Keith Haring’s NSFW Bathroom Mural To Reopen in 2015

Keith Haring’s awesomely NSFW men’s bathroom mural at The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center is about to be reopened after a hiatus for restoration. In fact, the building itself, along with seminal work by Martin Wong, Kenny Scharf, Leon Golub, Barbara Sandler, and George Whitman from the historic 1989 installation exhibition “The Center Show” has been restored.

Haring’s bathroom mural, Once Upon a Time, which was famously painted just nine months before his death from AIDS in 1990, was a beacon of sex-positive acceptance during a time when the LGBT community needed it most. According to Gothamist, the former bathroom was actually used as a meeting area for Center events from 2001 until 2012, when it was briefly opened for public viewing. Since 2013 it has been closed for restoration. After all, we imagine a painting in a bathroom likely undergoes a fair amount of wear-and-tear.

Photo: The Dusty Rebel

The work has also been featured on the popular New York–centric blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, where its unapologetic raunchiness was described thusly: “Penises grow human heads with mouths that suck the toes of other human shapes that in turn contort into Möbius-strips of sucking, performing Escher-like convolutions as one body part morphs into another. Negative space becomes positive. Hollows turn into solids that penetrate other hollows—assholes, mouths, and other unnameable orifices.”

If that doesn’t make you want to take a peek for yourself, we don’t know what will. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait until January, when the building will reopen to the public with an official ribbon-cutting ceremony—we’ll keep you posted.

Photo: The Dusty Rebel

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