A Queer Balance: Power Relations in Homosexual Representations and in Choosing Flowers

Marcel Proust often substituted women for men in his novels: ‘he was so determined to disguise his own homosexuality, he was forced to transpose recalled experiences with men into beguiling tales of the Narrator’s passion for women. This elaborate game of encoding is the creative half of Proust’s effort, the invention added to the data provided by involuntary memory’ (White 1999: 143–4). Proust’s decision to encode his sexuality was not uncommon amongst same sex lovers in the arts for most of the 20th century — and hardly surprising given the legal, social and economic consequences of being more overt. In the case of visual artists, the codes they used were rarely broken by the casual viewer, not least because it was convenient for exhibiting institutions to place a ‘heterosexual filter’ across their work, for example in the form of picture captions and biographical material. I have dealt with these issues at length in an exhibition (New Art Gallery Walsall, 2004) and an accompanying book, Hidden Histories: 20th Century Male Same Sex Lovers in the Visual Arts (Petry 2004),1 which describes some of the codes and heterosexual filters that were used, and recalls some of the relevant emotional and sexual histories which otherwise remain mostly hidden. Similarly, my art practice deals with issues of layering, encoded messages and sexual identity.