Dalí's painting Crucifixion (1954) presents a typical example. Dalí's interpretation of Christ on the cross, often an eroticized form in art, is extreme and austere; the draped woman gazing at the hovering form of Christ on the enormous geodesic cross suggests heterosexual longing, though there is nothing in the features of Christ himself that suggests homoerotic desire on the part of the artist. Through both topic and depiction, typical sexuality is subverted, but not in any way that suggests homosexual desire.

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Surrealistic filmmakers, like surrealist writers, had more freedom in their celluloid creations, and one can find splashes of homoeroticism in the works of Cocteau and Buñuel.

Buñuel's film Los Olvidaros (1950), for example, features a minor homosexual character (who, alas, is portrayed in a typically predatory manner) and also presents a male-dominant homosocial portrait of street-life in poverty-stricken, urban Mexico.

Cocteau, who was himself homosexual, offers similar glimpses of homosexuality in his works.

Surrealism failed to achieve significant popularity in 1930s America, and as World War II loomed, the movement began to wane in Europe as well. Its influences, however, are widespread; and surrealism and the surrealists, despite the anti-homosexual stance of their leaders, have been embraced by homosexual communities and artists worldwide.

Thus, while surrealism as a visual art did not initially embrace its homosexual members, it is now often the homosexual painters, critics, and writers who have worked to keep the movement alive as an artistic expression.

A large number of significant twentieth-century European artists focused on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender themes, making such concerns crucial to the understanding of twentieth-century European art.

For prolific French poet and artist Jean Cocteau, filmmaking may have served as the best medium for the expression of his genius.

The founder of psychoanalysis and the discoverer of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud initiated a fundamental transformation in the self-understanding of Western men and women, including especially the role of sexuality.

The works of García Lorca, internationally recognized as Spain's most prominent lyric poet and dramatist of the twentieth century, are filled with thinly veiled homosexual motifs and themes.

Sculptor Robert Gober is among only a few openly gay American artists to achieve an international reputation as one of the great artists of our time.

Poet, translator, literary and art critic, and short story writer, Edouard Roditi was associated with most of the twentieth-century's avant-garde literary movements from Surrealism to post-modernism.

Swiss-born artist Sonja Sekula created small-scale abstract images with profound emotional power.