Books
The Artist’s Library: Billy Sullivan on The Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear
By Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
Cover of Sean DeLear, I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear, 2023. Courtesy Semiotext(e)
In this installment of The Artist’s Library, our recurring series in which novelist Sarah Blakley-Cartwright asks artists to discuss their favorite books, New York painter Billy Sullivan speaks about the fearless and frank diary of L.A. musician Sean DeLear (1965–2017).
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright: This book was a delight. You used the words “fresh and cool,” Billy, when first describing it to me. In his diary, Sean DeLear comes across as exuberant, poignant and funny—he named himself as a homonym for “chandelier,” a brilliant pun. Did you ever meet him?
Billy Sullivan: This kid! Don’t you wish we knew him? No, I never got to meet Sean. But when I was reading the book it became clear to me that I identified with him, with his queerness, even though I was an Italian-Irish Catholic white boy. His diaries made me think of what it was like when I was fourteen, taking the subway to the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, getting out of Brooklyn, finding the freedom to start experiencing who I was. He had to get over the hill, and I had to get out of Brooklyn.
Also, when I searched for more information about Sean’s life, it reminded me of Jackie Curtis, who became an underground star and much more. When Jackie came back into my life in the ’70s, hanging around Max’s Kansas City and coming to our house for dinner, he reminded me that we were in the same gym class! His grandmother had a bar called Slugger Ann’s. It was a gay bar in the East Village and there were all these photographs of Greta Garbo.
SBC: You paint portraits of your friends and muses. Have you ever painted Sean?
BS: No, I prefer to paint people I know. It works better that way. If I wanted to paint Sean, I’d have to be using his photographs. But they’re perfect just the way they are. He was documenting himself from day one. His photographs and videos are divine.
SBC: Yes, documenting and creating. Sean was a vocalist who fronted the indie band Glue, a well-known cabaret performer and a visual artist who collaborated with Kembra Pfahler and Vaginal Davis. What does his work in the arts mean to you?
“I went out and stayed out until 5:00 in the morning. I was laying down on some people’s grass and the sprinklers came on by themselves. I thought it was raining, then I noticed it was the sprinklers, then I ran, then I noticed my watch on the ground. I ran and got my watch and then was hitchhiking to get some meat. No luck, then I went home.”—DeLear
BS: When I got the book I started looking up who he was, and I fell in love with his music video, his running on grass in heels and diving into a lake. I was sold.
SBC: Sean was a pioneering punk and a party-scene fixture, as well as being unapologetically Black and queer during the ’70s, in conservative Simi Valley, Ventura County. The diary depicts his many sexcapades with a fearless swagger. It’s not just bravado, it's bravery. I was inspired by his self-appointed freedom. Did you feel the same?
BS: It brought me back to subway sexcapades in men’s rooms at fourteen on my way home from high school. Not to mention going home with people I met on the street. I wish I could have been more accepting of it then. The thing I love about the diaries is that he’s so up-front about it.
SBC: I was struck by the lack of transition between his daily life and his sex life. The sex is embedded, without partition.
BS: At fifteen, it’s a ruling force. I didn’t go to bathhouses at fourteen. I didn’t have the balls to do that. One time my mother took me shopping at Bloomingdale’s and bought me a coat. But then I met a man in the men’s room, and my mother and I got separated. When I finally got back home to Brooklyn she asked me what happened and I just said I got lost. It’s how your sex drive carries you away. It’s these urges, and you don’t know why you’re doing it. You just are.
Above: Billy Sullivan, Jackie Curtis, 1971. Pastel and watercolor on paper, 35 x 46 in. (88.9 x 116.8 cm). © Billy Sullivan. Photo: Steven Probert. Collection of Nicolas Party and Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
SBC: He made what can’t have been easy look like a breeze. Do you see evidence in these diaries of the flip side, evidence of the difficult labor of being a trailblazer, especially at such a young age?
BS: No, I don’t. It’s so clear and direct, the way he writes about his day. That’s the beauty of this diary—he didn’t spend long hours describing the difficulties; he simply dealt with what he wanted.
SBC: I wonder if he kept later diaries.
BS: I couldn’t find any.
SBC: Beneath all the insight, experience and acumen, do you still see the child in the narrator?
BS: Yes, I do, and that child knows exactly what he wants.
SBC: It’s not fraught.
BS: It’s about learning, experiencing and figuring it out. All-natural teenage stuff. It’s all good. He’s finding it and sharing that on the page with himself at night in this little book.
SBC: What was your high school experience like?
BS: It was an art high school. There were guys putting on eye makeup in the bathrooms, wearing mohair sweaters backward so the “V” went down their neck, spraying hairspray. You pretended you weren’t like that. We’d go to this place called Pam Pam’s in the West Village. Because it was an art school, you had fabulous gay women and men teaching. It was wonderful. You wouldn’t really know, but they’d assign all these great books.
“Did I ever tell you about me? Well, I am about five foot six inches tall…I am Black, have a nice bod, am doing OK in school except in English. My cock is about nine inches long and I love it. I would love to pose nude for Jack, Jim, or Tyler and make a porn film. My prize possession is a Minolta XG-7: my camera. It is worth $250.00. I am gay, as you know I think.”—DeLear
SBC: Sean is also a seemingly effortless literary stylist, recounting his life in a register that could easily take a writer decades to develop. What is it about the prose style that strikes you most?
BS: How matter of fact it is. It reminds me of Jimmy Schuyler’s poetry in his weather diaries, which are very direct. Schuyler was an amazing guy. He wrote great poetry. One time, I saw Jimmy when I was picking up a friend early in the morning at Fairfield Porter’s house in Southampton, in the 1970s. Jimmy was sitting in the screened-in porch with a drink in his hand, just like in Fairfield’s paintings.
SBC: You’re known for having chronicled the downtown New York scene for what, fifty years?
BS: Let’s call it fifty-five.
SBC: Has the meaning of that changed for you over time?
BS: It’s a way of keeping a visual record of where and who I am at that moment. Though the process stays the same. I can go back and work on an early image and it’s like I’m there again. My painting Amy and Carol, Deux Magots (2023) was originally a drawing that got destroyed in a fire in one of Mickey Ruskin’s restaurants. At the time, Amy was my wife and Carol [LaBrie] was a big model. Amy was going to run Kenzo in America, and we were in France. When I was making it into a painting, I remembered that whole time in France—what the girls were wearing and how much fun we were having. When I do something from an archive, it brings me to where I was.
SBC: You can time travel in your own images.
BS: And then I paint the present moment, like when I painted you and Nicolas [Party]. I think about the whole visit when I’m working on a painting. Like how we also had Francesca [Kaufmann] there, being her energetic self. For me, working on the painting brings all that stuff together.
Billy Sullivan, Kiki’s Flowers for Klaus, 2017. Pastel on paper, 42 1/4 x 30 1/2 in. (107.3 x 77.5 cm). Photo: Greg Carideo. Courtesy the artist and kaufmann repetto, New York / Milan
Billy Sullivan, 2020. Photo: Paul Kennedy
SBC: It was wonderful to look up and see you in the front row at my reading last week.
BS: You talk the same way as I do, I think. When you were talking about your life, it was so beautiful. And your baby daughter who was there too is something. She was giving you everything she had. She was competing. She’s dressed in those European clothes and taking her shoes off. She flirts. She’s comfortable. She’s fabulous! She knows who she is. She doesn’t hide. That takes a lot, to be a child who does that.
SBC: You and Sean share a deep interest in the people around you, Billy. Neither of you are working in a vacuum. How much are your portraits about the person they depict? What is it that you love about people?
BS: I’ve always used their first names, because it’s not about them being famous. It’s that they’re people. Sometimes, people want full names. It’s supposed to be a painting, and it happens to be a portrait. The people around me are my family of choice and it goes back generations. I love who they are. The portrait is about being with that person in that moment and my memory of it. But it could be someone I just met yesterday.
SBC: Have you painted people you just met the day before?
BS: Sometimes. There’s a portrait of a guy who was at the opening of my show at the FLAG Art Foundation earlier this year. He had this watch on, and he had these shorts; I just took a picture. It’s also about the visual wandering eye. There’s something beautiful about that.
SBC: Something that strikes me about Sean is the authorial tone, the young writer’s astonishing self- possession. He seems immensely cultivated and mature in so many ways, and he proudly wore so much of who he was on his sleeve. Given that these entries were written when Sean was fifteen years old, do you feel there’s any chance he might have preferred the diary didn’t see the light of day?
BS: I don’t know. I’m just so happy it’s out there to be seen. Self-possession becomes self-acceptance. What a gift. He was right on time, and the rest of us are still trying to catch up.
“Then Tyler and me were sitting there and he got pissed because I would not cum or do anything and went storming out like a bolt of lighting. This other guy was sitting on the can and he was beating and then stuck it right through the hole and I made him cum—and his son goes to my school?”—DeLear
SBC: I love looking at your career with the insight that you consider yourself a diarist. Have you ever kept a written diary?
BS: No, but I have a photo archive that I dive into. It’s all been digitized.
SBC: What a relief.
BS: In my studio, there are boxes of slides everywhere and carousels that I once used to project them. Then I had to adjust to what was going on. It’s more technical now. There’s Photoshop. Film used to go away and come back; it wasn’t instant. I love Polaroids, but film was heaven because it would go away and then come back!
SBC: Sean was great with film.
BS: He was always going out to get more film and take nude films of himself. And he got an F in photography! He was developing his art.
SBC: There is occasionally, within the entries, a longing that makes me feel wistful. But on the whole, the diary left me with a sense of exhilaration and triumph, imparted by his prose and rhapsodic confidence. What feeling does the diary leave you with?
BS: That it should be required reading in high school!
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Sarah Blakley-Cartwright is a New York Times bestselling author whose most recent novel is Alice Sadie Celine (2023). She is publishing director of the Chicago Review of Books and associate editor of A Public Space.
Billy Sullivan is an artist whose work has been exhibited internationally for more than four decades. Recently, he has had solo shows at kaufmann repetto in New York and Milan; the Madoo Conservancy, Sagaponack; Rental Gallery, East Hampton; and Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich.