Paige Gratland | Celebrity Lezbian Fist

Paige Gratland

Celebrity Lezbian Fist 

Toronto, Canada: P.G. Thing Co., 2008

24 x 13 x 13 cm.

Edition of 25 numbered copies

Yesterday I visited Adriana Kuiper’s sculpture class and a student was casting her pink rabbit vibrator in silicon, reminding me of this Paige Gratland project from 2008. 

Celebrity Lezbian Fists are a series of  silicone fists cast from the hands of queer cultural icons. 

Working under the name P.G. THING CO. (a nod to Iain and Ingrid Baxter’s N.E.Thing Co.), Gratland takes super-groupie Cynthia Plaster Claster’s notorious casting of rock star cocks (most notably Jimi Hendrix, see below) as her starting point, but replaces the phallus with the raised, clenched fist. The resulting works become both a symbol of solidarity & defiance in the face of oppression, and a fully functioning sex toy. 

The fists are produced in an edition of 25 each, cast in colours chosen by each participant. The artists, activists, athletes, academics, poets, musicians, and filmmakers who took part include: 

JD Samson, is an American musician, producer, songwriter and DJ and member of the bands Le Tigre  and MEN.  Le Tigre’s song "Nanny Nanny Boo Boo" includes a shout-out to C.P. Caster. Additionally, both KISS and Jim Croce have written songs about her practice ("Plaster Caster", and "Five Short Minutes", respectively).

Phranc is a singer and activist who I saw open for Morrissey many years ago. She came onto the stage alone with her guitar and introduced herself as an “all-American Jewish lesbian folksinger”.

Savoy Howe is a boxer and coach who founded Newsgirls, a women's only boxing club that ran almost a quarter of a century before closing during Covid. 

Cathy Opie is a celebrated artist, photographer and educator (see her notorious Dyke Deck playing cards, here). 

Eileen Myles is a poet and author of more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces. Novelist Dennis Cooper described them as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature."

Harmony Hammond is an artist, activist, curator, writer and co-founder of the A.I.R. Gallery, the first women's cooperative art gallery in the United States.  

Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress. She was the first out black lesbian to ever direct a feature film (The Watermelon Woman, 1996) and runs the Oakland-basaed production company Jingletown Films. 

Jack Halberstam is an American academic and author whose work focuses on queer and transgender identities in popular culture. Halberstam is a professor at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. His best known book is Female Masculinity (1998).  

G. B. Jones is an artist, filmmaker, and musician, who will be best known here as the co-creater (with Bruce LaBruce) of the queer punk fanzine The J.D.s. 

Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan are a Canadian performance art duo who often perform as The Lesbian Rangers. Their video for What Does a Lesbian Look Like?, received regular airplay on MuchMusic in 1990’s and was featured on the spoken word poetry compilation album Word Up, alongside John Giorno, Jill Watson, Clifton Joseph and Judy Radul. 

Celebrity Lezbian Fists were launched at Art Metropole in 2008, and are still available there, for $250 each. Proceeds from the sale of “Celebrity Lezbian Fists” will be donated to The Triangle Program; Canada’s only classroom for LGBTTI2QQAP Youth.