The idea of a utopian place often appears, at first glance, to be quite abstract, something that’s a step removed from the places that define the real world. But one of the most powerful elements of several recent shows of queer art – both physical and online – is the way in which they root utopia in real times and places. From Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness to the piers of Christopher Street in Manhattan, utopia has had a specific location.

The recent show at the Garden Museum in London, My garden’s boundaries are the horizon, features a variety of different pieces of work by Derek Jarman, from large canvases to extracts from his film work, but the most fascinating piece of the exhibition is a recreation of Prospect Cottage itself, recently saved by an ArtFund campaign. The cottage resonates both in terms of wider ideas around preserving historical locations, but also specifically in terms of how it relates to queer art; Jarman’s 1990 film The Garden was filmed there and, like the location itself, is about creating a utopia away from a discriminatory, potentially violent outside world. Jarman’s garden was built on what seemed like naturally inhospitable terrain, in the shadow of a nuclear power station. This image of the cottage, and the garden Jarman created is in itself a powerful statement about the utopian power of queer art: no matter what the rest of the world looks like, it’s possible to have a place that’s yours, a place that’s truly safe.

Jarman’s utopian sensibility was rooted in nature, something that could be seen in large canvases like oh zone. For Jarman, the natural world is a sight of both life and death; his expressive, abstract landscapes took on a darker tone in the wake of his HIV diagnosis, seen in Ego et in Arcadia (Aids Memoir Prospect Cottage) from 1992, where the colours of the natural world that animate his early landscapes are replaced with ominous blacks and reds. By engaging with both life and death at Prospect Cottage, Jarman imagined his house to be a way out of and beyond the world as it is; a place not only of escapism, but a kind of spiritual reckoning as well. 

The idea of the natural world as a site of escapism is something that animates much of the video art of the late Barbara Hammer. Hammer’s engagement with nature and escapism is explored specifically through a queer feminist lens. She offers a way for the women in her films to escape from the domesticity expected of them; the opening of Yellow Hammer (on DVD with Hammer’s other 1968-72 early films) presents a young woman with her back against a brick wall, throwing yellow flowers into the air. As the flowers fall down, the film fades into images of nature, offering a literal opposition between the two, with one replacing the other. Nature is an open, safe space; films like Dyketactics and Marie and Me present queer bodies and queer love freely and without judgement. Ironically, Jarman finds utopia within the domestic, with the cottage shown in The Garden seen as a safe space for two male partners. 

While these utopias are very much a reaction to the world as it is, Peter Hujar’s images, recently shown at both the Pace Gallery online exhibition Cruising Utopia, and the Barbican’s Masculinities group show, are more emphatically about the world as it was. Hujar’s images capture queer spaces at a very specific time: one before the beginning of the AIDS crisis and the plague years. His urban spaces serve as a contrast to the natural world held in reverence by Jarman and Hammer, but the way that he presents them – whether in portraits of artists like David Wojnarowicz, or images like Christopher Street Pier #4 (1976) – is uniquely queer. These images foreground the bodies and lives of queer men in a way that still feels rare today; seeing people together, as a community, or in moments of romance. Hujar’s images present queer utopias by giving his subjects the space to exist on their own terms. Images like Christopher Street Pier #4, and Christopher Street Pier #2 are candid, with no sense of anything being performed for the camera. Instead Hujar captures the simplicity and power of queer people simply living their lives in a space, and moment in time, that belonged to them. 

Like Hammer, he foregrounds queer bodies and acts of queer love in a way that’s powerful in its simplicity. A photograph like Two Men in Leather Kissing (1966), focused entirely on the kiss itself, with a grey background, turns it into a kind of non-place, imbued with romance and desire, free from the realities of 60’s America.

The nostalgia that permeates much of Hujar’s work – something heightened by the historical schism created by the AIDS crisis – raises an important issue with the ways in which we talk about and relate to these ideas of queer utopia. For all of the power that they had, and all of the reminders that they provide, they need to do more than just give us images of the past. To look at something like Hujar’s Christopher Street photographs, or the intimacy of his series on David Brintzenhofe applying make-up and in drag, and simply wish that things could be that simple again does a disservice to the utopian impulses that these artists share. To assume that utopia is synonymous with the past, or is somehow unattainable in the future ignores the powerful political dimension of some of this work. Hujar’s photograph Gay Liberation Front Poster Image (1970) serves as a reminder not only of how pride parades were conceived in the past, but the ways in which we need to rethink them going forward. Even Jarman’s The Garden, literally filmed on what is now a historical site, reveals the encroachment of reality and violence onto utopian spaces.

The queer theorist Jose Esteban Munoz wrote a book whose title is used by the recent Hujar show: Cruising Utopia. Munoz argues about the importance of a “queer futurity”, rather than a myopic focus on the present. What the utopias of artists like Jarman, Hujar, and Hammer offer is a map that shows where we might go, as well as just the places that we’ve been. Jarman’s endless interrogations of utopia, and the connection that he had with nature could be defining the intersections of queer activism in the future. These artists reveal the ways in which we can connect with the world, and each other, in order to find and create spaces that are queer, safe, and powerful.