"It was really written for undergrads-presumably to answer the question we hear so often from them: "Why were so many artists (or writers) gay?"

From a listserv I'm on:

Christopher Reed's Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas, Oxford University Press.

The poster writes: It's a big, beautiful, brilliant book, full of full-color prints of works of art and artifacts from a variety of different cultures and across the ages.

Reed is a modernist, so about two-thirds of the book deals with Western

cultures from the late 19th Century to the present, but the early chapters

provide invaluable examples of the ways contemporary Western understandings

both of homosexuality and of art do and do not help us to meaningfully

understand the sexual practices and visual/material productions of those

times and cultures or of our own.  Examples are taken from the ancient

Greeks, of course, but also from the Sambia of New Guinea, the Berdache of

North America, from Tokugawa Japan, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, etc.

Reed's most intriguing insight is that Foucault's theories about the history

of homosexuality in many ways apply equally to the history of art, for these

two concepts developed at the same time and ideologically in parallel.  The

artist and the homosexual as socio-cultural types therefore share much, a

fact of which the public (and our undergrads) are well aware, but one art

historians before Reed have not acknowledged and accounted for.

Though the book will hold immense appeal for queer theorists and historians,

as well as those who just love looking at glossy prints of queer art, it was

really written for undergrads-presumably to answer the question we hear so

often from them:  "Why were so many artists (or writers) gay?"  Reed does an

excellent job of showing us and our students why some of the art that looks

so "obviously gay" to us today really isn't, or at least wasn't understood

that way at the time it was produced, but also of explaining how some works

of art that may not read as queer to us today really were; that is, they

participated in a counter-cultural artistic homoerotic discourse.  Having

been lucky enough to have access to the book prior to its publication, I've

used it with great success several times this last semester to teach visual

arts in an interdisciplinary Western Civ type humanities elective for

undergrads.  The book will be invaluable, I think, for those teaching

courses designated as LGBT or queer.