GLR May-June 2026

ART

Pushing the Medieval Envelope

I N DISCUSSIONS of LGBT history, the European Middle Ages generally get little attention. Just look at the bib liography for different periods, and you will see that there is far less scholar ship about these five-or-so centuries. There is simply less material to study, as high cul ture in the Middle Ages was less focused on pleasure, love, and sex than that of other periods in European history.

than are issues of same-sex desire. There are several works about the (many!) saints whose stories involved a change of gender or of gender expression, as, for example, in a pair of paintings (from Belgium in the mid-15th century) from the life of St. Theodora/Theodore—a saint who started life as an elegant lady but, after being tricked into adultery, became not a nun but a monk. There is also a pair of statues (from

A NDREW L EAR

SPECTRUM OF DESIRE Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages

Met Cloisters, New York City Oct. 16, 2025–March 29, 2026

Germany around 1300) of Saints Mary and Elizabeth, both pregnant (respectively with Jesus and John the Baptist) joining their right hands like figures in a betrothal scene, uniting them, as the label says, in a same-sex community. A few works do seem to refer to same-sex love, most strik ingly, from the Cleveland Museum of Art, a paired statue (also from Germany around 1300) of Christ and the “beloved disci ple” St. John, portrayed in the pose of a married couple, with John’s head resting on Jesus’ shoulder and Jesus’ arm placed protectively around John’s shoulder. Popular legend (as the label says) claimed that John had abandoned his “earthly” bride for a spiritual marriage with Christ, but as this statue makes clear, the boundary between the spiritual and the earthly was not clear-cut in the Middle Ages. The exhibit does not mention it, but there was also a long tradition of seeing Jesus and John as a same-sex couple, as when King James I of England re ferred in an ambiguous way to his relationship with his “fa vorite” George Villiers, saying: “Christ had his John, and I have my George.” In that light, it seems to me that same-sex-loving people of the Middle Ages (whether or not this love constituted an “iden tity”) would have found encouragement in such depictions of Christ. One can imagine that statues of Jesus and John could have functioned in their time as gay icons of a sort. people nowadays, well, talk. The art of conversation has gone the way of the Polaroid. We all have that friend who returns a voicemail with a text. It’s less important to watch this film than it is to listen to a pair of clever people who just jabber in the way that filmmakers like Woody Allen and Richard Linklater perfected. Last year Linklater gave us BlueMoon (and an Oscar nod for Ethan Hawke as Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart) and, in 2009, Tom Ford elegantly brought Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man to the big screen. These depictions of queer men and the straight women they love are rare because they throw a grenade into the standard Hollywood love story. Where we expect wedding bells and a baby on board, there is fierce friendship scrubbed of any sexual tension. As promised, Peter Hujar’s Day documents a day, one that was well spent, and a life only posthumously coming into focus. Hujar Continued from page 58

Indeed, you might easily imagine that love and sex, and es pecially LGBT love and sex (much less “identity”), made no appearance at all in the art of the Middle Ages. However, this is not the case, as revealed by last winter’s exhibit at the Met Cloisters titled Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in

the Middle Ages . This exhibit brought together a large gallery ful of works—mostly from the Met’s own collections, but in cluding a few key loans—with LGBT content. It divides these into themes and provides excellent explanatory materials so that you can understand the works in the show and also learn how to see these themes in Medieval art in general. Gender issues are somewhat more prominent in the exhibit Andrew Lear, a Classicist and an art historian, is the founder and op erator of Oscar Wilde Tours. Christ and Saint John the Evangelist , 1300–20. Cleveland Museum of Art.

May–June 2026

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