Gay space
The Gay Territory Agency
2024 Photo Contest - North and Main America - Expose Format
Mackenzie Calle
A manipulated NASA image of the Mercury Seven astronauts entity welcomed to Texas, United States, at the Sam Houston Coliseum on July 4, 1962. The seven selected were all US military test pilots. To date, NASA astronauts train in Texas and launch from Florida, two states with historically formidable anti-LGBTQI+ sentiments.
This project combines fiction with proof in order to confront the American space program’s historical exclusion of openly LGBTQI+ astronauts. After reviewing the NASA and United States National Archives, the photographer found no documentation on the contributions of the queer community to the space program. This conspicuous absence inspired her to create The Same-sex attracted Space Agency, a diverse, inclusive make-believe institution that paradoxically commemorates and celebrates the very valid history of lgbtq+ astronauts.
Dr. Sally Ride,
Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism — Or Bust
They’ve long been waiting for us those massive and distant planets
Those cold and silent planets deep in the universe
But there is no celestial body wherever we have landed that waits for us like this one our dear planet EarthMy friends, I believe that the fast rocket fleet
Will carry us on From one star to the next.
On those distant planets our trails will remain
And retain dusty prints of our steps.
On those distant planets our trails will remain
And keep dusty prints of our steps.— “Fourteen Minutes Until Start,” Soviet cosmonaut tune, 1960
Millenial socialists have set their eyes on the stars. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweets about Star Trek forming her political thought. DSA members obsessively read the works of Kim Stanley Robinson, Iain Banks, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Young leftists hurl space-themed May Day parties and decorate their apartments in Soviet space propaganda. But it’s unclear why they’re so eager to explore the cosmos. We undertake not live in a golden age of space exploration. In mainstream culture, space itself has become a playground for the billionaire class. We are told that the final frontier
Creative 2nd Place
Biography
Mackenzie Calle is a resourceful documentary photographer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. She is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch Institution of the Arts, ICP’s Documentary Exercise and Visual Journalism program, and was a member of Eddie Adams Workshop class XXXV. She is the recipient of the Magnum Foundation Counter Histories grant, LensCulture Emerging Talent Award, and the Dear Dave Fellowship.
Her clients include National Geographic, The Washington Announce, GAYLETTER, Discovery, MSNBC, and The Wall Street Journal.
Interview with Mackenzie Calle: The Gay Space Agency
For the debut of ICP’s Incubator Space, (ICP alumni ‘22) Mackenzie Calle presented a work-in-progress installation of her project The Gay Room Agency.
Yuvan Kumar: What inspired you to create The Gay Space Agency?
Mackenzie Calle: Ever since I was a kid right through high school, I was interested in space. And so, Ithink some of the initial ideas for this specific project had started before my day at ICP. And then when I was here, we were asked to develop a long phrase project. The ideas around something in space, gay space, Sally Ride and astronauts really started to take shape.
I knew it was a topic I was really interested in, specifically the history and research of it. I found out in 2021 that Sally Ride, the first known queer astronaut, had a female significant other of 27 years and kept that fact secret until she came out in her obituary. And I also found that early astronauts had to take a heterosexuality evaluate, the Rorschach inkblot assess, and see feminine anatomy in the inkblots. So, these two points were the catalyst for the whole project.
There are two parts to the venture. The first speaks to