NEW YORK TIMES: Why Can’t New York Make a Proper Monument to Gay History?

Holland Cotter writes in the New York Times: “So how do we go about monumentalizing such history in a useful way?

I can think of only a few recent models to point to. Maybe one is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, also called the Memorial to Lynching Victims, produced by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., in 2018. Information-wise it just keeps things hugely simple. The straightforward statement of hard facts — names, numbers — and a suggestively suspended abstract design make the murderous reality of race-based hatred equally part of the past and the present.

Closer to home there was, until recently, a stirring lament of a public sculpture, called “Craig’s Closet” by the American artist Jim Hodges, installed in the park adjacent to the New York City AIDS Memorial. Named for Hodges’s partner, the musician Craig Ducote, who died in 2016, the piece was a black-painted cast bronze image of an ordinary bedroom closet, this one wide open and filled with items of everyday life — books, hoodies, travel bags, shoes. In part thanks to its placement near the memorial, the piece kept personal and political content in subtle sync, in an image that spoke of lives we had and have, lives we lost and are still losing, and lives we need to fight not to forget. (The work was on view from June 2023 through May 2024.)”