In 1986, Haring opened the Pop Shop, a Soho retail outlet selling his artwork on t-shirts, posters, toys, buttons, and magnets. Often producing dozens of these drawings in a day, Haring used his art to engage passers-by in the act of creation as well as the resulting images. Between 19, Haring created innovative drawings on empty black advertising panels in the New York subway. Keith Haring was a talented pop artist who dedicated his career to bringing gay art and AIDS awareness to the masses. While today pulp novels may seem laughably over-the-top, they are nonetheless important pop culture representations of gays and lesbians in art.
Like other sleazy publications of the 50s and 60s, gay pulp fiction covers showed a fantasy world full of absurd clichés, seductive poses, and muscular bare chests. These paperbacks included full-color covers with racy titles and stories that addressed taboo subjects like prostitution, rape, and interracial romance. Gay male pulp fiction, while less popular than lesbian pulp novels, enjoyed a large following that peaked in the early 1950s.
Women soon understood pulp cover art as a type of code – two women in a suggestive pose with the words ‘strange’ or ‘twilight’ in the title indicated that the book had lesbian content. In an era before the feminist and gay liberation movements, the sensationalized images on the books’ covers were often the only way for women to read about lesbianism.
Now coveted by collectors, these novels began as an affordable form of titillating popular art. Lesbian pulp novels from the 50s and 60s featured lurid cover art, with colorful visual innuendo, knowing glances and lots of skin. While the Ancient Greeks understood sexuality in radically different ways than we do today, their art serves as a reminder of a time when same-sex attraction was accepted and even celebrated. Some of these distinctive vases show an older man giving gifts to a boy, while others show more overtly sexual acts. Vivid images were often painted on black figure vases, hundreds of which survive today. These homoerotic relationships were the subject of elaborate Greek poetry and art.
The Ancient Greeks even sanctioned relationships between teenage boys and older men as a rite of passage for males just entering puberty.
Unlike in other ancient cultures, the Greeks considered free adult male sexual attraction to be both normal and natural. The Ancient Greeks produced one of the earliest well-developed examples of gay art. Like the rainbow flag, the pink triangle is now an image found on pride badges, stickers, and t-shirts, and is a common symbol used to advertise gay-friendly events and activities. Though not everyone embraces the pink triangle as a positive symbol of gay pride, the triangle and inverted triangle have gone through countless variations and remain popular. Gay prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were forced to wear the pink triangle to show that they were homosexuals, which meant that they often received worse treatment and as a result were less likely to survive the camps. In an UK Gay News op-ed piece, Baker wrote: “In my view the rainbow flag is unfinished, as the movement it represents, an arc that begins well before me, its breadth far broader than all of our experiences put together, reaching the farthest corners of the world with a message of solidarity and a beacon of hope for those who follow in our footsteps.”īorn out of the violence of the Nazi regime, the pink triangle is a reclaimed symbol of oppression now used to show LGBT pride and increase understanding. Gilbert Baker himself encourages the LGBT community to continue to remake the flag for ourselves. Since then, the now-common six color flag is only one of many variations, all of which symbolize the diversity and inclusiveness of the LGBT movement. The original version of the flag had eight colors, each of which stood for concepts including healing, sunlight, nature, and spirit. The rainbow flag has changed dramatically since its first hand-dyed creation by Gilbert Baker and his boyfriend Jomar Teng. A (very) BRIEF HISTORY OF LGBTQ ART AND SYMBOLISM