Sarah Burns 
The Emphatically Queer Career of Artist Perkins Harnly and His Bohemian Friends [EPUB ebook] 

The Emphatically Queer Career of Perkins Harnly is the story of a Nebraska-born artist (1901-1986) who over the course of his long life crossed paths with a staggering array of famous and infamous personalities, including Sarah Bernhardt; Paul Swan, a.k.a. “The Most Beautiful Man in the World, ” who made women swoon when he danced in his tiny leopard-skin tunic; Rose O’Neill, the free-living artist who invented the Kewpie; William Seabrook, author and occasional cannibal who for better or worse introduced Americans to the zombie.
The narrative traces Harnly’s steps from remotest Nebraska through silent-era Hollywood, post-revolutionary Mexico, Depression New York, wartime Tinsel Town, queer Los Angeles in the repressive 1950s, and, in the 1970s, all around Europe and South America, where Harnly traveled to visit the last resting places of famous people, from Vladimir Lenin to Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria, and Eva Peron.

About the author

Sarah Burns (Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is Professor Emeritus of Art History, Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia, 1989); Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, 1996); Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004), and (with John Davis) American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2009).