Below the Eyes: Sexuality and Averting the Gaze

22-min Portion of Lecture at Konstmuseet i Skövde, Sweden April 21, 2023

Meaningful Q&A at St John's University on April 21, 2022

An Artist Comes to Terms with Homosexuality from the 1960’s to the Present

In coming to terms with her own identity, the artist Linda Stein dealt with feelings of intense shame. Despite her best efforts, she just could not conform to societal expectations for her. Now in her late seventies, Stein, a survivor through shifting definitions of right and wrong, wants to reveal her diaries and conflict in order to help others still struggling on their own journeys to discover and realize themselves:

“My diary has been my salvation for much of my life. I still turn to it at moments of great upheaval, anxiety, and frustration, and find it calming to sketch and write my feelings. It clears my head so I can better make decisions, slows me down, opens a channel to elide my self-loathing and insecurity.”

Linda’s story is one of triumph and resolution. When she began keeping her diaries, there was an enormous amount of stigma attached to the word homosexual, which was listed as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. At the time, Linda felt enormous angst as she dealt with defining her own sexuality. She recalls that the words lesbian and gay were hardly mentioned.

Stein’s diaries are sketchbooks with texts. When she was depicting frontal faces, she also wrote. In diary notations, she wrote: “Some of these faces I am drawing look back at me with disdain, even disgust. I need to make sure they can’t see me. I have to leave the eyes out altogether and begin just below the eyes.” As she averted the gaze of her own drawings, she reflects: “I had to be sure that none of these faces had the means to see me, this me that was so very bad.”

This lecture reveals Stein’s dynamic process of making change happen. She is an avid reader with a reflective personality. The audience for this lecture will see her grapple with issues of misogyny and sexuality (homophobia) within the context of growing up in the 1950s Stein has become a spokesperson, standing up against bullying and defending the rights of all to be themselves: “So much of my life was spent hiding from prejudiced eyes. Experiencing the margins of society, my diaries elucidate my longing to get to the center, and to feel normal and accepted. Now I want to shout out that THIS is who I am. I don’t have to hide anymore. I have been outing myself within three minutes of almost every lecture I give.”

By Gail Levin, September 2021