Queer British Art, 1861–1967

Exhibition curated by Clare Barlow, Tate Britain, 5 April–1 October 2017.

The summer of 2017 saw an unexpected, and certainly unprecedented festival of queer Britain: a series across all BBC outlets called 'Gay Britannia', embracing drama, documentaries, stories, art and music; an ambitious Channel 4 series entitled '50 Shades of Gay' covering a similar range, though a little quirkier; plays on West End and other stages; celebratory lunches, teas, dinners and receptions, including one hosted by the prime minister in Downing Street; talks, exhibitions and displays at the National Archives, the British Library, the British Museum and elsewhere. And a high-profile exhibition at Tate Britain on 'Queer British Art 1861–1967.

This extraordinary flowering was ostensibly sparked by the fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act in July 1967, which partially decriminalized male homosexuality in private in England and Wales. Perhaps more fundamentally it celebrated a belated social recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people, charting a remarkable shift in attitudes. In historical perspective the hard-won achievement that 1967 represented looks increasingly more like the end of an era than the beginning of a new one. After his imprisonment for 'gross indecency' Oscar Wilde, who is a major presence in the exhibition, had warned his friend George Ives that it wasn't so much public opinion that needed educating as public officials. It took nearly eighty years of effort to educate sufficient numbers of MPs and peers to modify the key piece of legislation, the Labouchère amendment of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which created the offence of 'gross indecency' between men. Women were not similarly criminalized, so were not by any stretch 'liberated' by the 1967 Act. But neither were men. The reform in 1967 merely decriminalized sex between men in a very narrowly defined private space, as long as you lived in England and Wales, were aged over twenty-one and were not in the armed forces or merchant navy. In Scotland and Northern Ireland the law was not brought into line with the situation in England and Wales until the early 1980s; and it was to take another thirty years before the great wave of sexual reforms introduced by the post-1997 Labour government laid the ground-work for full legal equality and citizenship for LGBTQ people.

So 1967 was not the birth of gay freedom, as the media presented it in the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations in the summer of 2017 – a summer otherwise dominated by an inconclusive election, growing uncertainty over BREXIT, terrorist attacks, the Grenfell fire disaster in west London, and widening social divisions and anxieties. 1967, long remembered as the summer of love, suddenly seemed a time of optimism compared to the realities of 2017. Yet for LGBT people, 1967 was more the end of the beginning than the beginning of the end. The grass-roots mobilization of gay liberation that did eventually change everything began after 1967, and it took a long march through identity and community creation, the trauma of AIDS, a socially conservative backlash and strenuous reforming campaigns before a new era and a new sexual and gender consciousness fully emerged after the millennium.

The art and artefacts represented in the Queer British Art exhibition curated by Clare Barlow belong firmly to that pre-1967 consciousness. Its starting point is the ending of the death penalty for buggery in 1861, to be replaced by imprisonment for between ten years and life. Its closing date is the ambiguous '1967', It therefore commemorates and celebrates the art of the double life, of codes, deflections, discretions and indiscretions, indirections and misdirections, innuendoes, mythical allusions and Hellenic nostalgia, as well as the occasional startling boldness, frankness and transgression for all who had eyes and imagination to see – the necessary art of the closet. The question it necessarily poses, and doesn't fully answer, is how the art and artefacts presented in the exhibition can speak to us today. Can we see in them traces of our current preoccupations; or do they speak from another world, now irretrievably past?

A major strength of the exhibition is that...