Clare Barlow

I wanted to show that the past is more diverse than you can possibly imagine!  The show contains artists and subjects with wide-ranging sexualities and gender identities.  And while some of them had tragic lives, such as Oscar Wilde, others were very successful.  There are moments of humour alongside moments of oppression – all of human emotion is on display.

The idea of doing a show to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales first came from Tate’s LGBTQ+ staff network.  This anniversary offers an opportunity to reflect on where we have come from as a community and on where we are now, and I was delighted to be asked to take the project forward.

1861 is the end of the death penalty for sodomy in Britain and 1967 is the year of partial decriminalisation.  However, these legal landmarks are a very small part of the story.  Across the hundred years of the show, we move from a world in which there are few words for same sex desire and gender diversity to a world in which identities are starting to be recognized and the community is starting to find its unique voice.  It’s a really exciting period!  There’s key moments like the trials of Oscar Wilde and the prosecution of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which was banned for its depiction of female same-sex love, but there’s also a really rich queer culture that starts to develop across the arts – from gender swaps in music hall through to depictions of sex between men in the work of Francis Bacon and David Hockney. 

Each artwork had to connect to queer perspectives and experiences or to public debates over same-sex attraction and gender diversity.  These connections are very varied – in some cases, it’s an artist exploring their desires, while for others, it’s an audience seeing something in the work and either throwing up their hands in horror or finding something in the work that speaks to their own sense of identity.

The potential ambiguities of the visual arts help some artists to explore themes that might be more difficult to express in words.  But audiences are skilled at decoding these ambiguities and finding hidden meanings in the works, real or imagined.

We’ve included biographical information where it helps you understand the artwork.  For example, to understand why Duncan Grant’s portrait of P.C. Harry Daley, which shows him wearing his policeman’s uniform, you need to know that Harry Daley was one of the lovers of the novelist E.M. Forster and knew Grant through Forster.  Daley later writes a memoir about his life on both sides of the law.  Similarly, I think Gluck’s Lilac and Guelder Rose takes on a slightly different meaning if you know that Gluck had a relationship with society flower-arranger Constance Spry.  It’s about making those hidden histories visible.

Representations of the body are interesting because, of course, there is an academic tradition of depicting the male nude which isn’t intended to be sexual.  Each of the nudes that we’ve included has an explicit connection to queer culture or to debates over same-sex desire or gender diversity.  Frederic Leighton’s The Sluggard, for example, is depicted in a pose that is taken from a work by the Renaissance artist Michelangelo, at a time when Michelangelo’s sexuality was being questioned and it subsequently became a gay icon.  Reviews of Duncan Grant’s Bathers described it as a “nightmare” that would have a “degenerative effect” on the young men at the Polytechnic where it was installed, while the depictions of wrestlers and body-builders were an established way of encoding queer eroticism.  Of course, the kinds of body shapes that are depicted in these works tend to be conform to society’s expectations of beauty.  I don’t, however, think this is peculiar to queer culture – the same could be said of most depictions of the female nude from this period.

The idea of identity is comparatively recent and develops during the period covered by the show.  In the mid-nineteenth century, most people didn’t have a sense that particular sexual acts or preferences reflected a core truth about the self. Cahun was heavily influenced by the sexologist Havelock Ellis, who was one of the first people in Britain to try to classify desires.  His work was key to the development of the concept of queer identities.

Even in the 1960s, there was the ever-present threat of legal persecution. The playwright Joe Orton and his partner Kenneth Halliwell had separate beds in their Islington Flat to keep up the illusion that they weren’t a couple.  Barbara Kerr-Seymer was thrown out of the house by her parents when they found a copy of The Well of Loneliness on the piano.  There were, however, areas in the city where queer people could find each other – cruising grounds, clubs (including the Gateways club, which catered for lesbians), particular pubs etc.  Navigating the city as a queer person relied on a degree of luck and some knowledge: for men, flirting with the wrong man could lead to a prison sentence.  The police periodically organized raids or tried to entrap men by posing as a potential love interest.  But many people managed to find each other and some even lived together in defiance of the law. 

The purpose of Queer British Art 1861-1967 isn’t simply to anthologise artists by sexual identity; it’s to look at how themes of same-sex and gender diversity have had an impact on art.  There were some artists who we didn’t include because, although we knew they were in same-sex relationships, there was no sign that they explored that aspect of their identity in their work.  If we ignore the ways in which artists and audiences have explored same-sex desire or gender identity in art, we miss an important dimension of the artworks and we erase the history of queer experience.  There are, for example, plenty of studies of the heterosexual marriage portrait or of heterosexual eroticism in art.  I don’t think it’s radically different to be exploring LGBTQ+ themes.

We are very excited to be holding this festival at Tate Britain.  There will be a host of free events, different performances, stalls, food – a real party atmosphere across the gallery.   It will start at 2pm with activities for all ages and run through into the evening. It’s an opportunity to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community today in its full diversity!