Michael LaRocco

Man in Polyester Suit is a photograph by American artist and provocateur Robert Mapplethorpe. The photograph is a black and white sepia toned portrait of an African American man slightly angled before the camera and dressed in a gray polyester three-piece suit with the subject’s exposed phallus dangling from his unzipped trousers. The image and lighting for the photograph is compositionally minimalist with no props or background detail appearing alongside the subject apart

Martha, the self-loathing heroine of Edward Albee’s searing 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the embodiment of the gay icon run amok, a character who insists on our attention the moment she utters her first line of dialogue in the play. Returning home late one night from a faculty party with her husband George, an associate history professor at an unnamed New England college, Martha looks around her living room and, unimpressed with her surroundings, declares with

The stage musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch casts away the shackles of realism and codified performance to embrace disunity. The musical follows the exploits and heartache of genderqueer rock singer Hedwig Robinson, an East German immigrant living in the United States, who’s undergone a botched sex change operation and is now living in Junction City, Kansas, where she’s recently been abandoned by her G.I. husband.