Sexual Identity

Art about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer lives, from coded images of desire to open claims of visibility.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

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About

For much of history, love between people of the same sex could be shown only in code. The Victorian painter Simeon Solomon depicted Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864) in an embrace, and his career collapsed after his conviction in 1873. Romaine Brooks painted women of her Paris circle in tailored jackets and monocles, as in Una, Lady Troubridge (1924), and Paul Cadmus's The Fleet's In! (1934) was withdrawn from a government-sponsored exhibition after protests from the navy.

From the 1970s artists claimed visibility openly. Barbara Hammer's film Dyketactics (1974) celebrated lesbian touch and sensuality, and as AIDS devastated artistic communities in the 1980s, queer art became political. Zanele Muholi's Faces and Phases (begun 2006) builds a portrait archive of Black lesbian, transgender and gender-nonconforming South Africans. Others treat gender as performance and play, as the duo Eva & Adele do by appearing as identical, shaven-headed twins.