Framing Out Of Frame

Two years ago I was asked by Dulwich Picture Gallery to come and explore their collection of paintings in relation to lesbian gay bisexual transgender and queer history. In this time we have found fascinating stories, developed a tour and even an annual Out Of Frame evening event that celebrates and highlights the significance of sexuality and gender in their artworks.

It’s been a thrilling project to work on, the stories we have brought out have been funny, surprising, even moving, and the audiences that have come (some to the Gallery for the very first time) seem to have found a real sense of resonance and reverence for the people and lives hidden behind the paintings, or just out of frame.

But as someone who works with museums and history, who writes largely about LGBTQ+ people, I can admit that queer history is not straight forward (pun intended!). Even looking into the past in the most general sense, trying to tell the tales of those who cannot speak for themselves is a tricky tightrope to walk: You want to avoid editorialising whilst still breathing fresh life into the past. You want to uphold historical integrity, whilst also letting people find their own connections to history. Talking about gender and sex specifically, highly personal, and currently highly politicised traits, is a thorny topic to say the least!

In the world of 2025 where I write this, the waters are made even more shark-infested with the ongoing culture wars. Arguments I have heard throughout my career include questioning whether so-called ‘queer history’, is even legitimate history at all. Isn’t it just foisting words and identities onto long deceased people that wouldn’t have understood today’s politically correct terminology? Is it a desire to rewrite the past and use it as a mirror for their own contemporary values? Or worse, is it a desire to lock heterosexual or cisgender people out of parts of their own history, gatekeep it, remove ‘normal’ history in an attempt to push an insidious queer agenda?

So, here I wanted to share a bit of the thinking behind a few of the stories we feature, maybe to shine a little light on why we think this work is valuable. For those that haven’t really come across even the idea of queer history before, I hoped to address some questions and dispel some of the hyperbole around what it means and why we do it. Maybe, in this little blog post not many will read, to even turn the noise down for a second and share how and why I do this work through three examples.

When asked to look at a collection, gallery or a museum I begin with a simple premise, that people like LGBTQ+ people today lived in the past. Simple.

Not that they were the same as us, used the same words, or even understood their identities in the same way, but that just like us they lived and loved differently. If we take this as true, then starting from there I know the stories do exist in every museum and every gallery, they are there, somewhere. Therefore I see it as my job, a gay man living today, to tell those stories as respectfully and generously as possible. To be a custodian for those lives in my own limited capacity.

In terms of HOW you might look at a particular artwork from an LGBTQ+ perspective, I think there are three main ways in:

The first is perhaps obvious, the painter or the subject was a lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender person. A good example of this would be the 17th century portrait of King James I/VI probably by John de Critz the Elder (the painting is currently on holiday in Edinburgh but will come back towards the end of 2025!). James’s relationships with his male ‘favourites’ most notably George Villiers, are well documented. His full length portrait, in full ‘King of bling’ bejewelled splendour, normally hangs at the far end of the gallery. I talk about his life, his reign, and what the court made of his particular interest in handsome young men. We discuss the gossip around these men, what they got out of their relationship with the king and how being so powerful could both protect and endanger someone with illegal and heretical desires.

The second layer is through direct symbolism or allusion. There is a painting in the Gallery called Nymphs by a Fountain, painted by Flemish painter Peter Lely. Lely is, as far as we know, a heterosexual man, who did not necessarily paint the reclining followers of the goddess Diana by a fountain with a subversive agenda. But, as spotted by a volunteer at the Gallery, the posing of the nymph facing away from us has been taken directly from a classical sculpture, as was popular at the time. In this case the real world muse for this pose was that of a famous sculpture known as Sleeping Hermaphroditus from Rome. In myth Hermaphroditus was an intersex god or hero, created by a fusion between the nymph Salmacis and a young man, into a single gender fluid body. They are where the term ‘Hermaphrodite’ comes from, a fusion of the male god Hermes and the goddess of love Aphrodite into a single word.

It’s very unlikely that back in the 1650’s Lely was making a profound statement about gender! It is more likely either a playful allusion to other aficionados of classical art, a knowing wink-wink nudge-nudge, or an acknowledgement of the gender bending nymphs position in the retinue of Diana and their association with magic springs. The figure is facing away from us, in the actual sculpture a phallus is clearly visible alongside the otherwise feminine form. You need to be ‘in the know’ to understand why this pose would be subversive. Therefore, either by artist intent or accident, we have an intersex presence in this otherwise very traditional painting.

The third and perhaps most controversial reason to look at a painting from a ‘queer’ perspective is through viewer association. As an extreme fictional example, if you were to see a painting of Kylie Minogue on the back of a hot pink unicorn, you might well consider the piece as ‘camp’ even though there is nothing overtly queer; Kylie Minogue isn’t herself gay, neither is the unicorn or the colour pink, but certain symbols and characters have been used by LGBTQ+ people throughout history and have become coded as queer.

At Dulwich Picture Gallery we have the painting of Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni. (Interestingly the El Prado museum in Madrid has speculated that Reni was perhaps a gay man, but the main reason for the inclusion of this painting on the tour is due to later association.) The saint, originally connected with healing illnesses, a soldier in his forties bludgeoned to death at the order of Roman Emperor Diocletian, is most frequently represented as a young shirtless Abercrombie and Fitch model pierced by arrows. The sensuality of these pieces featuring Sebastian has been commented on by many, over time he has even become divested of some of his original theistic meaning, reborn as the patron saint of homosexuality. The painting that hangs in the Gallery has the young saint, his muscular body contorted, eyes gazing almost lazily heavenward, and a scant swatch of fabric only just covering his crotch. (Visitors today often giggle when they see the piece, even before we start talking about it!) When the piece was seen by a young Yukio Mishima, a Japanese gay writer, poet and later ultranationalist, he found it to be a sexual awakening. And he wasn’t alone, gay icons as varied as Oscar Wilde and Madonna have used Saint Sebastian as a symbol of forbidden desire and sexual rebellion; The love that dare not speak its name.

The three paintings depict queer experience on multiple levels. From an insecure King whose relationships with men has spawned a Netflix TV series, secretive classical sculpture that shows the intersex body as erotic and powerful, to a saint who has over time evolved into a homoerotic icon and ambassador.

So what?

Why bother?

As a young person, obsessed with museums and history in the 90’s, I would walk through museums and galleries with the vaguest sense of unease. I had already started to understand that I was ‘not like the other boys’ and on top of this I could not see anything like me, or the way I felt, reflected in the statues and paintings on display. I was never taught that gay people existed in history, my education of humanity was one of exclusive heterosexuality. So the conclusion I came to was that I was an anomaly, before even fully finding the words to describe myself, I imagined that I was something newfangled, strange and unworthy of being in the gilded halls in the places I loved. I am not alone in this. The people that come on our tours to hear this perspective on the works on display, or the evening events where we put on with drag and performances, have very different backgrounds but very similar stories; Having to piece their own history together through inference and hearsay. For them, and for me, acknowledging and celebrating queer history isn’t about ticking a box, or hollow forced representation. It is about making the space to acknowledge what has always been there, but has so often been left unspoken or unhighlighted.

To those who might find the content of the ongoing Out Of Frame research project irrelevant, or unnecessary, I’d say you are not obliged to find any particular area of history personally relatable or interesting. That being said for many of us it is a kind of lifeline, back to a past that has for the majority of modern history been left in the dark. Having a past, knowing that past and about the lives of people like you that came before, can make a liveable present and future seem more possible.

I spoke to an elderly man after my last tour, we sat on a bench opposite the Guido Reni. He told me about what it was like growing up gay in the early 60s, about coming across other men in bars talking to each other in the secret gay language of Polari, of avoiding police raids and of blacked out windows, joy and shame. He was delighted that here in his local art gallery, a gallery he knew and loved well, there was now an acknowledgement that his stories and his life were also welcome and relevant.