The Lavender Scary Fairy was performance/exhibition by Alexander D’Agostino  meditating on the history of and resistance to the Lavender Scare, a post-Cold War moral panic in the US,where thousands of gay employees were  fired or forced to resign from the federal workforce under homophobic laws and  policies. This sparked ongoing acts of resistance to homophobic and discriminatory  policies that positioned homosexuals and sexual-minorities as threats to national  security. Even today, we see fear based policy and legislative action that echoes the  same scare tactics and nationalist agendas of the Lavender Scare. 

The processional performance began at Transformer Gallery, where I activated a shrine-like installation and became the "Lavender Scary Fairy" before continuing onto Logan Circle, where people would receive lavender blessing from Lavender Scary Fairy.  Performance relics were on display at Transformer the following week of the  performance.

Currently, I am creating “Queer Shrouds” an archiving/myth-making project in response to acquiring a collection of vintage gay erotica from a queer elder during the pandemic. 

Making prints of this archive on fabric is a labor of love and alchemy. Cyanotype, and solar reactive dyes allow me to capture ghostly shadows of this queer treasure including images from my own works, along with images of 16th century witch-hunting manuscripts. The synthesis of these images is creating a living breathing project that allows me to present my experience with trying to invent and come to terms with my own sense queerness, and to share that publicly in hopes of resonating with others in search of stories and identities that might normally be invisible/erased/or hidden.These Queer Shrouds are stored in Leather Books, Called Queer Shroud Grimoires. They are installed in grids on walls, called Queer Shroud Grids.

A Grimoire is magical book of spells, often written in code and passed through multiple generations and contributed by multiple authors. My Grimoire, The Book of Sodom, is a large hand-bound book of 90 pages, written in an esoteric alphabet called Theban, or “the witch’s alphabet” so the information can hide in plain sight. It is a collection of queer codes, lexicons, rituals and mythologies harvested through research and embodying queer history.

This Grimoire first appeared when I performed “Queer Curiosity” at the Walters Art Museum in September of 2018, when I asked the audience to rip up pieces of paper and write the names of queer ancestors and spells for queer justice that I would add to the Grimoire. The spells that people wrote were beautiful, sad, honest and empowering. At the core of my practice is a want to enchant people to celebrate and empower their own lives. I want to develop the artistic research methods of gathering queer histories and rituals.

Investigations with dance, ritual and the moving image.