WINNING ESSAY:
Does this portrait look queer to you?
Teenager overheard in the National Portrait Gallery:
“Ugh, it’s so straight in here. Where are all the queer portraits?”
You can perhaps imagine the awkwardness of the shoulder shrug that accompanied these words or the flop of adolescent arms in disappointment. I didn’t get the sense they were asking a rhetorical question, rather that this was a genuine line of enquiry. Where are the queer portraits?
Museums and galleries can feel like rather straight places. Take a wander through portrait galleries and you’ll tend to see plenty of white faces, lots of men, people close to the centres of power. At first glance, many of these are also presumably straight, or at least painted into a portrait as if they were. There are symbols of stability, sovereignty, control and conformity aplenty – wives in backgrounds or children sitting attentively at a knee. So it’s easy to have some sympathy with the teenager’s question when searching for a queer face in the corridors of grey men.
Defining and categorising a portrait as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or asexual can be fraught with complications. It can feel like putting portraits – their sitters, painters, collectors, curators or anyone else for that matter – into a queer box. ‘Queer’ itself isn’t a straightforward word. Often used as shorthand, it’s something of an umbrella term – a word with origins in the peculiar or strange, reclaimed from discrimination and hate speech and which defies clear definition. Indeed, the notion of ‘queer’ is delightfully disruptive which is perhaps why those in the LGBTQ+ community are drawn to it.
In recent years, art galleries have been ‘queering’ their collections – looking again at their artworks, drawing out queer narratives and highlighting these for visitors. Sometimes a portrait’s queerness is clearly visible, especially in modern portraits where superstars and celebrities wear their queerness publicly and proudly. In the NPG, we can find a parade of queerness – an almost life-sized canvas of queer rights campaigner Peter Tatchell (NPG 7180), a photograph of the actor Andrew Scott (NPG x200148) or a double portrait of the Pet Shop Boys (NPG x88067).
But further back in history, identifying queer portraits can be trickier, especially if we are looking for anything beyond the realm of the white, gay man. Sometimes we can spot a queer portrait by eye, but more often we might only get a queer inkling from a painting – a hunch, a question, a raise of an eyebrow.
–
On floor 3 of the gallery, meet Chevalier d’Eon, who was part of early 19th-century fashionable London society. A French diplomat, soldier, spy, celebrity fencer, performer and author, d’Eon lived and dressed throughout their life as both a man and woman. A source of fascination, people placed bets on their biological sex, and they were offered huge sums to be physically examined.
Chevalier d’Eon (1728–1810)
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw217942/Chevalier-dEon
Looking around Room 18, we are surrounded by the formality of the portraiture of the day. Amongst the grand faces and gilded frames sits a haziness of gender portrayal. Shown neither as butch man, nor as gentile Georgian woman, there’s a calm ambiguity to this painting. The sitter has an understated reservation about them, perhaps a quiet queerness that we can sense, as much as we can visibly see or learn about in a biography or from an art history textbook. There’s something in the portrait that seems to be asking us a question, rather than making a statement.
NPG curators have hung d’Eon with a group of boxers and fighters. While d’Eon was a diplomat, their portrait isn’t shown alongside the grand dukes and famous poets, instead it’s in a corner, next to the door, with the knuckle-baring ne’er-do-wells and the societal misfits – a place where queer people often find themselves, perhaps by accident, perhaps quite happily.
–
One floor down, here’s the face of Radclyffe Hall. That Hall was a lesbian is clearly on record as was the furore caused around the publication of her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), which makes the argument for lesbian rights and same-sex marriage. A decade after this portrait was painted, her work would be banned by the British state for being obscene.
Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943)
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw02836/Radclyffe-Hall
Hall isn’t dressed in the conventional female fashions of the day, instead shown as an Edwardian male aristocrat complete with starched collar and monocle, perhaps as an act of rebellion, perhaps as an influencer of queer fashion and touchpoint of lesbian sartorial style. It would be too simplistic to focus purely on the depiction of Hall’s outfit in this portrait though, for there is also queer grief on display. At the time of painting, Hall was in mourning for Mabel Batten and there’s an air of melancholy and loss here.
Again, the curator’s choice of where to hang this portrait might have a queer quality to it. Drawing back from the painting, we notice it’s sandwiched between Winston Churchill (NPG L250) and a youthful King George VI (NPG L214) in full naval uniform. On one hand, this places Hall firmly in polite, Edwardian society – part of a man’s world, close to the establishment. Yet there’s something of a pushback against authority here, having a censored lesbian writer placed between two men who would go on to run and rule the country. Hall held her own in a world dominated by straight men, and she’s still holding her own today.
–
Queer portraits become more visibly noticeable the closer we get to the present day,
thanks to the advancement of LGBTQ+ rights and shifting opinions. Part of the queer heritage narrative from the 1980s onwards that can’t be ignored is the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
The name Terence Higgins sits on queer people’s lips with both pride and poignancy. Terence’s biography as a House of Commons Hansard reporter, barman and DJ is largely overshadowed by him being one of the first people in the UK to die of an AIDS-related illness. There’s a charity named after him that seeks to educate and remind us about sexual health and emotional wellbeing.
‘Terry Higgins – Three Ages of Terry’ (1945–82)
Wondering whether this portrait ‘looks queer’ or not, it’s clear that this drawing doesn’t conform to conventions of the historical, or even modern, painted portrait. There are no heavy oils in gilded frames and gone are the moody black-and-white photographs of popstars. In this contemporary portrait (created in 2023), we find something that feels radically different – a bare-chested man, almost sketch-like, red pencil perhaps echoing the red AIDS ribbon we don each December. Terence’s face is shown three times at different stages in life – a life cut short. There’s a nervous uncertainty here and the triptych of faces reminds us of the multiple lives queer people live. Instead of a portraitist seeking to portray a definitive version of the sitter, here Curtis Holder reminds us of the shadows and memories we carry with us though life and death.
Encouraged and thoughtful, and noticing Terence’s neighbour on the wall – the unashamedly queer artist Derek Jarman (NPG 6680) – we are forced to remember that queer portraits are rarely far from oppression. Out of the corner of our eye, the figure of Margaret Thatcher looms large across the room – she who, through her ignorance and her malice, damaged both of these men’s lives and those of countless other people.
–
Looking at these portraits, across the NPG collection, there are queer codes visible, allowing us to glimpse something of queer lives, past and present. Those hints, those coded messages, placed on canvas by artists, are sometimes subtle, sometimes bold, but they are there to be observed, if we know how to unpick them. We can certainly see some queer portraits.
Yet alongside these depictions of queer lives, there also exist queer readings of portraiture – the impacts that portraits have had on people in the past, the impressions they make on us today and the possibilities for what they might mean in the future. Context, interpretation and art history are important components in understanding a queer portrait. Yet so are the emotional reactions and intuitive responses we have to these artworks. So while we might scour collections for portraits which look queer, we ought also to allow ourselves to use our emotional intuition to recognise that queerness also.
To the teenager who asked where the queer portraits are, I can say: everywhere. Queer culture is knitted into our society, baked into our history and painted onto canvases for all to see and for us to feel, sense and interpret as individual viewers.
To stay in touch and hear the latest news please subscribe to our newsletter