Artists
Although his nickname may indicate nothing about his sexuality, Il Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi) painted a number of works that depict same-sex intimacy.
Known for his association with the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement, British artist Simeon Solomon created homoerotic works and suffered as a victim of late nineteenth-century English homophobia.
American artists and lifelong partners Maud Hunt Squire and Ethel Mars forged distinguished careers in book illustration, painting, and woodblock printing.
Emma Stebbins is remembered for the sculpture that she produced between 1859 and 1869 and for being the lover of actress Charlotte Cushman.
The symbolist movement in painting and literature, which flourished in Europe from 1886 to 1905, was the first self-consciously queer movement in Western art history.
Russian-born painter, sculptor, and set designer Pavel Tchelitchew created a number of works that illustrate homoerotic desire.
An important contemporary photographer, Wolfgang Tillmans synthesizes classic photographic genres, but has also pioneered in his photographic installations by utilizing innovative methods of presentation.
Defiantly rejecting the invisibility, homophobia, and indignities of pre-Stonewall life, the men in Tom of Finland's drawings reflect a hyper-masculine, working-class version of homosexual manhood that proved important to the emerging gay rights movement.
A deeply sensual painter, Greek artist Yannis Tsarouchis filled his canvases with homoerotic images of vulnerable men and (to a much lesser extent) strong women.
British artist Henry Scott Tuke created works that celebrate the beauty of male youth, as well as the artist's lifelong love of the sea, swimming, and sailing.
A painter of figures and landscapes in oils and gouache, British artist Keith Vaughan specialized in the depiction of male nudes in landscape.
Queer video art explores diverse issues, but because it can be such a personally expressive medium, it frequently focuses on issues directly concerned with queer experience.
British painter Dame Ethel Walker is best known for her portraits of women and for a series of works based on generic mythological themes.
The avatar of Pop Art, Andy Warhol expressed desire in his images of celebrities and flouted traditional notions of masculinity by embracing extravagance, effeminacy, and an obsession with surface appearances.
Famous for his watercolor paintings, Henry Cady Wells was also a patron of the arts and an activist citizen of the Santa Fe and Taos art colonies from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Publisher, book designer, and museum director, Monroe Wheeler was a leading figure in New York artistic and gay communities of the 1950s and 1960s, alongside his partner of sixty-eight years, the writer Glenway Wescott.
Renowned photographer, teacher, critic, editor, and curator, Minor White created some of the most interesting photographs of male nudes of the second half of the twentieth century, but did not exhibit them for fear of scandal.
Boston sculptor Anne Whitney, who as a woman in a male-dominated field struggled for equality, chose subjects--abolitionists, feminists, and blacks--that reflected her liberal political and social beliefs.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, poet, painter, and activist Fran Winant helped define the role and sensibility of lesbians in the contexts of gay liberation and radical feminism.
The first gay American artist to respond to the AIDS crisis with anger and moral outrage, David Wojnarowicz used his art as a polemical tool with which to indict those he held responsible for the AIDS epidemic and to document his own suffering.
American artist Martin Wong created innovative, transgressive paintings that celebrated his sexuality and explored multiple ethnic and racial identities.
Although she is best known for her affair with Djuna Barnes, as depicted in Barne's classic novel Nightwood, Thelma Wood was herself an artist; originally a sculptor, she also practiced the obscure craft of silverpoint drawing.
Mexican artist Nahum Zenil has consistently acknowledged and utilized his identity as a gay man to define his artistic personality.
Film Actors: Gay Male
Film Actors: Lesbian
Photography: Gay Male, Pre-Stonewall
Chamberlain, Richard
Erotic and Pornographic Art: Gay Male
Comic Strips and Cartoons