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Homoeroticism refers to 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.
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 & sex acts. Thus, it can often evade censure and confiscation 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: male-male
Male-male examples, in the visual fine arts, range through history: Ancient Greek vase art; Roman wine goblets (The Warren Cup); the Italian Renaissance (such as Agnolo Bronzino, Caravaggio), through to the many 19th Century history paintings of classical characters such as Hyacinth, Ganymede and Narcissus; 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 artists such as Paul Cadmus and Gilbert & George. Such art is, necessarily, figurative.
Notable examples: female-female
Female-female examples are most historically noticable in the narrative arts: the archiac lyrics of Sappho; the The Songs of Bilitis; novels such as those of Christa Winsloe, Colette, Radclyffe Hall, and Jane Rule, and films such as Madchen in Uniform. More recently, lesbian homoeroticism has flowered in photography and the writing of authors such as Pat Califia and Jeanette Winterson.
In Poetry
There is also a strong tradition of homoeroticism in poetry. In the male-male tradition, one might cite erotic poems by major poets such as Abu Nuwas, Hafez, Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca and Allen Ginsberg. Elisar von Kupffer's Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltlitteratur (1900) and Edward Carpenter's Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/iolaus.html) (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, one might cite erotic poems by major poets such as Sappho, "Michael Field", and Maureen Duffy.
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 in the art world, after about 1920 (in favour of modernist, socialist realist art and abstract expressionism), was partly a homophobic act.
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).
- 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).
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).
- 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:
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