Homoeroticism

It has been depicted or manifested throughout the history of the visual arts and literature and can also be found in performative forms; from theatre to the theatricality of uniformed movements (e.g., the Wandervogel and Gemeinschaft der Eigenen).

Homosexuality as known today was not fully codified until the mid-20th century, though this process began much earlier: Following in the tradition of Michel Foucault, scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and David Halperin have argued that various Victorian public discourses, notably the psychiatric and the legal, fostered a designation or invention of the "homosexual" as a distinct category of individuals, a category solidified by the publications of sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) and Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), sexologists who provided an almost-pathological interpretation of the phenomenon in rather Essentialist terms, an interpretation that led, before 1910, to hundreds of articles on the subject in The Netherlands, Germany, and elsewhere.

"[5] Despite an ever-changing and evolving set of modern classifications, members of the same sex often formed intimate associations (many of which were erotic as well as emotional) on their own terms, most notably in the "romantic friendships" documented in the letters and papers of 18th- and 19th-century men and women.

Several Italian Renaissance artists are thought to have been homosexual, and homoerotic appreciation of the male body has been identified by critics in works by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

More explicit sexual imagery occurring in the Mannerist and Tenebrist styles of the 16th and 17th centuries, especially in artists such as Agnolo Bronzino, Michel Sweerts, Carlo Saraceni and Caravaggio, whose works were sometimes severely criticized by the Catholic Church.

James Bidgood was also an important pioneer in the 1960s, radically moving homoerotic photography away from simple documentary and into areas that were more akin to fine art surrealism.

Female–female examples are most historically noticeable in the narrative arts: the lyrics of Sappho; The Songs of Bilitis; novels such as those of Christa Winsloe, Colette, Radclyffe Hall, and Jane Rule, and films such as Mädchen in Uniform.

In many texts in the English-speaking world, lesbians have been presented as intensely sexual but also predatory and dangerous (the characters are often vampires)[citation needed] and the primacy of heterosexuality is usually re-asserted at the story's end.

The only other Renaissance artist writing in English to do this was the poet Richard Barnfield, who in The Affectionate Shepherd and Cynthia wrote fairly explicitly homoerotic poetry.

[12] The male–male erotic tradition contains poems by major poets such as Abu Nuwas, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, Paul Verlaine, W. H. Auden, Fernando Pessoa and Allen Ginsberg.