A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects

Jim Kepner was a major fixture of the Los Angeles science fiction and homophile publishing communities and highly involved in the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS). After joining LASFS in 1943, Kepner began writing his own Marxist science fiction magazine, Toward Tomorrow, briefly published between 1944–45. While not explicitly homosexual in scope, it addressed progressive topics of the era, including left-wing politics, racial equality, and women’s equality.

Kenneth Anger’s film, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954–66), is a key example of the overlapping occult and artistic networks in midcentury Los Angeles, and it features many of the key figures in the exhibition, such as Cameron, Curtis Harrington, Samson Debrier, and Renate Druks. It is an interpretation of a Gnostic Mass, a ritual performed by the members of Ordo Templi Orientis, a secret society based around the occultist Aleister Crowley’s gnostic religion, Thelema. Anger, who was also a practicing Thelemite, explores film as an occult medium, utilizing color, superimpositions, and mythological iconographies to conjure spiritually immersive and sexually liberated worlds on-screen.

Exhibition page.