FAG BASH Tea Cup

This is the Tea.

“Last summer, as I stood on the beach of the harbor, watching the boats, I found a coffee cup in the shallows. It’s not unusual to find bits of crockery on this beach…but a whole cup is rare…It was not, I’m sorry to say, the perfect little white china cup that poetry demands…”

– Michael Cunningham, Land’s End: A Walk In Provincetown

In the vaults of the International GLBT Historical Society, there are many boxes filled with the estates of dead men.  Trophies, baubles, jock straps, dildoes, leather badges, locker keys to bathhouses long shuttered and the cufflinks of dead lovers. In one box, there is even a collection of spice jars all labeled with different men’s names and filled with rainbows of pubic hair, the owner a famous playwright with a peculiar fetish for shaving his tricks. These are the belongings of lucky ghosts, whose lovers and friends had passed them on to the Society, probably before they met their own demise. For the rest of the AIDS generation, the contents of their dressers, the books on their coffee tables, the artwork on their walls and the secrets of their nightstands all spread like dandelions seeds across flea markets, yard and estate sales, buried in the attics of inconsolable mothers or in the trash cans of unforgiving fathers. These items were never passed down to their rightful heirs: our generation. We never received the wisdom that could be delivered along with a faded old protest t-shirt, or the sordid tales of a sea shell from Fire Island. The family heirloom is a foreign concept to most gay men.

– Leo Herrera June 2012

The Tea Cup was created in commemoration of the 5th anniversary of Fag Bash, a weekly event held in Provincetown in the Summer. Concept & design by Leo Herrera of art collective HomoChic, commissioned by Mark Louque and sculpted by Keith Keary. The inspiration was a quote from the opening of Michael Cunningham’s A Land’s End: A Walk Through Provincetown. It’s an artifact meant to outlive us, so that we may one day be lucky enough to pass them on to generations to come.