Content warning: This article briefly discusses childhood trauma and sexual abuse.

“We’re just not sure if your work fits the theme of our festival.”

It was only a matter of weeks before a local arts festival was about to launch its program when I received this joint message from their curator and director. The theme of their festival was about the ‘future’.

The news came to me by surprise since I thought they’d been informed about my practice months ago: how as a trans Filipino sex worker, I’ve been using my gloryhole to create art with my clients, lovers and fellow sex workers.

Knowing their curators both identified as queer, I assumed that this would be a smooth collaboration.

As someone who didn’t have any formal education in the arts, I was over the moon when I was invited to contribute to this festival: the affirmation of being an artist, and the acknowledgment that what I do is a form of art.

I was excited to finally show my work to an audience outside of my friends, and to exhibit my practice alongside peers and artists I’ve long admired.

All images/artwork: Emil Cañita
Header image: Author holding a copy of the RESISTANCE issue, photo taken by Hailey Moroney.
This article appears in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue – buy a copy here.

I’m one of those people who long struggled to identify as an artist.

Aside from my lack of formal training, a part of me thought that because all I did was write about and take photos of the people I had sex with, it wouldn’t be considered art.

All of my insecurities about my work and my identity as an artist came up when I felt that pang of rejection from the festival organisers.

I was heartbroken, and a part of me felt betrayed: I thought my fellow queers would have my back.

I needed some clarity, so the gallery I was working with facilitated a meeting with the festival organisers to understand where they were coming from.

We met at a cafe the following week and I got to meet the curator. When we finally sat down, knowing how they felt about my art practice, I asked them, “How do you perceive my work?”

To my surprise, the curator replied, “I actually don’t know much about it. Can you tell me?”

I was quite offended by their response. I was thinking to myself, How could they tell me that my work doesn’t fit their festival theme, when they haven’t even done their due diligence of looking at my work in the first place?

In any other professional context, it’d be inappropriate to give advice on anything you aren’t well-informed on. But in this case, it seemed like it didn’t matter, ‘cause at the end of the day, they get to decide who gets to be seen.

If you think about it, very often festival curators select themes that can essentially allow most – if not all – types of work to be shown. It’s all just a matter of how your work responds to their theme.

This wasn’t the first time someone has pushed back on showcasing a gloryhole in Australia’s cultural history.

In 2018, the Western Australian Museum acquired a Gosnells train station toilet door with a gloryhole cut into it. The acquisition was highly controversial, drawing media attention and criticism.

Some people deemed it “too tacky to display”, while others pulled the classic ‘what about the safety of our children?’ argument.

It’s a tale as old as imperialism.

Neil Buckley, the local man who saved the door from a soon-to-be-demolished train station in Perth, said on VICE that the gloryhole is “a really important part of social history”, and a reminder of a time when homosexuality was deemed illegal.

A lot of people in our communities would still be criminalised if not for our country’s resilient and brilliant advocates. Knowing this has helped me believe in my work, and has taught me that protecting our way of life through legislation alone is not enough.

Gloryholes also challenge the ways in which queerness is often de-sexualised to be more palatable within the dominant culture.

I was reminded of this when the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) opened QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection in 2022, and I got asked to interview Chinese-Australian image-maker and performer William Yang, who was part of the exhibit.

Yang is known to document our community’s hedonism, yet none of his more salacious photographs were acquired by the NGV. In my interview, published in Art Journal of the NGV No. 58, Yang noted: “When I first showed some of my gay works at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1977, it was considered quite controversial at the time. I think a lot of these attitudes still exist today.”

His story reminds me that I’m not alone.

During my meeting with the festival organisers, I tried to hide how I truly felt about their dismissive response to my work.

I took my time explaining my practice to them, and how it extended our knowledge about the functions of a gloryhole. I told them about how the gloryhole came about from a dream after seeking Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR): a psychotherapy treatment to help alleviate the post-traumatic stress of having grown up in an abusive household and enduring sexual abuse as a child.

I told them how I’ve been able to use a gloryhole as a tool for self-discovery and gender-affirming care; a medium to heal from sexual trauma; and a Covid-safe way to have sex, according to The British Columbia Centre for Disease Control.

For what the gloryhole has brought to my life, I wanted to showcase it as an object of great importance in our history.

Alongside it, I wanted to share a video featuring over a dozen male sex workers who I’ve come to meet along the way – men who are seldom seen or heard when sex work is discussed.

Through this body of work, I wanted to challenge and expand the way we think about human sexuality and sex work.

I wanted to show people just like me that it’s possible to experience post-traumatic growth.

Despite my efforts, I was met with feedback that told me that parts of my work were ‘distracting’.

The curator spoke in a tone that made the word ‘didactic’ sound derogatory. I knew then that these people were not my allies. I could tell that they’d already made up their minds.

I left the meeting feeling heartbroken and discriminated against.

Through their actions, I was reminded that sharing one’s identity doesn’t necessarily mean that you also share the same values.

This article appears in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue – buy a copy here.

When I tried to continue working on my practice that evening, my body was pushing back.

A part of me felt conflicted about having to censor my work. A part of me didn’t want to be involved in the festival anymore, but I was also overwhelmed with anxiety: would withdrawing myself from this opportunity limit my prospects in the future?

I reached out to a number of my peers and curators whom I’ve come to know through my community.

“These types of festivals largely benefit from a lot of unpaid labour from creatives,” a curator, who is also a friend, reminded me.

They were right. Artists often pay for the materials, framing, and printing and can sometimes even pay for their hanging and documentation to show at a lot of galleries. Unless you’re knowledgeable with grant writing and can align your art-making to the life cycle of these grants, you’re often left to self-fund your work.

Did I mention galleries often take a standard of 50 per cent off your art sales on top of that? It doesn’t take much to realise that the math is not math-ing.

It’s no surprise that when national arts funding body Creative Australia launched their report in 2023, analysing the economic and working conditions across the arts sector over the five years to 2023, the annual average income based on creative work alone was $23,200 AUD for a professional artist in Australia.

Ninety-one per cent of artists draw their income from a variety of work, and yet the average income of artists in this country is only $54,500 AUD a year – that’s 26 per cent below the national workforce average.

To put this in context, the average rental cost for a house in an Australian capital city is sitting around $32,760 AUD in 2024, according to Domain.

Trans and gender-diverse folks were also made invisible in Creative Australia’s report. There was no identifying information about how many trans and gender-diverse folks were even included.

Despite the increase in showcasing diverse bodies in a lot of our country’s cultural institutions – including Black people and other people of colour – the reality is that the Australian arts community is still largely white.

How do we expect our cultural institutions to truly reflect and embody the multiculturalism in our country when close to 80 per cent of their workforce is culturally white?

In another report by Creative Australia published in 2021, this country’s First Nations and multi-ethnic communities were found to be more likely to attend and engage with the arts – yet rarely are we able to have access to or control of this sector’s resources and decision-making.

For example, in the same report by Creative Australia, from 2015 to 2019, only 7 per cent of First Nations applications were awarded national arts grant funding, and only 12 per cent of successful applications were from migrant and multi-ethnic communities.

When I tried looking for works about sex workers in any of our state and national galleries, the results were just as depressing.

With the less-than-a-handful of work that I found, they’d been mostly made by people outside of my community.

For one of the world’s oldest professions, our voices are still largely excluded in these so-called cultural establishments that are meant to reflect our country’s history and the lives of its many colourful inhabitants.

Despite this depressing statistical reality, I refuse to allow this to censor my point of view and voice as an artist. I’m reminded how often our experiences of these institutions are symptoms of a corrupt system and a long history that is deeply colonial and patriarchal.

Talking to my peers, I’m reminded of my power – how institutions like these festivals wouldn’t exist without our labour – and the true purpose of making art, which is an avenue to express ourselves to the world.

I’m also reminded of one of my favourite multi-hyphenated thinkers, bell hooks, a Black feminist who talks about creating and sharing art as an essential part of any practice of freedom.

In Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, she explores how art-making enshrines our freedom to express our culture and our history with one another.

Throughout history, it’s no surprise why colonisers have often destroyed the artwork of the culture they’re trying to subjugate.

Even to this day, it’s no surprise why certain politicians are always the first to try and cut the funding to the arts and the culture it creates. It’s ‘cause they know that art-making is a form of resistance.

When I look back at the artists before me who’ve worked to unashamedly showcase our queer sexualities – Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, David McDiarmid, William Yang, Betty Grumble, just to name a few – I’m reminded that I’m already standing on the shoulders of many giants.

I’m reminded that my stigmatising experience is not an isolated incident, but part of a counterculture and a conversation that is standing up against puritanism, racism and queerphobia.

I am grateful to have watched so many people before me fight similar battles – they taught me that we can succeed.

They taught me that I’m not alone.

Feeling empowered, I called the gallery the next day and told them that I didn’t want to be part of the festival anymore. We would exhibit my artwork independently.

“If anything happens,” I told my gallery, “I’m not sure the festival would have my back.” I’ve learned not to doubt my body when it clearly says no. My mental health and safety will always be my priority.

I don’t want to be a part of a ‘future’ that does not acknowledge nor celebrate my culture.

Despite not being a part of the festival, I’m happy to share that my exhibition was a success.

My community came down and supported me at my opening and visited the gallery throughout the month my work was shown. More than a dozen of my works are now residing in queer homes across the country and across the globe.

Reflecting on this, I remembered a time when a friend visited me to work on a project featuring queer homes. While looking at all the overtly sexual objects and art around my house, he said, “Isn’t it amazing when you get to a point in your life where you can just create a home that you’re not ashamed of?”

When museums and other cultural institutions fail us, let’s not forget that our personal spaces can be the seeds and sites of cultural resistance.

Through this experience, I’m reminded of how often success is created through communities.

I’m grateful to have found a gallery that believed in my work. I’m grateful that I had my regular clients doing sex work to fund my art practice. I’m grateful to have a community that has supported my practice and held me through the years as I continue to develop my voice as an artist.

Following in the steps of the WA Museum’s gloryhole acquisition, I recently found out that a state gallery has also acquired a handful of my works: one of them is a photo of me giving one of my clients a blowjob.

I cried at the thought of the stories I captured and my blowjob outliving me one day. I laughed at the privilege of hopefully being seen as antiquated by queers who haven’t been born yet.

Hopefully, by then, if someone like me was trying to look for themselves in our nation’s galleries, they wouldn’t feel as invisible as I felt when I looked.

If there’s anything I can pass on to anyone else who may feel like they’re neither heard nor seen, it’s to keep on developing your voice and to surround yourself with people who understand you.

Resistance comes from being connected and supporting one another. It’s through these acts of resistance and solidarity – big and small – that we’re able to challenge and chip away at these institutions that aim to erase us.

Even though it still may not look like there were a lot of us to reflect our cultural institutions in the past, by being there for each other in all spaces, we can be the future.

This article first appeared in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue.

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