Abida Parveen, the great Sufi singer, once claimed in an affirmation of the transcendental power of music, “I am neither man nor woman, I am a vehicle for passion…”
Recently, Indian radio launched its first LGBTQ programme called Gaydio, which sounds suspiciously like gaydar! In the midst of the commentary, there are musical interludes from the rich corpus of recent Sufi music, with its gender neutrality and poetic idealism that often stands in sharp contrast to the violence and dystopia of the film narrative.
Meanwhile, Tate Britain has produced an ambitious show, Queer British Art (1851-1967), that marks the two conspicuous dates in British law that conclude with the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England in 1967.
Certainly the exhibition and its timeline make for a compelling story and involves memorabilia, personal histories, portraits and art. It spans the artist under the harsh regime of the Victorian age to the coming of 20th century gay icons like David Hockney and Francis Bacon.
Queer gaze
The exhibition begins promisingly, by piecing together work by some of the most well-known figures in the British art scene. How the queer gaze was identified is located in the 1850s in Simeon Solomon, a pre-Raphaelite painter who moved from mythic subjects like Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene, to Frederick Leighton who painted Daedalus and Icarus and Walter Crane’s The Renaissance of Venus.
Any suggestion of ‘deviance’ attracted the law: Solomon was jailed and socially ostracised for the last 20 years of his life. Another trial that was to profoundly affect the course of the law had at its heart Oscar Wilde, celebrated as a tragic pop icon of the 20th century.
A magnificent portrait of Wilde by Robert Pennington is flanked by the cell door in Reading Gaol, the prison where Wilde was incarcerated for two years, and where he wrote De Profundis. Wilde’s widely publicised trial and his unsuccessful defence of a “love that dare not speak its name” had a corollary in his own approach to the government.
It is his words, “The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous”, that have seen the sympathetic and popular restoration of his reputation in the 20th century.
However, if less repressive laws were coming, there was also more scandal. Two portraits trace how the discourse around sexuality was to change—there is Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness, whose reception in 1926 was no less stormy, and Havelock Ellis, whose work Sexual Inversion was to be a first step in the scientific reading of alternative sexuality.
Expectedly, there are the creative lights of the first half of the 20th century, many of whom had a period of efflorescence. The figure of the androgene was the exception rather than the rule. Frequently, the portrait was a compliment to status and position.
Darling, how wonderful
Vita Sackville-West, the subject of the novel Orlando, who during her relationship in the 1920s with Virginia Woolf was considered the better writer, is resplendent, if enigmatic, in a red hat in the famous portrait by William Strang.
There is also the playwright Noel Coward in a blazing red dressing gown with his monogrammed initials, with the quote: “Why am I always expected to wear a dressing gown, smoke cigarettes in a long holder and say ‘Darling, how wonderful’?”
Humour, occasional self-deprecation, and even bypassing the subject made up for some of the challenges the artist would have encountered. From our vantage point nearly four decades later, Bhupen Khakhar was exceptional and heroic in developing an unambiguous and graphic aesthetic language.
Gluck and Spry
In England, even during the loosening of Victorian mores, artists could move in the upper echelons of society and not essentially commit their art to their sexual orientation.
An example is Hannah Gluckstein, famous for her androgynous dressing, who painted mainly flowers. (Gluck lived for several years with Constance Spry, subject of the book The Surprising Life of Constance Spry, and flower arranger to high British society.)
There is also the lovely work, The Chintz Couch, by the painter Ethel Sands, from the home that she shared with her partner Anna Hope, who makes this nuanced gesture to domesticity.
Inevitably, the focus of the exhibition shifts from the British upper classes who could afford the luxury of portraits and artistic patronage to music halls and streets, a liberation compelled by the two world wars, the revolution of psychology, and wider education.
The exhibition celebrates through memorabilia, such as his crown and costumes, the cross-dressing acts of Jimmy Slater, the dazzling female impersonator and trans icon. Slater, enormously successful even after the war, performed drag shows, revues and pantomimes till the 1960s. From the high seriousness of a mythic alter ego like Sappho, the sites for the enactment of queer identity had shifted very quickly to the spectacle of the stage and the jokes of the barracks.
The later part of the exhibition that brings us up to the late 60s is in fact the least interesting, and ends with little fanfare. Even the Bacon and Hockney works on view—the latter with Going to be A Queen for Tonight—don’t do enough to carry the show forward.
To create a more inclusive show, one that’s less white, less dominated by painting, more multi-racial, and one that considers shifts in language around the subject, the Tate could consider a show that covers this history from 1967 to the present.
The author is an art critic and curator who, while preoccupied with her art website www.criticalcollective.in, is also contemplating a book on the Middle Ages.