The evening before I was due to return from my last visit with my parents, I went for a long walk along the bayside where I’d grown up. Old homes that had been landmarks of my childhood had been razed and their plots maxed out with a kind of hybrid architecture-style that was part Spanish colonial, part Dubai skyscraper. In the final stretch of houses, I paused in front of a wrought iron fence and was greeted by a familiar face, a lumbering seal of a yellow Labrador by the name of Kaya. As she inched toward me, panting sweetly and stupidly for me to pet her, I felt my heart leap with joy before crashing and breaking inside of me. The little puppy that I’d remembered had grown old, and I suspected by the look of her that this would be the last time we would ever meet.
I started sobbing despite myself because over the course of the trip I realized something irreplaceable had been lost; not my innocence but the whole world that had sustained it. The landscape of my childhood was being encroached upon by money and politics and time. Once development was complete, I would be the keeper for a past that few could inhabit and that truly no longer existed. I looked long into Kaya’s button black eyes and was shaken by how totally this cast-off animal could be a mascot and portal for my own childhood. I stood at the gate for an inappropriately long time, paralyzed by nostalgia, enough to worry my parents and to probably freak out my neighbors. I gave her one final kiss and scratch behind the ears and stood up to find my way back home.
The sad truth is that the world as we know it vanishes more and more every day and that all the while we become strangers within it. With little regard for our feelings, the foundation of the past is demolished to pave the way for future. It’s only understandable that amid this constant change, that humans would latch onto something that would remain precious and stable as everything cheapens and fades around them. For the Key West artist Robert “Gene” Otto that “something” was a doll he had loved since childhood, a Steiff creation of wire and felt that he dressed in his old sailor costume and lovingly christened “Robert.” It was a doll that he returned to in middle age and cherished for the rest of his life, making little clothes and small sets for Robert to live and clinging dearly to the little fellow as dementia laid waste to his memory.
The myth of Robert the doll that survives today is as creepy as its origins are tender. Legend holds that he was either cursed by a Voodoo practicing servant, made to house the restless spirit of a dead child, or is bound by the unforgiving ghost of Gene’s scorned wife, Annette. These stories have formed around Robert’s uncanny presence and the bizarre spate of bad luck that has befallen visitors of the East Martello Museum, who either did not properly acknowledge him or took his photo without permission. He is a staple of paranormal television programs and the subject of what looks like a pretty awful horror movie, a toy that/who has been elevated as the real life analog of haunted dolls on the silver screen like Chucky and Annabelle.
Robert the doll is haunted but to the artist Matthew Leifheit, the ghosts are more local and personal. Encased in a glass box with no one to play with, Robert is a toy without a master, a remnant of an old stately Key West that bears little resemblance to the modern island. For Leifheit, Robert’s own vanishing world runs parallel to another rapidly disappearing context, Key West as a gay paradise. Stunningly beautiful and remote from the mainland, the island was a hub for sailors and a destination for celebrities like Tennessee Williams and Leonard Bernstein, who wanted to be “where the boys are.” A local economy of bars and clubs sprang up, and with it a culture unlike anywhere else on Earth. The question of passing on cultural inheritance is timeless enough for heterosexuals but a newer and more pressing one for queers, the oldest of whom have a living memory of the invention of “gay” as a distinct identity. Even as civil rights have been coded into law, rent prices nationwide have soared and hubs where a sensibility about what it *means* to be gay used to be transmitted have shuttered. A profound divide exists across the generations, with the elderly alone with a rapidly diminishing sense of familiarity and the young uprooted without a sense of history to ground themselves.
The photographs on display in Robert express an impossible wish about time and circumstance and where we locate our desire for safety as the world lurches violently around us. In Leifheit’s imagining, Robert the Doll is recast as a long-limbed, blank-faced twink, who becomes a site of youthful projection and nostalgia for the old Key West. Photographs of the Artist House, where Gene and Robert once resided run alongside portraits of “Robert” zooming around town with his new owners. The scantily clad young man propped up and against breathlessly excited senior citizens is both creepy and oddly sweet, and only underlines how out of sorts and unforgiving it is to cling too long to one’s innocence. In other pictures “Robert” looks like the demonic entity pop culture makes him out to be, his vacant expression curdling into lascivious menace as he’s slavishly fussed over and doted upon. Leifheit compounds this feeling by taking cues from a (in)famous Helmut Newton photograph of a woman sat wide-legged as she stares vamp-ishly at the object of her affection.
One of the oldest forms of horror was the confusion of categories between dolls and humans. For Freud, this slippage was emblematic of the uncanny because it forced the doll’s beholder to confront a long-since repressed understanding of themself as children. In this way, Leifheit opens a dusty old box of associations that warp and prickle at our sense of the past as we look longingly to beloved items to square our understanding of the overwhelming present.