Gaying the Met with Oscar Wilde Tours
In 1981, LGBT activist and film historian Vito Russo published the first edition of The Celluloid Closet, a groundbreaking examination of the portrayal of homosexuality in film since the 1920s. Praised for its illuminating wit and incisive research, Russo’s book altered the way in which many filmgoers experienced classic Hollywood films.
Similarly, Dr. Andrew Lear of Oscar Wilde Tours offers museumgoers an exploration of homoerotic art in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Defined by Lear as “an extremely conservative institution” with relatively few male nudes in its expansive collections, the Met nonetheless proves to be a veritable repository of homoerotica. As cinephile Russo showed us with films, the trick is knowing where to look – and that’s where Lear’s tutelage proves invaluable.
Appropriately, Lear’s two-hour homoerotic art tour commences in the Greek and Roman galleries with an initial gander at the Met’s marble statue of a kouros (youth), ca. 590-580 B.C., which provokes Lear’s commentary on Ganymede, Zeus’s most beautiful mortal boy, and the Greek worship of the young athletic body. As the co-author of Images Of Ancient Greek Pederasty: Boys Were Their Gods, Lear is widely recognized as one of the foremost scholars on same-sex love in the ancient world.
An expert on erotic vase painting from Athens between 600-400 B.C., Lear explains the narratives contained within a series of black-and-red painted vessels that prove to be Greek culture’s rough equivalent to the physique pictorials of the 1950s. These stylized scenes include older Greek men entranced by young athletes upon whom they bestow gifts, which epitomize, according to Lear, “the give-and-get of ancient Greek culture.”
Various vases depict male beauty contests, with a tool used for “skin-scraping” to be used after the athlete has been covered in olive oil, while the winner of the best physique is often wrapped in ribbons and surrounded by gifts. Another terracotta kylix (drinking cup), which exhibits a bearded man propositioning an athletic youth with a purse, is simply titled “The Boy is Beautiful.” What more need be said?
According to Lear, hardly any museum in the world is without a statue or bust of Antinous, the young Greek lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who is one of the top three depicted figures (alongside Julius and Augustus Caesar) from the Roman era. The Met’s marble bust of Antinous reveals a full-lipped, smooth-skinned youth with bed head, tousled curls who wouldn’t look out of place in a 21st-century boy band.
A statue by Michelangelo known as “Young Archer,” which was once installed on a fountain at the Fifth Avenue Whitney mansion, depicts a pubescent Cupid who appears to be in the throes of carnal satiety.
As a guide, Lear combines the enthusiasm of an excitable boy with the erudition of a beloved professor. At the Met’s collection of Oceanic art, Lear delves with delight into The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection where huge phallic bis poles from southwest New Guinea depict same-sex initiation rites with startling clarity.
Lear attributes “art gaydar” to the unearthing of some of his more fascinating finds within the Met’s collections. A Renaissance painting by Andrea Sacchi depicts the Apollo Belvedere alongside the celebrated castrati Pasqualini, which, according to Lear’s research, reveals the clandestine intimate relationship between the singer and his ecclesiastical patron, who was a nephew of the Pope.
In front of a painting by Sir Edward Burne-Jones titled “The Love Song,” where a besotted knight gazes with fascination at an angelic boy in toga while seemingly oblivious to the maiden in their midst, Lear smiles and says, “Bromance à la lettre.”
Born of a desire to combine travel and gay history, Oscar Wilde Tours was founded in 2014 by Lear who has taught at Harvard, Columbia, New York University and Pomona College. Lear’s gay history tours of New York, which include walking tours through the East Village and Greenwich Village, as well as a 4-hour bus tour of Manhattan, will commence in April 2015. An upcoming Oscar Wilde Tours in Italy will unearth Italy’s gay past while feasting on the country’s art, architecture, and magnificent food.
Those who explore the Met with Lear can expect a tour as revelatory as it is inspiring.
