Multi-media British queer artist David Hockney recently died at 88 years of age. His art collaged together an ordinary and beautiful gay existence at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the United Kingdom, making his work quite transgressive. He avoided the usual cultural narratives that depicted gay men as tragic, deviant, and secretive, and instead painted scenes of friendship, pleasure, and ordinary domestic life, as can be witnessed in his well-known works like We Two Boys Together Clinging and Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. By portraying queerness in broad daylight rather than in secrecy, Hockney helped normalize queer relationships and experiences.
David Hockney Radically Illuminated Queer Desire
