Classic gay art pose
This June, New York City is playing host to WorldPride NYC, a thirty-day international festival of LGBTQIA+ culture that will coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. It also coincides with The Costume Institute's spring exhibition, Camp: Notes on Fashion, at The Met Fifth Avenue, which traces the etymological origins of camp in theatrical and LGBTQIA+ culture, as skillfully as camp's contemporary expressions of artifice and exaggeration, theatricality, humor, and irony in fashion.
In honor of these two moments, we are launching a short series of posts on some of the most important aspects of camp. In this article, we explore the millennia-old history of camp culture's trademark, the teapot-like gesture known as "the camp pose."
The camp pose can be traced to the contrapposto (literally, "opposed") stance of Antinous, the young lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian who embodied the classical idea of male beauty in the second century A.D, called the "Beau Ideal" since the nineteenth century. The stance is charact
A pair of literary poses for this increasingly sluggish series. Both these titles are gay-themed to a greater or lesser degree. James Purdy (1914–2009) received much praise from contemporaries while he was alive but, like Angus Wilson, he’s one of those writers’ writers you don’t catch about today. Outsiders were a favourite Purdy theme, and he wrote several novels about gay characters, of which Narrow Rooms is considered something of a classic. I’ve not read it but going by descriptions the use of Flandrin’s painting on this cover from 1980 would seem a little lazy. This later use on the cover of Teleny (another gay classic) at least suits the French theme. (Thanks to Sander for the tip!)
The second volume hasn’t been published yet but Callum James posted the cover proof on Twitter a few days ago so I hope he doesn’t mind my showing it here. The book is a collection of letters by Frederick Rolfe aka Baron Corvo. I don’t know whether this is one of Rolfe’s own photos but he enjoyed photographing naked youths so even i
Posing as a gay Bacchus: Caravaggio and the Queer Art at the Uffizi Gallery
Bacchus was usually depicted standing, set against on open landscape, in the company of a satyr to verb his role as both god and mentor. Caravaggio approached the subject differently, having Bacchus sitting on a couch, in a private environment that looks appreciate the artist’s studio, about to take off his robe, which seems to be thrown carelessly on him. He is offering a glass of wine to the viewer and, from his rosy cheeks, it looks appreciate he’s been drinking some himself.
The sexual innuendo may refer to the homosocial context of the cardinal’s entourage, but the reality that Caravaggio deprives the figure of his mentoring nature turning him into a young prostitute with dirty fingernails (and probably a dirty mind too) is even more interesting. Caravaggio deliberately disrupts the traditional iconography of Bacchus and gives us a modernized version of the myth, an intentionally queer figure who might be about to verb, “Look, I’m no Roman god, I’m only dressed up as one”.
Lgbt Pride Concept. Male Gay Couple In Affectionate Pose In The Sea. Poster
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