At Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum, a young woman is examining a painting. To reduce the work to a simple description, it’s of a man in an evening gown.
“It’s incredibly vulnerable,” says Catriona Sixby.
Despite the vulnerability, there’s a presence in the subject’s face.
“I feel like this forces you to go, like, she is saying, ‘This is me, you have to see me like this, even if I’m exposing something you don’t want to see,’” says Sixby.
Other viewers who pass by agree.
“He has sort of a defiant look on his face, which I love, and I really love this painting. It’s like, ‘Look at me, I’m okay, and if you want to look back at me, that’s great,” says Betty Casey.
There’s just something about the face in this painting.
“He looks kinda matter-of-fact. Other words, I wouldn't call it non-expressive. He seems to be looking out, saying, ‘Well, this is me,’” says Harry Willis.
The artist is Patrick Gordon. He doesn’t especially distinguish the work.
“I don’t see a difference in them versus the portraits in the front of the gallery. It’s just his clothes are different,” says Gordon.
But patrons say the mood is important.
“More important today probably than at any time I can remember in my 75 years,” says Willis.
The painting, called “Mrs. Lennox II,” was created in 2016 as a follow-up to a 1990’s series. All of this work was done long before drag queens started getting negative attention. But the man in the painting has been standing out for a long time.
“20 foot palm trees are, what can I say? A pain in the butt,” says Kenneth Youngblood.
Youngblood is showing me his garden that includes a ceramic parrot.
“One year I was being funny on Facebook and I said, 'Oh, we forgot to bring the parrot in.' It was like snowing and this lady thought we really had left the parrot out and just went off on me. I was like, 'Lady, get real, it’s plastic.'”
There’s a ton of blooms here too and Youngblood knows them all.
“Those actually are Rose of Sharon. You can see all the different colors and they’re just a weed. But the true thing about all gardening is there’s no such thing as a weed. A weed is something that's in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Youngblood used to be a professional florist. He remembers being the first 90’s business owner to fly a big pride flag on Cherry Street.
“People would come in and say, ‘What is that?’ And I would tell them, ‘It’s the gay flag, it’s the rainbow flag.’ And I lost more clients that first three or four months when they realized, and they were like, ‘What’s that about?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s because I’m gay.’”
Youngblood also was active in several gay rights organizations at a time when there weren’t a lot of options for support.
“It was all small and there was a help line that we ran with volunteers, which was a pain in the rear because I always ended up having to do it. But every once in a while it’s someone wanting to kill themselves, so you’d have really one-on-one conversations with people, and that was how it was back then.”
But now, Youngblood, who took the name Mrs. Lennox because he looked like Annie Lennox’s mother at one point in his life, says he fears for human rights in the future.
“When somebody can go in and snatch you out off the street and send you to a country that you’ve never even been in, that’s not what I grew up to be, that’s not what I’m for.”
Youngblood says he hopes young people today will embody the expression he wears in Pat Gordon’s painting.
“Defiance is, you can’t walk away. Defiance is very, very important and the young drag queens, some are out there are very defiant, and they deserve to be, and they need to be.”
Youngblood’s painting is on display at the Philbrook Museum until January.
