Perhaps because we are more sensitive, as we are said to be, or perhaps in response to the difficulties most of us faced, until recently, in trying to lead a “normal” life, gay men have been and are disproportionately represented among the world’s great artists.

Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were among the first of a long list of creative artistic geniuses with a sexual preference for other men. As a result, both got into trouble with the law in Renaissance Italy, but -- due in no small part to their enormous talent -- were able to extricate themselves from major scandal. While their art seldom specifically reflected their homosexuality, the clues are overwhelming. Michelangelo painted beautiful muscular men in various stages of undress. The nude men he painted on the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel are especially beautiful.Michelangelo even went so far as to paint the undraped ass of the Almighty, pictured from behind on the third day as He planted the Earth with vegetation. (Lest this great Renaissance artist be accused of blasphemy, it should be noted that the Bible explicitly says that God created man in his own image, which presumably includes a derriere.)

Da Vinci, unlike his younger rival Michelangelo, preferred androgynous young men, a type often depicted in his paintings. For many years, he kept in expensive clothes a lissome assistant by name of Salai, or “Little Devil” in Italian.Skipping forward some 500 years, homosexual artists of the mid-20th Century could be more explicitly gay in their painting. In the 1930s and ‘40s, Paul Cadmus, who died in 1999 five days before his 95th birthday, did not bother to disguise the gay identity of his subjects in such paintings as The Fleet’s In, Shore Leave, YMCA Locker Room -- several of which were removed from galleries after Mrs. Grundy-style protests from various powers that be, including the U.S. Navy. In his later years, he executed beautiful drawings of his young lover and companion, Jon Anderson.

Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was somewhat more guarded that Cadmus, but his gay loves were often the subject of his art. Many of his abstract paintings were a memorial to his lover, Baron von Freyburg, killed in World War I while serving in the German army. Later, his depictions of the ruggedly handsome sons of the Newfoundland family with whom he lived were especially moving, particularly those memorializing their deaths while fishing in the stormy Atlantic.

More recently, beginning in the 1960s, Michael Leonard, a favorite of gay impresario Lincoln Kirstein, painted absolutely gorgeous gay male nudes.Artists who explored homosexuality -- either explicitly or implicitly -- in the 20th Century were not limited to the United States.

In Mexico, Abraham Angel, a sensitive painter who died by his own hand in 1924 at age 19, endured the scorn of his older brother -- the head of their fatherless household -- for his artistic pursuits and, if we read between the lines, for his apparent homosexuality. He left a small but beautiful legacy of paintings, in particular expressionist portraits of his family and friends, including at least one presumed to be his lover.

And in Germany, for another example, during the creative but doomed-for-destruction Weimar Era, presumably heterosexual (he married twice) Christian Schad painted arch, sophisticated portraits, including one of a homosexual count with two haughty prostitutes, one of them a drag queen.

These of course barely scratch the surface of gay art and gay artists. There’s Andy Warhol, David Hockney, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (talk about explicit!), Charles DeMuth, Jared French, another photographer George Platt Lynes and many, many more. There are a number of ways gay men can enjoy this cornucopia of male beauty and erotica that artists -- both gay and presumably straight -- have created over the centuries and continue to make today. You can go to art museums. Any of the major art museums are likely to have some of the art -- or similar paintings -- discussed here. You can buy some of today’s beautifully produced art books with full-color illustrations. Any good gay bookstore, or even any good bookstore, is likely to have books that focus on the homoerotic in art (see a few referenced below). You can simply type in the name of these and other gay artists in “Google” and you will come up with lots of illustrations of great art that has a special appeal for gay men. Finally, if you’re adventurous and have a modest budget available to buy art, you can collect art that has a gay appeal. I have a number of pictures of male nudes -- oils on canvas, water colors and prints -- that were done in the first half of the 20th Century (that makes them art, not pornography). I paid $1,200 for one of them, but only $100 for a number of them. So affirm your own healthy existence and otherwise enrich your life. Make art a part of your gay life. References:


References:

"The Sexual Perspective, Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West" by Emmanuel Cooper

"Male Desire, The Homoerotic in American Art", by Jonathan Weinberg

"Resumen, Pintores y Pintura Mexicana, Ano 3 No. 29: Abraham Angel, Horacio Renteria" By Rocha Publishers, Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City

"Glitter and Doom, German Portraits from the 1920s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Quarry, A Collection in Lieu of Memoirs" by Lincoln Kirstein


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxHoward Williams
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxMarch, 2008