Sacred Musings: June 2025

Exciting news and a fabulous pair of Getty exhibitions!

Bonjour à tous et à toutes,

Summer is in full swing and it feels like humanity’s pot has been set to boil. We’ve barely passed the Solstice and we’re already spiritually and physically overheated… but at least I have good news…

I honored to announce that I have joined the advisory board at the Philosophical Research Society!

PRS means the world to me, as the first place to embrace Sacred Monster without question. It is LA’s best kept secret, having existed at the corner of Los Feliz and Griffith Park Blvd for 90 years — ancient by Angeleno standards.

PRS is a community center for the weird and wonderful, for those who are curious and thoughtful and caring.

PRS is a place where on any given day, you can go to a lecture about ancient folklore; participate in a group meditation; buy a book on an esoteric subject; attend a Surrealist study group in the library; have your tarot cards read (or attend a workshop on designing your own); catch a screening of an off-the-beaten-path film; join a monthly death support group; enjoy a little tea, sun and conversation the courtyard; and more.

However, maintaining a space like this one for 90 years requires money, which PRS needs to raise — to buy a new projector that can handle more film programming, repair a hole in the library’s roof, replace the wildly uncomfortable seats in the auditorium (WE KNOW THEY SUCK), and have enough saved for the next 90.

If you’re curious about PRS, hit me up! I’d be happy to tell you more. Hopefully, I’ll see many of you there at my fundraising event on July 5th. If you can’t make it and want to make a contribution, let me know.

Earlier this month, I was treated to a private walk-through of the landmark $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives exhibition at the Getty Research Institute by its curator, Pietro Rigolo, ahead of its official opening. Pietro was exceedingly kind and generous to give me his time, and the exhibition is one of the most thoughtful and moving that I have been to in a long while.

The show opens with one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s ever-thought provoking candy works (this one, red-white-and-blue lollipops) and follows with almost an entire wall dedicated to Jean Cocteau — a rarity in a major US museum. From there, Pietro’s curation takes you through a chronological journey through the last century of queer history, explored via art and objects. There’s Mapplethorpe’s Duchampesque ready-mades, Ron Athey’s still-provocative needle crown, Catherine Opie’s Dyke Deck and much more. I was already on the verge of tears seeing how much of Cocteau was included, and almost lost it when Pietro told me the story behind John S. Boskovich’s 1997 work Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers): Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate. To commemorate Earabino’s role as the stylist behind Madonna’s “Bedtime Story,” Pietro told me he included a QR code on the wall that opens and automatically plays the video on Youtube. It was his wish, he told me, that people would fill the ever-silent GRI with the song, allowing Earabino to take up just a little more space as people moved through the building.

A few days later, I was back at the Getty to celebrate the formal opening of $3 Bill with its companion exhibition, the monumental photography show Queer Lens. In tow with me was my friend Hamish, a young art student from LA studying photography in Paris. We both learned a ton walking through the exhibit — I found early photos of men in drag and a Muybridge motion picture series particularly fascinating, and took great pleasure in pointing out to Hamish contemporary artists like Robert Andy Coombs, whose provocative work is on display (and who was at the opening!)

As Hamish enjoyed one of the Gonzalez-Torres lollipops from $3 Bill, I was confronted with a particularly jarring sight: a Shepard Fairey poster from 2008 made in response to California’s Prop. 8. It was truly surreal to see included in an exhibition about history a piece that I experienced in its present. The Fairey poster was all over West Hollywood and the offices of Equality CA (I used to work the phone bank for them) when I was a teenager, sneaking out to party in Boystown because my Sunset Strip colleagues all knew that I was the underaged Roxy intern.

It was a sharp reminder that we are always living through history. We have control of how it’s written in the future — whether in anecdote or fable, on a museum wall in glass or not at all.

$3 Bill and Queer Lens are open now through September 28th. Don’t miss them.

à très bientôt,

Chloë