Diva You've been framed This September the Big Apple's most famous gallery, the Guggenheim, will be showing an exhibition of America's favourite lesbian artist Catherine Opie. Her mid-career survey comes at the age of 47 and marks the fact that Opie has really hit the big time. Her triumph is a triumph for us all and we should salute the fact her Sapphic lens has brought the lesbian community into focus. But her show also reminds us that there is a desperate lack of lesbianism represented in our own galleries.... The internationally renowned Opie sees herself as a documentary photographer and her portraits of American life does for queer people what Walker Evans did for Alabama sharecroppers in the 1930s: it brings them into the limelight. In 1999 Opie took her RV 9,000 miles across America and captured en route the most revealing insight into lesbian home-life. In her Domestic series people like Joanne and Betsy, amply proportioned mothers of a little girl and owners of a very suburban looking home (blue china tea set and porcelain dogs included) are introduced to our collective psyche. These images are touching without being remotely saccharine. They normalise lesbian domestic life, by expertly capturing the minutiae and humdrum of the everyday - lesbians relaxing in their backyards, hanging out in kitchens, floating in their pools, playing with their children, lounging on beds, staring out windows, and so on. Opie admits her life these days is fairly domesticated, in fact my interview with her is punctuated with the homely sound of the coffee grinder. She has spoken in the past about yearning for a successful domestic relationship and you get the impression she really gets a kick out of looking after her partner and her partner's 28-year-old daughter. She dreamily ponders her new-found happiness, 'I am really glad that I get to live with someone I love and respect so much. I finally feel at peace with this sense of family and not being alone anymore.' An unashamedly sensitive soul, she goes on to say, 'I was getting lonely even though I had multiple girlfriends. I always ended feeling slightly heartbroken'. She refers back to her past when she took the photos that first brought her to the public's attention - her spectacular portraits of close friends from LA's leather community. A major part of Opie's triumph is introducing a lesbian's life story to such a mainstream and high-profile gallery: her work follows the pattern of her life from being an insecure leather dyke to one who finally gets to live her 'dream' of having a family and kids. Her Guggenheim exhibition is a coup d'Ètat in terms of increasing the visibility of the lesbian community, and that does not just mean the media-friendly type who hail from the L-Word part of LA but also their leather sisters, drag kings and so on. The more you talk to Opie, the more you get the feeling that most images she produces are driven by the desire to achieve equality for the queer community. She says, 'I hope in my lifetime I will have the exact same advantages as a heterosexual couple would do'. Catherine Opie's mid-career survey is not the only art show in a mainstream American gallery to deal with lesbian issues either. In 2007 there were a slew of them including the high-profile Whack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, devoting a large section to lesbian artists and their very instrumental role in the feminist art movement. There was also, more interestingly, Shared Women a show of young feminist lesbian artists. These were shown in LA's ¸ber-established MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) and LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) respectively. Brownie points can indeed be awarded to our art friends across the pond for helping to increase the visibility of the lesbian community. In contrast, there is a striking lack of artwork about lesbianism in our major galleries. The Tate can only come up with two examples of work that touch on lesbianism in its century-long history - New Yorker Zoe Leonard's The Fae Richards Archive which sketches the fictitious biography of a black, lesbian actress and the Surrealist exhibition, Desire Unbound that in a roundabout way hinted at lesbianism through its gender ambiguities. However in the 1980s and 1990s the Brits lead the world in lesbian artistic discourse with the magnificent trailblazer Tessa Boffin producing Stolen Glances, Lesbian Take Photographs in 1991. This was the first collection of its kind and an enduring archive that brought together much of the photographic work and debates surrounding lesbian sexuality. Sadly the intrepid Tessa - mate of Catherine Opie - committed suicide in 1993 and today's new breed of lesbian artists seem to have very much retreated from her brand of in your face lesbian work. Young British artists like Beck's Futures' nominee Kirsten Glass or Victoria Miro-represented Dawn Mellor identify themselves as lesbian but it's hard to gleam anything really meaningful about their sexuality from their work. Kirsten Glass, who graduated from Goldsmiths in 2000, makes wonderfully decadent mixed-media paintings of beautiful fashionistas, as equally informed by fairy tales as they are by film noir and injected with a rock and roll spirit. The most lesbian reading of her work she reckons has been when somebody described them as 'lesbian vampire paintings'. Other than that the cheerful young artist says, that even though she is totally open about her sexuality, it's rarely read thorough that lens. Kirsten seems to be worried about ghettoising herself and says that she 'wouldn't want an audience defined solely by their sexuality' though she concedes there is probably not enough art in our galleries that explores lesbian issues. In true pop-chick fashion she makes, a somewhat charming suggestion. 'If there could be an art version of le Tigre it would be amazing'. The more established Sadie Lee is one of a rather distinguished number of lesbian portrait painters that seem to do exceedingly well when it comes to the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery - this also includes Victoria Russell (winner of the BP Portrait Award in 2000) and young guns like Kelly-Anne Davitt (short-listed for BP Portrait Award in 2003). Not much of what these painters produce can be construed as explicitly 'lesbian'. This wasn't always the case when Lee first started out in the 1980s when it was all about - in her own words - 'I would like to fuck this woman'. However, she left behind such literal references to her sexuality long ago and is now more concerned with the aging body. She explains this development in subject matter in her own indomitable way. 'Certainly as you get older...sex doesn't seem to be as high up on the list as when you are young and 20 and all you care about is what your hair looks like and who you're going to pick up'. Lee also has a theory about the lack of lesbian sensibility in younger British talent. 'We're so assimilated we don't need to shout about it anymore, we can just get on with the business of being professional artists'. As much as the very convincing Sadie Lee assures me that all is hunky-dory there is still a niggling sense of unease at the vast difference in attitude between the Yanks and the British. With the American Opie reckoning it is important to 'address issues of visibility' whereas Lee believing it is no longer crucial to hammer the point home. History might have something to do with Opie's more political slant on the lesbian art world: American lesbian artists were casualties of a particularly vicious climate of political conservatism and right-wing religious zealotry during the latter part of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. The infamous case of the NEA Four - whose National Endowment Fellowships were vetoed by then-NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer - has had an essential part to play in shaping the thinking of American LGBT artists. All four artists' work was known for its sexual themes, and each of the artists, bar one, was gay. Around the same time that Sadie Lee was being welcomed with open arms by the British Establishment - the National Portrait Gallery decided to use the painting of her and her girlfriend to advertise the Portrait Award - lesbian performance artist Holly Hughes, one of the NEA Four, was being persecuted by the American government. It is no wonder that American lesbian artists feel more of a need to make sexual orientation the centre of their creation. Opie does not understate the importance of this dark period in queer history. 'Reagan years are pivotal to my politics and evolution, I reacted on so many levels during that time period'. But there is something nasty in the woodshed according to some. Julie Parker, Chief Executive and Artistic Director of The Drill Hall, the UK's s leading space for lesbian, gay and queer performance, reckons that the inescapable certainty of a Conservative government in Britain could herald a threat to this liberalism in the arts. She says, 'I think we are about to take a nosedive in this country in terms of a major lurch to the right and I think what you will see is much more visceral, engaged, overtly obvious work which is challenging what are seen to be cultural and political norms'. So could lesbian artists raise their heads above the parapet and go back to creating more militant and political work to combat this predicted conservatism? As I get rather exercised over the thought of a war on gay artistic freedom, Sadie Lee, in typical matter-of-fact fashion tells me that if I crave a more politicised and overt type of art I should make it myself. She doesn't quite appreciate my pure lack of artistic talent but she has a point. It is this kind proactive approach that Opie approves of in her crusade to stamp out homophobia. 'We are an intelligent community who has done an awful lot in terms of visibility,' she says. 'But what I think is really great is that people can visit major museums and they might hopefully think about something in a different way. I don't know that a homophobe goes into a museum and looks at my exhibition and says "Oh my God! I completely understand, I'm not a homophobe anymore". I don't have that kind of idealism but not to have that as your dialogue is denying a major part of yourself.' And who could argue with the wonderful Catherine Opie. Catherine Opie: An American Photographer - 26 September 2008 to 5 January 2009, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum