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When Jacqueline Kennedy escorted the body of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, slain by the assassin’s bullet of Lee Harvey Oswald, back to Washington, D.C., she refused to change out of the pink suit she was wearing as she rode next to him in the open motorcade through downtown Dallas. It was drenched with his blood. On Air Force One she told Lady Bird Johnson, “I want them to see what they did to Jack.”
I don’t know who the “them” was that she was referring to—the killers? his political enemies? the American people? She certainly must have known that children, watching the evening news with their families, would see her. Her own children, too, would eventually see this image. I think that even in her own profound grief, she was astute enough to seize the moment because she had a lesson to teach: This is what violence looks like.
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The Brokeback shirts and Harvey Milk’s suit provide two excellent examples of the associated conundrum the responsible curator faces when posed with the dilemma of telling a painful historical truth, physical or emotional, while tastefully putting on display the controversial artifacts of love and violence. I asked photographer Dan Nicoletta his opinion about putting Harvey Milk’s suit on public display. He was very careful with his words. “Like the West, I guess Harvey belongs to everybody now.”
In an earlier exhibition called St. Harvey, Harvey’s suit was mounted on a mannequin, prompting charges of ghoulishness. The GLBT Historical Society, in its current display, attempted to mollify critics by placing the suit in recline, under a glass case. But with the bullet holes and bloodstains still plainly evident, it is still hypnotically graphic, and hard to imagine that detractors might be appeased. I even apologized to visitors while photographing it. The suit horrifies. Horrifies.
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The full article as published in the Winter 2011 edition of 'Convergence', a publication of the Autry National Center is available here:
http://bbmfoundation.org/images/Artifacts%20of%20Love%20and%20Violence%20-%20Hinton.pdf
Courtesy Autry National Center
