Painter’s Words Speak Louder Than Abstracts : Exhibit: John Breitweiser’s ‘zinger phrases’ works are part of annual juried show at Orange County Center of Contemporary Art.

John Breitweiser says that when he and his companion Stuart Wilber returned to America in 1987 after four years abroad, the culture shock they experienced had nothing to do with fast food and video games, but with intolerance and bigotry.

Settling in Orange County, Breitweiser, an artist, found that Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), the Rev. Lou Sheldon and other officials openly opposed to the gay lifestyle “were just waiting to club us for being who we were.” Meanwhile, Breitweiser got a job as a waiter only to find his co-workers dishing out epithets as casually and often as they’d serve guacamole.

“It was an accepted atmosphere of hate and homophobia,” said Breitweiser, and his art--some of which has been included in the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art’s 12th Annual Juried Show here--changed radically as his rage grew.

He’d been doing apolitical, abstract paintings. But after joining the letter-writing campaigns of such civil rights groups as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, he began to feel that he had to be more of an activist, and that words carried more force than abstract images. “I couldn’t keep doing the work I was doing,” he said. “I had to try to affect some change.”

For his letters, he had been collecting what he calls “zinger phrases” from newspapers, magazines and other sources. He painted two such phrases in oil across one of his canvases: “Silence is the voice of complicity,” and “Words of oppression are words meant to hurt.”

Three confrontational pieces in the OCCCA group show convey his views with similarly plain-spoken simplicity through a mix of quotes and his own writings. “Automatic Loser” (1992) uses red letters on a vivid green background to deal with the plight of gay and lesbian youths:

To a Young Gay Person, growing up in terrifying aloneness, the truth about the sexual orientation of famous figures means that your sexual feelings don’t make you an automatic loser.

Teen suicide among gays is rampant because “kids learn that they are worthless or sinners or perverted from all that insane propaganda people put out about us,” Breitweiser, now 44 and living in San Clemente, said during a recent phone interview.

“If someone had said to me when I was growing up that Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and Alexander the Great were most likely homosexuals, maybe I would have been saved a few years of thinking I was a disgusting, perverted person.”

With bright yellow and blue letters, “Parental Loyalty” (1991) asserts that:

Parental loyalty to rigid and outmoded belief systems provides no immunity against the biological happenstance of a child’s being gay, but it can subject that child to self hate, domestic violence, parental rejection, untold mayhem at school, and too often, death by suicide.

Violence against gays is the subject of “Queer Basher” (1991), actually a baseball bat on which is written:

The most virulent queer basher is attacking the homosexual potential in himself.

Breitweiser says that while he has not been injured physically, his work is informed by personal experience, including the shame he felt as a youth.

He says he knew as a boy, growing up in New Jersey, that he was gay. But he kept it a secret “locked up deep down in (my) soul” until just before he met Wilber nearly 15 years ago.

Breitweiser had been married to a woman for seven years, “doing my best to be what society wanted me to be.” When he finally revealed his true sexuality, he said, his family was supportive. “It took a couple years, but they realized that I was the same person I had been the year before, and the year before that.”

Breitweiser, who has a master’s degree from the Art Institute of Chicago, also makes art dealing with capitalism, addiction and other contemporary social, political and personal issues. His work was displayed in last year’s annual juried show at OCCCA and in a group exhibit at the LA Artcore gallery in Los Angeles, both curated by Howard Fox, curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

He acknowledges that his work doesn’t stir a change of heart in all who see it. He realizes that gay issues, especially, “are a blind spot for many people . . . they have ingrained attitudes.” But some--and certainly his gay friends--find his painted statements empowering, he added. “They love it. We all know it’s truth but to see it up like that, displayed in a gallery, is real important.”

The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art’s 12th Annual Juried Show continues through Aug. 7 at the center, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd., Santa Ana. Gallery hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. (714) 549-4989.