In the dressing room of the Galapagos Art Space, DUMBO (Photo: Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

A warm red glow washes over the leather booths of the Galapagos Art Space. The tables – later to be filled with couples, birthday and bachelor parties – are separated by a central walkway that’s suspended over water. The Dumbo theater’s staff is busying themselves with preparations for the evening’s performance of the Floating Kabarette.

In a matter of hours, performers will emerge onto the walkway, strut up and take to the stage. For the audience, a night at the theater means watching their performance. They’ll only see what is put in front of them, what’s displayed on the stage.

But what happens behind the scenes?

Through the steel door marked “Stage door,” a concrete labyrinth winds through the bowels of the theater. A smell of chlorine wafts along its corridors.

The first dancer arrives. Her voluminous ebony hair emphasizes her slight frame. With feline caution, she plods onto the stage that’s still wet from being cleaned earlier in the day, sits cross-legged on the floor and stretches out. A few feet away, the stage manager is atop a ten foot ladder, changing light filters. The red curtain is drawn across the stage.

*

Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink

Two dancers stand before the mirror in the main dressing room. Their eyes are locked in concentration as they draw Cleopatra lines along their eyelids. The harsh light from the fluorescent bulbs above the mirror make their faces look deceptively severe. Among the make-up bags lining the ledge of the mirror, an oversized bag of pretzels is propped up against the glass. Its contents gradually diminish over the course of the evening as performers reach into it, replenishing themselves after their act.

On the other wall, two mirrors hang next one another. Another dancer with dirty blond hair, sits in front of them gluing on false eyelashes.

The host’s booming voice rings from downstairs as he warms up.

A voluptuous woman in a leopard print, faux-fur coat bursts into the room. She unbuttons her coat to reveal a sparkling red dress; the light catches its sequins. Her arrival makes the already-cramped room suddenly feel smaller.

The lady in red steps out of her dress and prances around the dressing room in black underwear. The stage manager appears. “Half an hour call,” he says to a chorus of, “Thank you!”

A girl with bleached-blond hair scrapped into a topknot, revealing a chunk of pink underneath, maneuvers a suitcase past the girls preening in the mirror. The dirty blonde steps past her, flips her waist length hair over her head and fills the room with the smell of apple sours from her hairspray. She twizzles her curls relentlessly, fixing them up and then tugging them back down.

“I can’t tell if my hair looks dumb,” she says to no one in particular.

One of her colleagues responds, “It does not look dumb.”

As the lady in red pats vibrant red glitter over her lipstick, the host calls, “Have a great show everyone.” The first act is called to the stage, and the dressing room clears out.

*

Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink

Less than ten minutes pass and the dancers drag white boxes, props from their act, off stage. They change out of their costumes as Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round” pounds from the front of house and whoops emit from the crowd.

The ebony-haired dancer takes a red wig of a plastic bag and tucks her locks into it. She stands on tiptoes, leaning on her elbows as she paints black teardrops beneath her eyes. She takes a step backwards to examine her work, then leans back into the mirror and pulls the line further down her cheek. Her mouth is slightly open as she replicates the pattern on the other side.

A narrow corridor juts out of the back of dressing room. She steps into it, plugs her iPod headphones into her ears and robotically jerks through her routine.  The synthetic red wig sticks to her face.

*

Two aerialists push a yoga matt up against a wall. One sits with his legs stretched out, toes in point. The dirty blonde curls up next to him and puts her head in his lap.

“The pain tolerance is the worst,” he says. “If you can deal with that, you can do it.”

The rhythm of the muffled music from the front of house is abruptly interrupted. The three stop their conversation and exchange quizzical looks. The stage manager runs up the stairs, leaps over them and darts out the door that leads to the auditorium. The crowd chant of “Kris, Kris, Kris!”

Five minutes pass and still no music can be heard. The three have resumed their conversation. Eventually the music starts up. The show goes on.

The ebony-haired dancer appears. She stands in front of the matt. “They kept telling me ‘go on,’ ‘don’t go on.’” She’s agitated. A colleague comforts her. She goes back into the dressing room and stands in front of the bright mirror.

She wipes the black teardrops away from her under her eyes. “It feels so good to take everything off.”

*

Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink

A bald, suited man appears from the stairwell halfway through the evening and hands out the paychecks. The host looks at his before folding it in half and tucking it into his breast pocket.

The aerialists have performed their act. They bid everyone goodnight and leave.

The ebony-haired dancer pulls on a pair of grey, faded jeans and black jumper. She loosely pins up her hair. A few strands fall out the back. She packs away the red wig into her suitcase.

“Where,” she asks, “are my drinks tickets?”

Frame grab from the David Wojnarowicz film, "A Fire In My Belly," with ants crawling on a crucifix. Photo courtesy of AP.

“HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” is the first major museum exhibition to center on how sexual identity and gender have shaped modern art. It also emphasizes the influence of gay and lesbian artists in the last century.

“The Brooklyn Museum is uniquely positioned, I believe, to host this landmark exhibition since New York is where many of these artists and their subjects discovered their voice and where the gay rights movement was launched,” said Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman.

The exhibit first appeared at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery from fall 2010 to February 2011.

The Catholic League and others protested the 4-minute segment of the film, “A Fire in My Belly” by late artist David Wojnarowicz, when it was part of the Smithsonian exhibition.

They called it sacrilegious for showing a crucified Jesus figure with ants crawling over it. Wojnarowicz created the film as a response to those suffering through the AIDS epidemic, which greatly impacted the gay community. He expresses this idea in the film with images, such as the crucified Jesus, of loss, pain, death and suffering. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992, and the film was never finished.

Following the protests, the Smithsonian pulled the piece just a month after the exhibit opened.

Frank O'Hara painted by Neel. Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue, in a statement last week, criticized the Brooklyn Museum for keeping the film segment in the exhibit. He called “HIDE/SEEK” an “ anti-Catholic exhibit” shown at “New York’s most anti-Catholic museum.”

But Donohue said the Catholic League will not stage a demonstration outside the Brooklyn Museum. He cited two reasons for this decision: “a) we won the big prize when Smithsonian officials voluntarily bowed to public pressure and withdrew the vile video, and b) the video has been shown many times since at other venues across the nation.”

In response to its critics, others have spoken up in support of the film.

Councilwoman Letitia James (D-Brooklyn) agrees with the museum’s decision to keep “A Fire in My Belly” in the show. “Freedom of expression is the pillar of democracy, and much is to be gained from the entirety of this show. Censorship has no place in a free society,” she said in a statement.

At a special “HIDE/SEEK” preview Thursday morning Brooklyn Museum Director Lehman and the exhibition’s two curators, Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward sought to blunt the criticism from Catholics. “I just wanted to make an offer that, if I can be of any service to the Bishop of New York in terms of teaching him the iconic tradition of his faith I would he happy to do so,” curator Jonathan D. Katz said with undisguised sarcasm.

The point, Katz explained, was that “throughout the history of Catholicism the singular metaphor for human suffering has been the body of Christ. It’s been deployed from the very beginning of Christian art.”

Museum Director Lehman, describing the exhibit, said, “‘HIDE/SEEK’ traces the expression of sexual identity through the major movements of realism, abstraction, pop art and conceptual art, framing portrait making in America in a new and illuminating way. ‘HIDE/SEEK’ brings together works by iconic figures in American art and artists who forged the way for free and open representation of sexual difference.”

The exhibit, Lehmann added, “explores the unexamined impact of gay and lesbian artists on the portrayal of personal identity.”

Walt Whitman by Eakins. Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.

“HIDE/SEEK” features approximately 100 works of art from 67 artists. The pieces, which span 100 years, from the late 19th century to today, include a range of media, from paintings to photography, to film and music.

Most of the artwork is from the original show at the National Portrait Gallery. About five pieces had to be swapped out because some of the loaned works were no longer available.

The exhibition’s pieces include a Thomas Eakins’ photo of Walt Whitman (1891; printed 1979), who is believed to have been homosexual; “Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills” (1935) a painting from Georgia O’Keeffe, an artist known for her suggestively sexual work; the Alice Neel painting of gay poet Frank O’Hara (1960); Yayoi Kusama’s photo “Homosexual Wedding;” Nan Goldin’s photo of two drag queens, titled “Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC” (1991)’ and the Annie Leibovitz photo, “Ellen DeGeneres, Kauai, Hawaii” (1997), shot the same year DeGeneres announced she was a lesbian.

It also features gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Keith Haring.

This extensive exhibit, however, gives prominence to Wojnarowicz’s film. A four minute truncated version of the film is shown together with other contemporary pieces. There is also a separate room that features a timeline of its history and longer versions of the film.

“HIDE/SEEK” is not the first controversy for the Brooklyn Museum. In 1999 the Catholic League led a demonstration in front of the museum protesting the exhibit “Sensation,” which featured a painting, “The Holy Virgin Mary” by artist Chris Ofili, in which cutouts of female buttocks and genitalia from pornographic magazines were displayed together with real elephant dung.

Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to pull $7 million dollars of funding from the Brooklyn Museum. The battle between Giuliani and the Brooklyn Museum ended up in the courts, which ruled in favor of the museum.

The artist is calling himself a “Vigilante Gardener” because of the not-so-legal project. Bieber spent 3 hours a week on the garden over the summer, eventually producing a film about the project.

A video from the exhibition, which includes a film depicting ants crawling on a crucifix, was pulled from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. last year after the work provoked public debate.

This exhibition, entitled “Hide/Seek,” is reportedly the first major in a museum show to consider gay themes in art history. The museum has received many letters protesting the exhibit since its announcement.

The tattoos on Dragonfly's hands were done using the Maori hand-tapping method. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Many of Dragonfly’s tattoos, including the ones on her face, were done using the “ta moko” hand tapping method. The skin is pierced with a small tool before inserting the ink.

Dragonfly would rather "lose her nose" than get rid of the tattoos on her face. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Dragonfly, 39, had already tattooed the stars on her chin herself when she met a Maori tattoo artist named Inia. She asked him to tattoo her in the traditional ta moko way.

The process was, she says, “very painful” but one she endured because the Maori style was something she’d wanted for a long time.

The tattoos on Russell's fingers stand for "all cops are bastards." (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Dragonfly, who is homeless, says she knows her tattoos have “closed doors” for her, but they are a part of her, she would rather lose her nose, she says, “than get rid of them.”

Her boyfriend Russell’s tattoos make political statements. He’s a squatters’ rights activist and has the squatters’ symbol – a circle with a zigzag arrow pointing diagonally rightwards – emblazoned on his right hand.

The three dots between his left thumb and index finger are the “mi vida loca” motif, meaning “my crazy life” in Spanish.

The tattoo on Russell's right hand is the squatters' rights symbol. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Russell’s first tattoo was a “poke ‘n’ stick” when he was 13.

Dragonfly says she’s familiar with the method, which involves using a sewing needle to make an incision in the skin which is then filled in with pen ink, none of her tattoos were done like that.

Dragonfly tattooed Russell a month ago. The letters “A, C, A, B” across his fingers stand for “all cops are bastards.” Dragonfly says she’ll eventually to redo its ink work because she’s not happy with it at the moment.

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The tattoo on Tristan Fitch's arm is his representation of his spirit. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Tristan Fitch, 40, was flipping through an archeology book when he came across an image that spoke to him and he knew instantly that he wanted it tattooed on him.

Something “clicked” when he saw the griffin, a mythical creature with the body of lion and an eagle’s head and wings. He later discovered, after having it tattooed on his arm, that the image was a representation of a tattoo archeologists discovered on a Shaman found in Mongolia.

The Shaman had been preserved in an avalanche and her skin was still intact, covered in primitive tattoos. Fitch says the revelation strengthened its appeal because of its connotations of “strength and adventure.”

Tristan Fitch designed the tattoos on his arms himself. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Fitch, a painter and sculptor, got his first tattoo when he was 17. Very few of his friends in his hometown in Georgia then had them. It was, he says, “different” to have a tattoo at that time. The first one is on his hip and he says that he “forgets” he has it and it’s become more like a “birth mark.”

He designed the two tattoos on his arm himself. One is a symbol that features in his paintings, it represents “forward movement” and he gave it a prominent position because of the importance it holds for him.

On Fitch’s other arm is his “representation of my spirit.” The original image – an abstract motif that looks like a highly stylized floating angel – was the result of a line drawing that he did without taking his pen off the paper.

Then there’s the gecko that rests on Fitch’s ankle. It’s his “tacky” tattoo, which he had done in Hawaii. But he doesn’t want it removed because it reminds him of a happy time in his life.

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The coffin on Oldschool Alex's hand was tattooed by now-retired artist, Dan Higgs (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Oldschool Alex, a tattoo artist, sees tattoos as a commitment. He says he doesn’t have a reason for every one of the many inscriptions that adorn him; they simply mark his ability to express himself freely.

Alex, who is 38, got his first tattoo when he was 17. He was living in New Jersey and part of the punk rock scene – the mid 1970s rock genre. The image is from one of his favorite comic books, “Faust.”

Oldschool Alex has "Farewell" tattooed across his fingers. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Alex now has even more tattoos that speak to his interests. He is, for instance, a movie buff and has dedicated one arm to images from horror films.

The "x" on Alex's temple represents his commitment to the "straight edge" life style. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Among his other tattoos are replicas of the work of artists he admires. One of them, the now-retired Dan Higgs, did the coffin on his hand. Alex says Higgs’s stylized American traditional work is “unique”, a style he greatly respects.

Alex refers to tattoos on people’s hands and face as “job stoppers.” This might hold true for other lines of work, but Alex says his decision to get them was “career motivated. You never trust a skinny chef,” he says.

He’s noticed a growing number of people getting tattoos, which he says is a “double edged sword.” On the one hand, it’s “good for business,” and he’s pleased to see a societal move towards the acceptance of tattoos. But he’s worried that people don’t give the decision sufficient consideration.

Operating the needle comes with responsibility and Alex says the pressure on tattoo artists is often overlooked. “We’re altering people’s bodies permanently,” he says.

Alex says he makes sure his customers have thought their decision through before he agrees to tattoo them. He says that he turns away more people than he tattoos.

Despite claiming that he got his tattoos “for fun” and that most of them “don’t mean anything,” some do hold significance. The cross on his temple denotes his commitment to “straight edge,” a no drink, drug or promiscuous sex lifestyle.

See more of Brooklyn’s inked

The Brooklyn Ink went tattoo spotting recently and asked local residents, “Why did you get your tattoo?” Click on the images to read the stories behind them.

Have a tattoo you would like to share? Tweet it to us @thebrooklynink