Homoeroticism

Saint Sebastian, by Carlo Saraceni (c1610-15), Castle Museum, Prague. The image of Sebastian pierced by arrows has regularly been described as homoerotic.

Homoeroticism refers to the representation of same-sex love and desire, most especially as it is depicted or manifested in the visual arts and literature. It can also be found in performative forms; from theatre to the theatricality of uniformed movements (e.g., the Wandervogel and Gemeinschaft der Eigenen). Homoeroticism thus differs from the interpersonal homoerotic; because homoeroticism is a set of artistic and performative traditions, in which such feelings can be embodied in culture and thus expressed into the wider society.

Arguments over classifications and labelling

The term "homoerotic" carries with it the weight of modern classifications of love and desire that did not necessarily exist in previous eras. Homosexuality as we know it today was not fully codified until the mid-20th century, though this process began much earlier:

Following in the tradition of [Michel] Foucault, scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and David Halperin have argued that various Victorian public discourses, notably the psychiatric and the legal, fostered a designation or invention of the "homosexual" as a distinct category of individuals, a category solidified by the publications of sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) and Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), sexologists who provided an almost-pathological interpretation of the phenomenon in rather Essentialist terms, an interpretation that led, before 1910, to hundreds of articles on the subject in The Netherlands, Germany, and elsewhere. One result of this burgeoning discourse was that the "homosexual" was often portrayed as a corrupter of the innocent, with a predisposition towards both depravity and paederasty — a necessary portrayal if Late-Victorian and Edwardian sexologists were to account for the continuing existence of the "paederast" in a world that had suddenly become bountiful in "homosexuals." (Kaylor, Secreted Desires, p. 33)

Despite an ever-changing and evolving set of modern classifications, members of the same sex often formed intimate associations (many of which were erotic as well as emotional) on their own terms, most notably in the "romantic friendships" documented in the letters and papers of 18th- and 19th- century men and women (see Rictor Norton, ed., My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries, Gay Sunshine Press, 1998). These romantic friendships, which may or may not have included genital sex, were characterized by passionate emotional attachments and what modern thinkers would consider homoerotic overtones.

Difference from pornography

Such eroticism in art is usually subtle and contains some "emotional charge"; which, in the arts, is the main factor that distinguishes it from explicit pornography featuring genitals and sex acts. Thus, it can often evade censorship by the state. Yet homoerotic material can ultimately be more potent than pornography, since some further act of imagination is often required in order to make it explicitly arousing.

Attribution of "homoeroticism" by critics

Post-Stonewall critics sometimes detect homoeroticism in artworks, even when the original artist would probably have denied the presence of such a theme. It may, however, still be valid to label the work as part of the tradition of homoeroticism; since the work may have been arousing for the homosexual portion of its audience, and an influence on future artistic production.

Notable examples in the visual arts

Male-male

Representation of Hadrian having anal sex with Antinous in Egypt

Male-male examples, in the visual fine arts, range through history: Ancient Greek vase art; Roman wine goblets (The Warren Cup). Several Italian Renaissance artists are thought to have had homosexual inclinations, and homoerotic appreciation of the male body has been identified by critics in works by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. More explicit sexual imagery occurring in the Mannerist and Tenebrist styles of the 16th and 17th centuries, especially in arists such as Agnolo Bronzino, Carlo Saraceni and Caravaggio, whose works were sometimes severely criticised by the Catholic church.

Many 19th Century history paintings of classical characters such as Hyacinth, Ganymede and Narcissus can also be interpreted as homoerotic; the work of late 19th century artists (such as Thomas Eakins, Eugene Jansson, Henry Scott Tuke and Magnus Enckell); through to the modern work of fine artists such as Paul Cadmus and Gilbert & George. Fine art photographers such as Wilhelm von Gloeden, David Hockney, Will McBride, Robert Mapplethorpe, Pierre et Gilles, Bernard Faucon, Anthony Goicolea have also made a strong contribution, Mapplethorpe and McBride being notably in breaking down barriers of gallery censorship and braving legal challenges. James Bidgood and Arthur Tress were also very important pioneers in the 1960s, radically moving homoerotic photography away from simple documentary and into areas that were more akin to fine-art surrealism.

Female-female

An example of lesbian erotica by Édouard-Henri Avril.

Further information: Lesbianism in erotica

Female-female examples are most historically noticeable in the narrative arts: the archaic lyrics of Sappho; The Songs of Bilitis; novels such as those of Christa Winsloe, Colette, Radclyffe Hall, and Jane Rule, and films such as Mädchen in Uniform. More recently, lesbian homoeroticism has flowered in photography and the writing of authors such as Pat Califia and Jeanette Winterson.

Female homoerotic art by lesbian artists has often been less culturally prominent than the presentation of lesbian eroticism by non-lesbians and for a primarily non-lesbian audience. In the west, this can be seen as long ago as the 1872 novel Carmilla, and is also seen in cinema in such popular movies as Emmanuelle, The Hunger, Showgirls, and most of all in pornography. In the east, especially Japan, lesbianism is the subject of the manga subgenre shojo-ai.

In many texts in the English-speaking world, lesbians have been presented as intensely sexual but also predatory and dangerous (the characters are often vampires) and the primacy of heterosexuality is usually re-asserted at the story's end. This shows the difference between homoeroticism as a product of the wider culture and homosexual art produced by gay men and women.

Notable examples in writing

There is also a strong tradition of homoeroticism in poetry.

The male-male erotic tradition contains poems by major poets such as Abu Nuwas, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, W.H. Auden, Fernando Pessoa and Allen Ginsberg.

Elisar von Kupffer's Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltlitteratur (1900) and Edward Carpenter's Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship (1902) were the first known notable attempts at homoerotic anthologies since The Greek Anthology. Since then, many anthologies have been published.

In the female-female tradition, there are poets such as Sappho, "Michael Field", and Maureen Duffy. Emily Dickinson addressed a number of poems and letters with homoerotic overtones to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert.

Letters can also be potent conveyors of homoerotic feelings; the letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, two well-known members of the Bloomsbury Group, are full of homoerotic overtones characterized by this excerpt from Vita's letter to Virginia: "I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia [...] It is incredible to me how essential you have become [...] I shan't make you love me anymore by I shan't make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this --But oh my dear, I can't be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that." (January 21, 1926)

In Romanticism

Homoeroticism has been a strong undercurrent in much Romantic and Neo-Romantic visual art. The Romantic emphasis on beauty, perfect love and friendship, pastoral idylls, other-worldy transcendence, the truth & validity of one's inner life, the dynamic outsider hero, and romantic death, all made the Romantic mode especially attractive. There was the added attraction of being able to use a coded symbolism to reveal a work as homoerotic only to those "in the know" about the sort of codes being used.

Some historians have suggested that the suppression of Romanticism and figurative art in the art world, after about 1920 (in favour of modernist, socialist realist art and abstract expressionism), was partly a homophobic act.

In Cinema

Most notable are positive portrayals of homoerotic feelings in relationships, made at feature length and for theatrical exhibition, and made by those who are same-sex oriented. Successful examples would be: Mädchen in Uniform, Germany (1931); The Leather Boys, UK (1964); The Naked Civil Servant, UK (1975); My Beautiful Laundrette, UK (1985); Maurice, UK (1985); Summer Vacation 1999, Japan, 1988;Germany, New Zealand and the U.S.A., (2003); and most recently Brokeback Mountain, U.S.A. (2005). Also of note is the feature-length BBC adaptation of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, UK (1989). Still, however, films are made with less apparent homoerotic undertones (versus the homoerotic overtones in movies like Brokeback Mountain), such as in the screen adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club.

See: List of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender-related films.

Key introductory books

Classical & Medieval literature:

• Murray & Roscoe. Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature. (1997).
• J.W. Wright. Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature (1997).
• Rictor Norton. The Homosexual Literary Tradition. (1974). (Greek, Roman & Elizabethan England).

Literature after 1850:

• David Leavitt. Pages Passed from Hand to Hand : The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914. (1998).
• Timothy d'Arch Smith. Love In Earnest; some notes on the lives and writings of English 'Uranian' poets from 1889 to 1930. (1970).
• Michael Matthew Kaylor, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde (2006), a 500-page scholarly volume that considers the major Victorian writers of Uranian poetry and prose (the author has made this volume available in a free, open-access, PDF version).
• Mark Lilly. Gay Men's Literature in the Twentieth Century. (1993).
• Patricia Juliana Smith. Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction. (1997).
• Gregory Woods. Articulate Flesh - male homoeroticism and modern poetry. (1989). (USA poets).
• Vita Sackville-West. Louise De Salvo, Mitchell A. Leaska, editors. Vita Sackville-West The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (1985)
• Virginia Woolf. Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf Joanne Trautmann Banks, editor. (Harcourt Brace, 1991)

Visual Arts:

• Jonathan Weinberg. Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art (2005).
• James M. Saslow. Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. (1999).
• Allen Ellenzweig. The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images, Delacroix to Mapplethorpe. (1992).
• Thomas Waugh. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. (1996).
• Emmanuel Cooper. The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West. (1994).
• Claude J. Summers (editor). The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts. (2004).
• Harmony Hammond. Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History. (2000). (Post-1968 only)
• Laura Doan. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. (2001). (Post-WW1 in England)

See also

• The erotic male in photography
• Homosocial
• Sex in advertising
• Slash fiction
• Uranian poetry
• Shōnen-ai

External links

• Torquere Press
• Sybaritic Press
• gay art magazine Articles about contemporary gay art today
• Homoerotic art of the World
• IMDB link to homoerotic keywords in film and TV
• The personal site and art galleries of the Ukrainian homoerotic artist/photographer Ukrainito - the first openly gay artist in the history of his nation
• Androphile project - Homoerotic art and culture from past cultures
• Androphile Project - Multi-cultural collection of ancient homoerotic art
• Eros Art Magazine
• Erotic an Digital Art