Rubies and Lemons

         London's Natural History Museum seems to be predominantly set up for the entertainment of children and, accordingly, it is chock-full of dinosaur skeletons. For the intrigued adult visitor, however, there are also interesting pockets. Everywhere, one is confronted by the unheimlich other-worldliness of taxidermied animals, which are at once part of the world, yet also now forever apart from it.      On entering the main entrance hall one is struck by the wonderfully demented, Neo-Gothic Victorian architecture, which is somehow reminiscent of the interior of a great cathedral, with its stained glass windows and great vaulted arches.      When originally built, this architecture was obviously intended to elevate Science to religious status. Which is ironic, because so much of the collection deals with Evolution.      Walking up the wide stairs to one of the upstairs galleries devoted to the evi...

  Gay artists and writers of the mid-to-late nineteenth-century could not identify themselves as homosexual as the term did not come into common usage until after the turn of the century. Indeed, the very notion that someone was predetermined to same sex attraction was completely outside of contemporary thought. Rather, it was believed that men could occasionally have spiritual or moral lapses. The word ‘homo-sexuality’ entered the OED only in 1892 …That the terms ‘heterosexual’ and ‘heterosexuality’ were coined even later (1900) suggests that what is at stake in this particular naming process is a distinctly modern epistemology not only of ‘deviance’ but of ‘normalcy’. [1] Gay men would have had only a nagging notion of their difference, and a strong sense that this difference was wrong. It was a time when gay men by necessity lived deep within the shadows, but the shadows were vague and what they obscured was unnamed and unidentifiable. Before the clinical name ‘homosexual’...

In an age where human beings wore more clothing than at any other time in history, the fully naked male was non-existent in contemporary Victorian painting and sculpture. If a painting took as its subject a biblical or mythological story it was permissible to show some naked male flesh, albeit sans body hair - but it was essential to cover the penis – the focus of man’s physical and sexual animality – with however brief a loincloth or a scrap of gauze. The painting, The  Hit  (fig. 1), painted in 1893 by Frederick Lord Leighton, is an example.                                                     Fig. 1. Frederick Leighton, The Hit,   1893. Leighton’s sexuality has never been positively identified; a brilliant technician and academic painter, there are many images of voluptuous women within his body of work. However, it is the homoerotic n...