You might not realize how underrepresented the LGBT community is in museums until you see our portraits on the walls of one.

In the mid-1990s, when mainstream society started focusing on gay and lesbian culture (as opposed to gay men with AIDS or lesbian feminists as a political group), Opie was taking pictures of her community. Of our community.

The iconic portraits displayed at the Guggenheim are moving because they portray us as people worthy of having our pictures in a museum.

Catherine Opie

They are large-format and color-rich; the subjects are treated not as curiosities, but as vulnerable, fierce human beings who are saturated with dignity and self-respect.

To Opie, we are kings and queens, posed against jewel-colored backgrounds.

Here is Crystal Mason, her bald head gleaming, her eyes tired yet resolute. Here is Angela Scheirl in jacket and tie, a jaunty half-smile playing on her face. Here is Daddy Irwin and Mark, clinging to each other protectively, affection clear in their bodies.

Catherine Opie, 47, is a political artist, but not because her images are overtly political. She is a political artist because she treats her queer subjects as human beings instead of freaks – without downplaying how not-mainstream they are.

“It’s important for our own culture – the culture we created – to be represented as it is,” Opie said in a recent interview at the Guggenhiem.

That is the key, she said, to her notorious 1994 self-portrait, “Pervert,” which shows her in S&M gear: black leather hood hiding her face, needles sticking through her arms like decorative sleeves, “pervert” carved in blood on her naked chest.

As gay and lesbian culture started being perceived as mainstream, she started worrying about being seen as mainstream herself.

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