Art: Classical
Ancient Greek and Roman art represents a variety of homoerotic experience in several different ways.
Patronage--the sponsorship of artists and the commissioning of artistic projects from them--is of central importance to %%queer%% cultural history.
Women with dildoes, often strapped on, are represented in many cultures and in most periods of European art.
The Greek god of wine, revelry, and orgiastic delights, and the patron god of hermaphrodites and transvestites, Dionysus has been extremely popular as a subject of Western art.
Endymion is frequently represented in art as an exemplar of male physical beauty, youthful innocence, and sexual accessibility.
Since antiquity Ganymede, the beautiful Phrygian youth abducted by Jupiter, has served as an artistic expression for homosexuality.
Athenian lovers Harmodius and Aristogeiton were remembered in ancient Greece as the great tyrannicides and celebrated as lovers, patriots, and martyrs.
Hermaphrodites are a common subject in ancient art, but disappear from art history until the Renaissance, when they are most often employed as non-erotic symbols of the union of opposites.
Throughout much of history, the nude male figure was virtually the only subject that could be used to articulate homoerotic desire in publicly displayed works of art, as well as those works of art intended for private "consumption."
A Phrygian fertility god whose cult spread throughout the Hellenistic world and usually depicted with enormous genitals, Priapus was the patron of all in need of luck, especially men and women in search of sexual satisfaction.
Despite Sappho's status as most ancient lesbian foremother, her image is almost entirely absent from modern and contemporary lesbian art.
Although art historians have given very little attention to representations of sex workers, images of same-sex prostitution extend far back into history.
Drag Shows: Drag Queens and Female Impersonators
European Art: Neoclassicism
Sports: Transgender Issues
Erotic and Pornographic Art: Gay Male
Film Directors