Chapter 16 America and the queer diaspora: the case of artist David McDiarmid Sally Gray [New York] felt like home as soon as I went there. It felt comfortable. It felt like a place you could grow. I felt that I’d done everything that I could in Sydney for the moment. It was like going to school on a very high level: on an art level, a sex level—the two most important things. It was like a playground. There was such a lot happening. It was not that frantic, it suited me, the pace. So why not live there? It was a really easy choice. 1 The life and work of Australian artist David McDiarmid were impacted on strongly by his long-term interest in North American literary, visual and popular culture—an interest that was consolidated during his period of travel and residence in the United States between 1977 and 1987. McDiarmid’s art, produced between 1976 and 1995 and which he designated from the beginning ‘gay art’, might be seen as both ‘mobile and located’, to borrow a term from Marsha Meskimmon, 2 in the sense that it was neither ‘Australian’ nor ‘American’ but an eclectic, multivalent attempt at a gay male art of his time. McDiarmid’s diverse art practice was inflected by his evident commitment to the idea of a mobile, ‘becoming’ sexual, political and creative subjectivity. It was this commitment that was the principal driver of McDiarmid’s 1977 decision to live in New York. Before, during and after his American period, he created a body of work that existed across geographical and cultural boundaries and across the interstitial sexual and gender categories explored in recent decades by queer theory. 3 Nomadic subjectivity and the city This interstitial character of McDiarmid’s art practice involved a play across geography, time and diverse realms of cultural experience. He had a postmodern lack of respect for modernist and Eurocentric hierarchies of culture and his art practice employed a ‘maverick orientalism’ of cultural appropriation. 4 Listing books he might one day write, Roland Barthes suggested he might write ‘The discourse of homosexuality’ or ‘The discourses of homosexuality’ or, again, ‘The discourse of homosexualities’, referring to the instability of sexual identity. 5 McDiarmid’s art is an evocation of such a notion: of multiple, polysemous 259