Winters, Riley. “Achilles and Patroclus: Brothers from Other Mothers or Passionate Paramours?” Ancient Origins. 2017. https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-europe/achilles-and-patroclus-brothers-other-mothers-or-passionate-paramours-008265 . Queer British Art 1861–1967 explores connections between art and a wide range of sexualities and gender identities in a period of dynamic change. The exhibition begins in 1861 when the death penalty for sodomy was abolished and ends in 1967 with the partial decriminalisation of sex between men. Legal persecution affected many, yet for some, this was a time of liberation – of people finding themselves, identifying each other and building communities. Perseus Digital Library.” Classical Tyrannicides (Sculpture). Accessed August, 2017. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/artifact?name=Classical%2BTyrannicides&object=Sculpture.

Here, too, we find an explicit link with gay male communities – the park was a well know cruising ground in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gertler lived near Hampstead Heath from the winter of 1914–1915 – how conscious was he that the landscape he painted here was heavily coded in gay male sexuality? Again, whether conscious or unconsciously, the sailor sits visually within a homoerotic landscape.In spite of the Victorian era’s prudish reputation, there are many possible traces of transgressive desire in its art – in Frederic Leighton’s sensuous male nudes, for instance, or Evelyn De Morgan’s depictions of Jane Hales. Simeon Solomon attracted sustained criticisms of ‘unwholesomeness’ or ‘effeminacy’ – terms which suggest disapproval of alternative forms of masculinity as much as same sex desire. Yet other works which might look queer to us passed without comment. A homoerotic ritual conducted by the two shamans with the lines representing energy and/or male ejaculation at or after puberty. Summers, Claude J. “Erotic Miniature Painting.” In The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004. Homer, the poet writes the pair as two friends with a tender relationship later deemed as pederastic by the Greeks, where in which an older male figure mentors and cares for the younger as a “rite of passage” that could include sexual relations. After the death Patroclus, Achilles’ aim for fighting in the war became Patroclus. Achilles’ grief causes him insomnia and a great drive to fight and avenge Patroclus’ death at the hands of Hector, a Trojan prince and fighter for Troy. After Homer’s Iliad, the two can be found in art and literature demonstrating their bond and companionship.

Von Gloeden offers even further proof that gay art is by no means a new phenomenon, just one that has only recently been permitted to see the light. Now, Leslie wants to liberate us from our own puritanism, hatred, and fear. “I just want to tell people they should relax about male imagery and not be so horrified all the time,” he said. “People are nuts.” Historical precedents for queer art renders this priggishness especially odd. “The measure of art education used to be the life class,” he explained. “Now, that’s no longer true. Now, you put a garbage lid on the floor and put cotton balls in it, and that’s high art.” Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple.” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. February 05, 2017. Accessed August 15, 2017. http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/presentation-of-the-virgin-in-the-temple-32587.Their support of queer artists extended beyond the gallery. Leslie led me to the spare bedroom, where his roommate lives. He pointed out Before Time Changes Them (1970) by Andrew Sichel, a fractured, blue-toned blow-job scene covering almost an entire wall. The title is a line from a Constantine Cavafy poem, and Leslie couldn’t help but wax poetic about Cavafy, who “wrote magnificent, rhapsodic gay poetry.” Demuth was an openly gay artist based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (USA). He is known by most museum-goers as a precisionist architectural watercolorist. Yet, Demuth also painted more homoerotic works of art set in bathhouses and other accepted homosocial environments. Muholi is among many contemporary artists who are creating work that challenges the all-too-narrow, heteronomative, white-dominated depictions of love found across art history. Artists working today, from photographers to figurative painters to sculptors, are shattering the conception that love looks a certain way, and creating greater visibility for the LGBTQ+ community in the process. Their portrayals of love—not just couples, but gatherings of friends and expressions of self-love and desire—are not only historically important, they’re also gestures of support for the many young people who will follow in their footsteps.

Previously part of Hide/Seek: Differences in American Portraiture in association with the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery Though the gallery was “above-grade,” cops showed up anyway. Ever the smooth-talker, Leslie greeted them: “Oh hello, officers, are you here to see the show?” The police tried in vain to convince Leslie not to hang the paintings on the walls. “They were so clumsy, they didn’t know what they were doing,” Leslie said. At the end of it, “the police couldn’t do anything. It was painting!”Aristogeiton, the older warrior (left) lunges forward and offers a protective cloak for Harmodius. This may symbolize the warrior’s mutual devotion and platonic love to one another. It is very important for artists to portray LGBTQ+ love as there is still so little of it visible, even though it may seem that in some small urban bubbles that everything is “cool.” Everything is not cool, as we are emerging from centuries of being defined as unnatural and unclean and we spent most of the last 150 years fighting repressive anti-sodomy laws. A fight that necessarily drew its inspiration from getting sex itself legalized between consenting adults in private, at, I believe, the expense of a more nuanced focus on some notion of love. I approach queerness as a process, one through which the choreographic framework fluctuates between structure and contingency. In Untitled (Holding Horizon) the sound and lighting are mixed live, as well as the structures that the performers move through. In this process the performers have the agency to use the qualities that we work with to loosen, expand, and contract the structure. This means that both the choreographic vocabularies and the performers’ subjectivity are both very present in the work. This unpredictability allows for intimacy in the way that the work unfolds; their relations and affects leak out into the room and have the potential to become palpable by an audience. How has LGBTQ nightlife in Warsaw impacted your performances? Penczak, Christopher. “Before the Pen and the Plow.” In Gay Witchcraft: Empowering the Tribe , 10-12. Weiser Books, 2003. To whatever degree I make sculpture that is formally restrained, quiet, precise, slow, I think it is for two reasons: I think that these can be used as strategies of refusal of representation and auto-biographical narrative (as many of these artists I just mentioned used them). And second, I yearn for focused spaces of co-presence with objects and bodies in which I am not as overwhelmed as I am in the regular world, so that I can look and feel my way around. Can you speak about how your work critiques, or responds to representation?

Achilles and Patroclus, are one of the most celebrated male warrior pairs in Greek literature after the Trojan War. Achilles is a young Greek warrior in Homer’s Iliad who possesses superhuman strength and ability as he was born from a nymph and a mortal. He is known for his only weakness being in his heel as his mother dipped him in the river Styx as an infant and held him by his heel. Patroclus is a warrior who grew up as a role model and companion to Achilles as appointed by Achilles’ father. Love and sexuality in all its forms have been central themes in art from its earliest days. The way we experience the world is mediated by our desires, so I think that no matter what an artist is portraying, they are always also representing who and what they love. So many masters used their desire to convey ideas far beyond love, but because queer love stands out as the exception, whenever it is present in a piece, it’s assumed to only be able to speak about queerness. For that reason, I feel it’s important to represent how my queerness is embedded in my life as directly and honestly as I can, to celebrate all the ways in which we are different and all the ways in which we are the same, and to give queer desire equal gravity and meaning.The flourishing of gay life in the 1970s soon gave way to the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s. “The whole decade was like a nightmare,” Leslie recalled with a shudder. “We were endlessly at bedsides and memorials and cremations. You’re always with friends trying to do something and you can’t do anything. Three people died in our house.” Everything closed down: the baths, the bars. Even the gallery had to close: “No one came anymore,” Leslie said; artists stopped bringing work. “It was such a pall over the city.” Still, it was during this decade, in 1987, that Leslie and Lohman created their nonprofit foundation, which was accredited as a museum in 2016. All three of these things may be featured if the tree setting is in fact, near a river. This illustration also brings forward an allusion to the Qur’an’s view of paradise with all the blisses of life from the poem in tact. Resource(s)