It is not difficult to imagine the pull of American culture, particularly the space and time landscape of New York in the late 1970s, for an artist such as McDiarmid. His visual and sociopolitical sense was already attuned to American artistic, commercial and popular culture and, most importantly, to the gay identity politics that had emerged there, with the aftermath of the Stonewall events of 1969 building on the cultural politics of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. In addition to his engagement with dissenting American cultures, McDiarmid was interested in the big, bold and outrageous qualities offered by American wealth and cultural promiscuity.

From the point of view of more adventurous Australian artists, by the mid 1960s, the United States was beginning to supplant Europe as the mythical centre of the Western avant-garde culture. Australian contemporary art curator John Stringer, who spent several years in the United States, wrote:

Moreover, by the late 1970s, the Australia Council for the Arts was funding Australian artists to take up residencies in its supported studios at PSI in Long Island City and Greene Street in Soho.^[8] For McDiarmid, however, a few months supported by an Australia Council grant, followed by return to Australia to exhibit the work produced and write up a grant acquittal report, was not what he was seeking. As a politically aware gay man, McDiarmid saw himself as an international or diasporic gay male subject rather than as an ‘Australian’ artist. He was, as evidenced in his recorded views and his personal and creative decisions, more interested in immersing himself in a sexually dissident American urban culture, which resonated with his embrace of a mobile ‘becoming’ subjectivity. He was convinced that his art, his life and his sexuality all needed to be developed in New York and he needed to make himself ‘American’ in some way for this to happen. The city provided an opportunity to release his subjectivity and his creative identity from ‘fixed referents’, to use Nigel Thrift’s term, and to form and reform personal subjectivity in, as Thrift said, a ‘hybrid and dialogic’ context in which identity was being constantly ‘copied, revised, enunciated and performed’.^[9] While McDiarmid continued to exhibit in Australia throughout his period of residence in New York, which ended in 1987, he was, in taking up what was intended to be permanent residence in New York, moving his centre from Australia to America. ‘Why not live there?’ he recalls in the 1992 interview quoted at the beginning of this chapter.