If you look closely artworks and
portraits of certain Victorians,
you might notice a recurring image
green carnations
attached to the lapel of a jacket
the green carnation was
something that Oscar Wilde
brought into the public
signifier of their identity
and encouraged his circle of friends
also to wear the green carnation.
It was a special shop in London
where you could get green carnations from.
They were dyed green.
They weren't a natural green colour.
Most people would always go for a
white carnation, but a green one
is something very strange,
very queer.
But these flowers are just one
example of the many visual symbols
throughout history
that hinted at secret sexualities
and identities that had been hidden.
So what other coded
symbols can we find in the history
of queer artwork?
How did today's artist reference and
re-use them?
And how have hidden symbols
transitioned to a wider and more
expressive queer visual language?
Around the same time as the Green Carnation,
there was another queer
symbol in use too
peacock feathers as a sort
of symbol of queer identities
because it's the male peacock
that has incredibly flamboyant tail feathers.
Check out this painting of the
couple Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon
by Edmund Dulac.
They're painted as medieval saints,
but Shannon is holding a peacock feather,
juxtaposing religious imagery with this
knowing symbol.
We see people holding them
and looking out into
the viewer to make some sort of
connection.
Peacock feathers were commonly used
in Art Nouveau at the time.
They're seen in Whistler's famous
Peacock Room and recur through.
Aubrey Beardsley's black and white artworks.
Nowadays we have plenty of ways of
anonymously communicating our sexual
desires with different tribes.
But on the dance floors of 1970s
San Francisco men relied
on a secret visual code
a handkerchief hanging from
a pocket.
Men would wear different coloured
handkerchiefs to denote their sexual interests.
You can't really get into examples
of the hanky code without getting a
different certificate.
Of course, peacock feathers,
handkerchiefs, carnations.
are but a few of the many, many
queer symbols throughout history.
All sorts of different shapes,
colours and hidden meanings.
There have always been coded
messages in clothing and
badges and so on and so forth.
There's the nautical star tattoo
commonplace in lesbian
communities.
The lambda symbol designed
by the Gay Activists Alliance in the
early 1970s, in science
represents energy.
There's one inspired by an animal.
My favourite one is the lavender,
a rhinoceros, which has a red heart
that emerged in the US, I believe
in Boston in the mid 1970s
it symbolises
strength and resilience against
adversity because it's a much
maligned animal.
But some queer symbols emerge
from less celebratory, more
defiant beginnings.
One of the most powerful and iconic
subversions of imagery was the pink
triangle, which is reappropriated
from its use in Nazi concentration camps.
It was sowed on people's
uniforms when they were in prison to
identify them as
gay men in
the concentration camps
there were other triangles as well.
There was a black triangle, for
example, that identified
antisocial behaviour and
that included lesbians
amongst them.
In a way, it's been
reclaimed by the
communities in the same way
that the word 'queer' has been reclaimed.
In the mid-80s
there was a campaign called 'Silence = Death',
where they took that pink triangle
and flipped it.
That campaign was addressing the
silence around the AIDS epidemic
in both media and government at the time,
with thousands, tens
of thousands, hundreds of thousands
of people that weren't being
represented.
Historical artists have also
frequently used the guise of
classical or mythological identity
to smuggle in references
to LGBTQ+ sentiments and feelings
comparatively to the Middle Ages
Antiquity was a time of acceptance.
Queer people might not have had the
labels that we do today, but
it's freer, more open attitudes
towards sexualities made
ancient Greece and Rome a
touchstone that artists throughout
history returned to
Those people had found the kind
of the vehicle in which to put
their desire kind of smuggle into
the thing that's existing and
already allowed.
Because it was sanctioned by history
and by great literature.
It's allowed the artist
to perhaps dwell
on the beauty of
the male figure.
You can say, 'Well, you know, that's
Haidrian and Antinoüs
or that's Achilles and Patroclus
Or from the Bible,
David and Jonathan.
So artists use these figures,
like Simeon Solomon's depiction
of Sappho, a Greek poet from Lesbos,
from which the word lesbian is derived,
sensual depiction of two women and embrace
dress slipping off a shoulder two
birds mimicking their form from behind.
But it isn't just visual artworks
in which queer code was used.
From the 30s to the 60s, a
vernacular slang called 'Polari'
was used by gay men.
Polari is a form of a slang
language, which took words from
lots of different places.
There was around 500 to 600
words documented
from Yiddish, from slang terms used by
circus performers,
wrestlers, apparently
merchant sailors too.
And it was adopted by gay circles
particularly a gay men communicating
with each other without risk.
There are some words still used
today that actually originated
from Polari
Cottaging and cruising,
which have particular connotations to them. There are words like naff,
which is a word from Polari
which just goes to show the legacy
of these kinds of codes.
so a variety of visual
and linguistic codes can be seen
throughout history,
hinting at queer experiences and inner lives.
But is there also a broader visual
language that runs through history?
Is there such thing as a queer aesthetic?
It's hard to sort of say what a queer aesthetic is
without stereotyping someone, I think.
There isn't any one experience
Queerness is something that's
difficult to describe.
It's multitudinous.
There are lots of voices
with different lived experiences and
different opinions trying to be expressed.
Aesthetics change with time.
We are every colour in the spectrum,
aren't we
nonetheless, through arts history,
LGBTQ+ artists
have been inspired by their
predecessors.
So there are themes and motifs
that emerge
because we don't see many images
which represent us.
We have to find ourselves.
We have to re-appropriate the
imagery that exists.
There is a way in which light
material and imagery is
recycled,
and so they are there in our DNA
without us necessarily directly
referring to them.
whether it's the use of a certain colour or certain types of fashion
images of camp or drag.
I associate it with otherness
in a way.
Anything that is
not societal norm worthy,
heteronormative.
Maybe there's a gaydar in painting...
Of course, there are specific
aesthetics and subcultures within
the broader LGBTQ+
umbrella like flowers,
which recur from Gluck's coded
still lives to the floral
compositions of Karl van Vechten
photography of Harlem residents
in the 30s and 40s
to Mapplethorpe's black and
white flower photography.
Since legal changes have in
recent decades made the lives
of queer people more open and free,
so too has the art produced by
LGBTQ+ artists.
The world of queer art opened up,
becoming bolder, louder
and more mainstream.
There's less requirement for
people to use those symbols,
those codes, which in essence,
were there to protect people.
And yet, if you look closely,
those secret codes and aesthetics
are still there
it is interesting even being in times when you
potentially can be more overt, and are more overt.
Again, it does seem to be something of fascination
and something which comes quite naturally
to slide in a reference.
People will read it when they know what it is,
but others for others, it might pass them by
For today's artists
really, it's about exploring,
analysing and challenging the
visuals that have defined queer
culture of the past.
When we come to try to find our own language,
how do we do that?
How can we identify an authentic voice
when everything we are is
developed as a consequence of
everything that we see and
everything that we know and all the
expectations which are placed on us, etc.
We are all formed by the
cultures that make us.
And maybe it's these figures from
the past. Maybe it's these like
myths. Maybe it's other people
who've made something before and
the way that I like to work with
that when I get it is to kind of pick it
apart and like to talk about
both like the histories, that
inform us and the kind of
shortcomings of those histories.
I thought I wanted to try to make some images,
some images, try to deal with that,
try to deal with the difficulty of that.
And so secret languages are
always with us, constantly
evolving, resurfacing
and speaking to us.