Hiding in Plain Sight: Decoding Homoerotic and Queer Art

When I visited Florence, Italy, I, of course, had to seek out Michelangelo’s sculpture of David. Despite all the images I had seen of the iconic sculpture, it took my breath away in its presence. I was truly experiencing the masterpiece for the first time. However, I wondered if I was also experiencing Michelangelo’s homosexuality, which, to me as a gay man, seemed so palpable in his artistic expression. I then wondered if there was Americana-themed homoerotic and queer art to discover as well. 

I found an answer when I encountered art scholar and lecturer Ignacio Darnaude. He built a career in the film business as head of International Marketing for Disney and later Sony Pictures, but art had always been a huge part of his life, drawing him to hundreds of art exhibitions all over the world. The realization dawned on him that many of the artists that he loved happened to be gay. Not just the ones that many people know, Keith Haring or Robert Mapplethorpe, but many others he responded to but didn’t realize until much later that they were gay. Darnaude left his career a decade ago to investigate why he was reacting so strongly to this art and discovered key artists in history, from Michelangelo to David Hockney, used secret gay codes in their work, revealed through gay imagery hiding in plain sight in iconic, world-renowned works of art. 

Finally, my curiosity could be satisfied with documented information and the insight of an expert on this subject. These are highlights of my conversation with Ignacio Darnaude about breaking the homoerotic/queer code in the art of three of the greatest artists America has ever produced.    

Q: Cecilia Beaux was the most revered female painter of her time and a rival of John Singer Sargent in the art of fashionable portraiture. Once honored by Eleanor Roosevelt as “the American woman who had made the greatest contribution to the culture of the world.” That’s quite an honor.  Did her artistic ability allow her to express homoerotic/lesbian themes without particular notice or public condemnation?

A: To understand Cecilia’s Beaux perception of sexuality, I need to give you a sense of how same-sex female relations have been regarded throughout history. During the Renaissance, sex was only sex if there was phallic penetration. The 1885 English Law broadened the prosecution of male homosexuals, but sex between women was not even considered sex at the time Cecilia Beaux lived and worked. Romantic friendships between women, even with sex and love letters, were considered harmless diversions that kept them out of trouble until the right man appeared and awakened their sexuality. 

These relationships were called “Boston marriages,” inspired by Henry James’s 1886 novel, The Bostonians, and were considered respectable; it was much more scandalous for a woman to live alone. It wasn’t until the end of the 19^th Century that sexologists started looking at these Boston Marriages, with articles about lesbianism popping up.

Cecilia Beaux didn’t identify herself with the word “lesbian,” which carried an “indecent” connotation, even if she had sexual relationships with women. Instead, she considered herself a part of the 19^th Century’s early feminist movements called the “New Women,” women who rarely married and who explored education and careers generally denied to them. She painted many images of women in intimate, ambiguous relationships as well as several portraits of the love of her life, Dorothea Gilder, the daughter of a couple of patrons. In a beautiful example of her double life, Beaux sent Dorothea two kinds of letters, one with gossip and small talk Dorothea could share with her parents and another intimate one in which she said things like “I’m longing for the farm, just you and I, that dear warm spot and your loving arms.” However, in spite of their passionate letters, Cecilia barely mentions Dorothea in her autobiography.

Q: J.C. Leyendecker created the ideal American male image that still inspires the pursuit of unattainable perfection to this day. Was the homoeroticism in some of his art solely attributable to his homosexuality or just the nature of commercial art created to depict the perfect American man to sell Arrow shirt collars and brands like Ivory Soap?

A: It’s a combination of both; he was the right artist at the right time, and this helped him become one of the most famous American artists of the early 20^th Century. His groundbreaking queer imagery defined the fashionable American male during the early decades of the twentieth Century. The Roaring Twenties left behind conservative Victorian times. Advertising companies were looking for images that would set trends and fashions, and Leyendecker’s unique style was perfect. What’s extraordinary is that many of his ads featured his partner, a drop-dead gorgeous Canadian, Charles Beach (1881-1954).

Their relationship started when Charles Beach showed up at Leyendecker’s studio, offering his services as a model. It was the beginning of a nearly five-decade relationship that transformed their lives and careers. Their big breakthrough came when a shirt company accepted Leyendecker’s pitch to create “the ideal American man, the Arrow Collar Man -” handsome, equal parts preppy and athletic, a desirable body underneath his clothing, exceptional poise, chiseled face and a firm chin that showed passion and determination.

Leyendecker’s ads for Arrow Collar came to define not only the fashionable American male but also the image of a new, vigorous America. The campaign caught lightning in a bottle. Arrow got 96 percent of the market and turned the Arrow Collar Man into a sex symbol who received more fan mail than movie star Rudolph Valentino. Seventeen thousand letters, many of them marriage proposals, arrived in just a month at Arrow Collar’s factory. Few, if any, of his fans realized that their ideal man was the superstar lover of the artist.

Leyendecker created ads depicting men gazing at each other longingly in close environments, which look completely homoerotic to our modern eyes. It would be tempting to reclaim Leyendecker from a contemporary perspective as a queer artist who created “homoerotic” works from his wild imagination. However, the reality is that his ads reflected the relaxed attitudes of his era when society encouraged men to engage in homosocial relationships in spaces such as fraternity houses, locker rooms, male clubs, and sporting events. These environments allowed homoerotic bonds and a level of physical and emotional intimacy that we no longer allow today. 

These were the suggestive scenarios that Leyendecker showed in his work. What was truly subversive was that he inserted his own lifestyle into these images by using his partner as a model. The reason why I believe he was a revolutionary artist is that his gay-vague ads planted the seeds for today’s gay-specific ads from brands like Calvin Klein and Abercrombie & Fitch, proving that homoerotic imagination is deeply embedded in consumer culture.

Q: Andy Warhol is the king of American “pop” culture. With his signature Campbell Soup cans, Coke bottles, and Brillo pad boxes, often in repeated patterns, he became as iconic a figure as the commercial products he featured in his art. Despite all we know about him and his art, he is utterly enigmatic to me.

A: It’s interesting how when critics speak of Pop art, rarely discussed is that most pop artists were gay. Pop came from a queer sensibility, rejecting societal norms, hypermasculinity, and heteronormativity. David Hockney and Keith Haring were explicitly queer, but others like Andy Warhol used the language of camp. Warhol had a complicated relationship with his homosexuality, which he referred to “as his problem.” He camouflaged his sexual identity all his life, never completely out of or in the closet; it depended on the circumstances. He said, “The minute you label something, you can’t go back.” 

Warhol moved to New York in the early 50’s to work as a commercial illustrator. During the homophobic McCarthy era, just when Abstract Expressionism took the art world by storm and artists like Jackson Pollock created bold, massive, macho abstract canvas, Warhol channeled his queerness into elegant drawings of shoes for ads, simple drawings of men in drag and whimsical illustrations of men with brazenly gay content. What’s revolutionary about them, particularly for an ardent Catholic like himself, is the men he painted were very happy, a stark contrast with the prevailing 50’s moral code when sodomy was a harshly punished felony in every state. 

Warhol became one of New York’s most important commercial artists, but he wanted to be a ‘real’ artist. He soon realized his queer art would only be embraced by a gay ghetto, but not by galleries, where Warhol was constantly rejected. This is far from what a ferociously ambitious artist like him intended. So, after 1959, he stopped creating them and, in fact, destroyed many of them, and altered his image from a sophisticated man to a pop culture-loving teenybopper with ‘Marilyn’ hair and a baby doll voice. By the time Warhol embarked on his new artistic career, pop culture and mass marketing in billboards, magazines, comics, and TV commercials exploded with bold imagery like never before. Warhol took advantage of this imagery, but his homosexuality went from explicit to encoded, camouflaged.

For instance, in his 1960 Dick Tracy and 1961 Popeye and Superman, he portrayed what appear to be straight, powerful archetypes. But that’s just on the surface. Warhol later revealed that these cartoon characters were erotic turn-ons for him in childhood. He encoded his homosexuality. Warhol’s graphic work avoided explicit statements about his sexuality to protect his image and fame.  He went from boys kissing, which has limited appeal, to soup cans, universally loved and known. But he kept creating coded work for the rest of his life. When his partner Jon Gould died of AIDS in 1986, his death became the source of his final coded series, over 100 images inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, which expressed his pain about Gould’s death in a coded way. In Andy Warhol’s Last Supper, showing Christ on the eve of his death, Warhol gave a face to the suffering of the homosexual community during the AIDS crisis, offering a plea for salvation.

Q: What is meant by a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in regard to queer artists and their recognition in the art world? 

A: Queer artists have had a revolutionary impact on mainstream culture. You only have to look at the list of the world’s most valuable paintings to realize that many of them have been created by queer artists, including the recent sale of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn for $195 million. In spite of the huge impact of queer artists, the vast majority of the population can’t name any. To this day, the art world and many museums reject that an artist’s homosexuality is key to his/her work. When artists are heterosexual, such as Picasso, we know everything about his female muses. However, up until very recently, when you bring up the sexuality of queer artists, the response from the conservative museum boards, afraid of losing prestige or funding, is usually “that it is irrelevant.” This “don’t say gay” policy forces many curators to hide same-sex relationships and closet queer figures who should be admired. There’s a positive movement as we speak. Museums are finally beginning to acknowledge the queer heritage in their collections, in some cases, thanks to having queer curators.

Q: I have experienced your lecture “Exploring queer art history through a Latin American Canvas” at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. What other revelations do you have in store for us with your lectures and other projects?

A: I’m currently working on lectures that delve into the extraordinary relationship between the Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca and the surrealist painter Salvador Dali, an impossible love story for the ages. I’m also preparing a lecture in tandem with the upcoming exhibition at the Getty Museum on one of my favorite artists, Gustave Caillebotte, entitled “Painting Men. ” It will finally deal with the homoeroticism in this artist’s work. 

Ignacio Darnaude has turned his passion and knowledge of art into incredible insightful presentations that illuminate art, history, sexuality, gender and the progression of human understanding, tolerance and respect. This abbreviated interview is just a fraction of the hour-long on-camera conversation we had for the podcast “Casey’s Cause,” where we discussed a wider palette of gay artists and their contribution to art and society.