still living / the secret garden was created at the invitation of E.G. Crichton for the Wandering Archives: Across the Pacific installation. Exploring my relationship to the two men who together homesteaded what is now my property in the Mojave desert, the work surveys the plantings that have lived or died over the 60 years of our serial stewardship. Harold and Lee created on paper an obsessive map, plotting the location of every tree and shrub, which I have transposed through embroidery to a man's cotton handkerchief, the kind that would have resided discreetly in the pocket of any man at the time. The map was keyed to detailed lists, now yellow with age, that I displayed in plastic sleeves embroidered to reveal the plants still living. The installation includes additional archival material and reproductions of photos, news clippings, and identification cards, as well as a Customs Declaration created for the installation by E.G. Crichton.

Mga Sinupang Lagalag (Wandering Archives)

Each of these Wandering Archives represents an individual who in some way lived a life outside of heterosexual norms. Each artist has excavated both tangible traces and imaginary gaps in the record to interpret a life. These archives of the dead crossed the Pacific in a suitcase to become guest immigrants at the Vargas Museum. Historically, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people have wandered in particular ways, finding each other through underground routes of site and recognition. Because of the nature of the closet, these lives are frequently invisible, both in life and death. For people whose traces are so often erased, the archive is a way of taking charge of collective memory. - E.G. Crichton

Reception, Nothing to Declare   Photo E.G. Crichton 2011

Who were Harold and Lee?

Harold (b. 1931) worked as a butcher and delivery driver in greater Los Angeles.

I know almost nothing about Lee except that he worked for the U.S. Post Office in Los Angeles in the 1940s.

Together Harold and Lee joined thousands of Americans in homesteading 5-acre vacation lots in the Mojave Desert, where they built first a cabin in the 1950s and, a few years later, a bungalow home. Like many in the southern California metropolitan areas, they spent weekends and vacations enjoying and “improving” their remote desert property, living a miniature American dream of freedom and the frontier.

Harold liked guns, lists, and heavy equipment. He had several tractors and a grader that he used to landscape his property and to make roads for the neighbors. He kept his guns in the old cabin that I now use as an art studio, and he kept extensive lists, including of the animals he shot – rabbits, squirrels, even the occasional sidewinder. He also kept records of everything he planted on the property.

At some point Lee was gone and Harold was living full-time in the desert. He died at home of stomach cancer in 1997.

What is the artist's relationship with Harold and Lee?

I have no proof that these men were gay, but neighbors here “knew” they were. When I bought the property they had homesteaded from Harold’s elderly heirs I found faded photographic slides scattered across the floor in the old cabin. The images hint at an intimate domestic association between the two men and an excitement and pleasure in their “hideaway” in the desert. It’s easy to speculate that here was a secret garden, a refuge from the dangerous life of deception and fear that was experienced by many gay people in the suburban areas at that time. But I don’t know any of this; I can only guess from what was left behind.

Among the things they left behind: trees, cactus, and shrubs, as well as the records of their planting over decades. Many were already gone by the time I acquired the property; others died under my care. But some are still living. I can’t say I share their landscaping aesthetics, but some of the trees Lee and Harold planted provide me to this day with beauty, shade, and solace in a stark land.

still living / the secret garden

• Embroidered cotton handkerchief
• Plot map on paper in plastic sleeve
• Plot key list of plants on paper in embroidered plastic sleeve, #1 through #38
• Plot key list of plants on paper in embroidered plastic sleeve, #39 through #74
• Plot key list of plants on paper in embroidered plastic sleeve, #75 through #107
• Civil Defense ID card, 1957
• U.S. Postal Service ID card, 1940s
• Snapshots of property and structures, 1950s and 60s
• Newsclipping advertising estate sale, 1997
• Customs Declaration prepared by E.G. Crichton