Art And Sex - An Exploration Of Gay Erotica

Product Information

Newspapers and the right wing press had aggressively presented gay love as a dangerous perversion, particularly during the AIDS crisis. It was work that captured social change in real life and brought the gay experience into the light for all to see - encouraging members of the gay community to come out of the shadows. 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. Michel Foucault describes this as the birth of the homosexual as an identity, rather than a set of conditions. During the interwar period, greater acceptance towards queer individuals could be seen in artistic urban centers such as Paris and Berlin.

Controversy then erupted in the United States when certain conservative elected officials objected that money from a National Endowment for the Arts grant went to Queer artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley. Such pressures were exacerbated by actions of censorship such as the Hollywood Production Code which banned depictions of "sex perversion" from films made and distributed in the United States up until 1968. The work caused consternation at the time as many felt the work should have been produced by a gay or lesbian artist. Gluck was born Hannah Gluckstein, but she built an androgynous identity by insisting upon "no prefix, suffix or quotes" around her gender-neutral name.Many artists at the time thus acted in their capacity as activists, demanding to be heard by the government and medical institutions alike. Opie began her career shooting powerful and subversive portraits of cross dressing, sadomasochism, and the leather community. It has become a powerful icon for gay rights, a tool of activism, and one of Wojnarowicz's most well-loved works. This piece however places it back in the realm of the ordinary, the final line reminding the viewer that gay love is as physical as heterosexual desire. The final photographs depict Cassils in an almost primal state, sweating, grimacing, and flying through the air as they pummel clay blocks, placing an emphasis on the physicality of their gender non-conforming and transmasculine body.

Artists like Will McBride or Robert Mapplethorpe had to fight institutionalized censorship of their art in galleries, as well as having to overcome many legal obstacles. Far from a dispassionate study of the human figure as an ensemble of volumetric forms (it's only a sphere, a cylinder, a cone), Hockney proposes a necessary link between artistic achievement and sexual attraction. In her paintings, she offers imagery associated with pornography — women-on-women, female masturbation, nudity — and rescues it from the white male gaze. In Gaydar (2014), Ferris offers no visual clues as to her sexuality, but the title acts as a rejoinder to society's fascination with her identity. Homosexuality was so much part of everyday life to the extent that the Romans didn’t even have a word for it.Hannah Roemer is remaking art-historical portraiture by depicting lesbians, who have long been made invisible, and Prince Jacon Osinachi is challenging expectations of Nigerian men. Apart from the eternal fire which was promised to the sinners, earthly penalties ranged from confiscation of property to capital punishment.