![]() But photographs are insufficient their art was in the performance, not in posed studio shots. There are photographs of Vesta Tilley as a man, of Dan Leno and Danny La Rue in drag. Here is Noel Coward’s monogrammed dressing gown and the pink wig worn by the female impersonator Jimmy Slater in the 1930s. Here is the door of Wilde’s cell at Reading prison and the Marquess of Queensberry’s fateful calling card addressed to “Oscar Wilde, posing as Somdomite” (sic) at the Albemarle Club. Art and life turned out to be entirely separate. ![]() His career collapsed and even his friends abandoned him. The painter Simeon Solomon, whose drawing The Bridge, the Bridegroom and Sad Love shows a man holding his wife’s hand but reaching back to the body of a disconsolate-looking Cupid.Īt the height of his Royal Academy success, Solomon was arrested for soliciting in a public lavatory, and later charged with attempted buggery. Oscar Wilde, whose middling likeness by the American artist Robert Pennington had to be sold during Wilde’s bankruptcy (its new owner’s husband still wouldn’t allow it on the drawing-room walls). There are many portraits of heroes along the way: the socialist activist Edward Carpenter, who lived openly with his lover, the labourer George Miller. The show spans the period from 1861, when sodomy was no longer punishable by death in England and Wales, to the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, decriminalising consensual sex between men. The show tries to accomplish far too much – balancing private lives with social history, sexual identity with mainstream politics, anecdotes and relics with poor old art, which frequently loses out. Likewise, Wilhelm von Gloeden’s famous photographs of Sicilian boys naked and posing as classical athletes appear without any word of his relationship with under-age boys. Ellis was a eugenicist, but his study of gay and transgender sex trumps his desire to weed out the weak, which goes unmentioned. There is a portrait of Ellis in the show’s second gallery, which is where everything starts going awry. Photograph: © DACS, The Estate of Keith Vaughan Keith Vaughan’s Drawing of two men kissing. But clearly (as inscribed on the painting’s gilded frame) one Alderman Alfred Holt would hardly have presented The Critics, Tuke’s painting of two lads watching (eyeing up?) a third in the water – to Leamington Spa art gallery if he had the slightest sense that it had been made by what the sexologist Havelock Ellis termed an invert. His sitters included Italian models and English rugby players in the pose of Greek gods, and he has become something of a gay hero. Henry Scott Tuke, for instance, painted naked boys swimming or sunbathing on the Cornish coast to popular success for decades. By invoking the classical tradition of same-sex love, artists could paint Sappho embracing Erinna and David strumming Jonathan’s harp and speak surreptitiously to particular viewers. ![]() The first gallery at Tate Britain is one enormous pre-Raphaelite swoon of bee-stung lips, bare breasts, togas slipping discreetly from shoulders and eyes half-closed in ecstasy. Is the artist gay, is the art gay, does it have a gay sensibility? Or is it all in the eye of the beholder? Certainly Victorian-era audiences could spot all sorts of coded messages. Queer British Art 1861-1967 encourages speculation of precisely this kind. Simeon Solomon’s Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene, 1864. ![]()
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