This statement by a German doctor in 1852 concerning the art collection of a suspected sodomite illustrates Christopher Reed’s central theme: the historical and political links between art and homosexuality. Gay men and lesbians, he suggests, have often both conceived of and represented their sexuality through works of art, from classical sculptures to postmodernist and queer art. When the New York Times reported in 1963 that ‘sexual inverts’ had ‘colonized ... the creative and performing arts’, the newspaper reinforced the idea that homosexuals were (perhaps dangerously) arty, but also hinted at the importance of art for homosexual expression.

Reed provides a wide-ranging overview of this nexus. Apollo and Ganymede became codes for male homosexuality, as did St Sebastian. The seductive ephebes of Caravaggio and the swooning male nudes of Girodet were dead giveaways. Ingres’s painting of harem women and Courbet’s tableau of two women snuggling in bed may have been painted to titillate men, but they could also speak to lesbians.

Reed furthermore contends that the category of ‘homosexual’ emerged alongside avant-garde art at the end of the nineteenth century, an intriguing conjunction underlined with his point about ‘the enormous subversive power modernists assigned to homosexuality’. Yet he does not quite sew up an argument about the precise connection between the two phenomena. Though some fin de siècle artists and photographers were certainly homosexual, the ethos of many modernist movements and artists – from Picasso’s rampant womanising to the homophobia of André Breton as leader of the Surrealists – suggests the need for finer tuning in his formulation.

Much of Reed’s material and many of the images in this richly illustrated book will be well known to those with knowledge of the history of homosexuality. There are, however, less familiar artists. Few, for instance, will be acquainted with a group of American expatriate women in Paris and Rome – Harriet Hosmer, Emma Stebbins, Edmonia Lewis – whom Henry James called the ‘marmorean flock’ for their sculptures of women. One insightful chapter deciphers the way that homosexuality appears in abstract expressionists’ work. For example, Robert Rauschenberg’s Bantam, with a title referring to a lightweight fighter (and perhaps, which Reed misses, a chicken, or cock), and the visual motifs of a baseball team – Judy Garland and delicate ‘feminine’ fabrics – allude to the artist’s homosexuality. Similarly, Jasper Johns’s ‘Target with Plaster Casts’ hints at the vulnerability of the homosexual body (and to St Sebastian); the casts of body parts, including genitals, neatly set into compartments symbolise both maleness and the opening of closet doors. 

Reed’s book is somewhat disappointingly limited to art of the Western tradition and, more specifically, to European and American works, though the first chapter discusses the material culture of homosexuality around the world, from flutes in New Guinea that figure in homosexual initiation rituals to dildos made for women in early modern Japan. Reed also devotes pages to homoeroticism in Native American and Polynesian life. Afterwards, however, he abandons non-Western culture. Even in this Western canon, there are surprising gaps – nothing, for example, on the Ballets Russes or on such popular gay artists as Pierre et Gilles. Indeed, in the sections on twentieth-century art, Reed’s study presents a very New York-centred approach, with only a few British figures – Duncan Grant, David Hockney, Francis Bacon – and one or two others allowed into the discussion. Among Australian works, William Yang’s annotated photograph of a man living with Aids makes it into Reed’s book. The paintings of Donald Friend, Jeffrey Smart, Justin O’Brien, and Agnes Goodsir are left out.

Such omissions are unfortunate, for artists outside America have had original perspectives on homosexuality, as seen in Friend’s pictorial record of his peregrinations. The work of Bhupen Khakhar (not mentioned here), though informed by Western art styles, incorporated indigenous Indian themes, and, by portraying mature-age men, departed from the buffed, toned bodies that dominate in Western art. The bulgingly stereotyped muscle-builders of Gongoroh Tagame recall Tom of Finland’s hard masculinity, but they can also be seen within a particular Japanese artistic and sexual tradition. By limiting his case studies and the possibility for reflecting on cross-cultural influences, Reed undermines his rather lame conclusion that ‘the most basic lesson of the history sketched in this book is that definitions of art and homosexuality are multiple and constantly evolving’.

Reed shies away from a discussion of pornography, whether in print or online. Certainly, this genre deserves to be included in a work that explores the evolution of artistic styles. Gay male porn images, after all, recycle tropes – the exotic super-sexed (and super-sized) foreigner, ephebe, soldier, worker, swimmer – with a long art-historical genealogy. Porn websites undoubtedly now form the most common gallery of gay visual art, more accessible and legible than the sometimes esoteric works that appear in gallery exhibitions.

The chapters of Art and Homosexuality covering the last thirty years become diffuse, though this reflects both the disappearance of discrete schools of art and the proliferation of explicitly gay images in public spaces. A chapter on Aids and art is again largely limited to the American example. The landmark National Gallery of Australia exhibition and catalogue of 1994, Don’t Leave Me This Way, gets just a bare mention in the bibliography. Reed’s concluding chapter on queer art, despite an interesting section on transgender work, is too much of a catalogue of obscure artists and their navel-gazing observations.

Readers of Reed’s book will discover splendid illustrations, notable among them an hilariously camp 1944 drawing of semi-nude American sailors cavorting on a Pacific island (used to advertise bath towels). There are some nice historical titbits: Reed reveals that an 1889 article gives the first use of ‘boyfriend’ in a homosexual context. There is, however, the occasional mistake, as when Reed repeats the common error that the Napoleonic Code decriminalised homosexual acts in France. (The change in legislation came in 1791, over a decade before Bonaparte became emperor; the ‘Napoleonic Code’, in any case, concerned civil, not criminal, law.) In general, Reed’s writing is easygoing; there is too much ‘performing’ of sex, but relatively little other jargon.

In addition to examining the links between homosexuality and art, Reed’s book provides a cogent overall perspective on the continuing politicisation of art with homosexual themes. Strident reactions in the United States towards the display of sexual images in publicly funded museums, and the still highly controversial issue of nude images of youth, are manifestations (the Bill Henson affair comes to mind). Reed points out that in the 1980s, and even later, exhibitions of overtly gay art remained generally taboo. He notes in passing that the archetypal British gay artistic duo, Gilbert and George, declined to allow their works to be reproduced in his book, which suggests that the label of artworks as ‘gay’ (as opposed to ‘British’ or ‘postmodern’ or ‘pop’) can still be uncomfortable for artists as well as gallery-goers.