Pictures and Passions

This text presents an overview of gay art from the beginning of recorded time to the present: works about gay themes by identifiably gay artists or for gay patrons. Saslow carefully examines the classical world, in which homoerotic love was recorded, celebrated, and satirized in the visual arts, and he examines the ways in which the guilt-free acceptance and institutionalized dignity the Greeks accorded to homosexuality have persisted as a nostalgic symbol of lost arcadian ideals in nearly every later civilization.