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Constructions of Homosexuality in the

Art of Francis Bacon
Rina Arya
Published online: 18 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: Rina Arya (2012) Const ruct ions of Homosexualit y in t he Art of Francis Bacon,
Journal for Cult ural Research, 16:1, 43-61, DOI: 10.1080/ 14797585.2011.633836

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 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 16 NUMBER 1 (JANUARY 2012)

Constructions of Homosexuality in the

Art of Francis Bacon

Rina Arya
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In this article, I contextualise Bacon’s representations of homosexuality ——

that is, same-sex relations between men. The male nude made its appearance
in Bacon’s work in the early 1950s, a time when the nude was not a popular sub-
ject in painting and when, perhaps more critically, homosexuality was illegal in
Britain. Other British contemporary homosexual artists, such as Robert Colqu-
houn and Robert MacBryde, steered clear of representing homosexuality, whilst
others, such as Keith Vaughan, depicted homosexuality in their art in an ambig-
uous and diffuse fashion, often with recourse to the homoerotic. Vaughan’s
studies of men exercising focused on the strength and virility of the male nude,
and were erotically charged without being overtly sexual. In contrast, Bacon
chose to be more explicit in his depictions. He did not simply allude to, but
pointed to the homosexual act of copulation. Given that Bacon was painting at
a time before the legalisation of homosexuality, how can these images be
explained and what was Bacon attempting to do? His representations of the
homoerotic and homosexual convey social attitudes of the time and are impor-
tant constructions and mediations of homosexual desire. I explain my motiva-
tions by drawing on Bacon’s cultural and theoretical background. What is
evident is that there is not one homogeneous interpretation of Bacon’s depic-
tion of homosexuality, but multiple readings, which are interdisciplinary. His
depictions can be explained with recourse to his biography, art historical influ-
ences, political activism and his existential awareness of death. I also demon-
strate how changes in the political landscape affected Bacon’s portrayals in the
delineation of what I describe as four thematic phases in Bacon’s art.

Francis Bacon was obsessed with the human body. In spite of his diversions to
other subjects, such as the crucifixions and the papal figures, the connecting
thread between all his works was the portrayal of the human body in the twen-
tieth century. In his oeuvre, there is a preponderance of images that are of
male nudes. These range from the seemingly innocuous and objective portray-
als of the male body, such as Study from the Human Body (1949) and Study of
a Nude (1952–1953), to more explicit explorations of homosexual encounters,
such as Two Figures (1953) and Two Figures in the Grass (1954).
Bacon also painted the female form but, in this instance, was more con-
cerned with capturing the individual essences of female sitters, such as

ISSN 1479-7585 print/1740-1666 online/12/010043-19

Ó 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2011.633836
 44 ARYA

Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne and Muriel Belcher, all of whom were
close friends. He was less interested in exploring the female nude form1 and
many of his studies of females focus on either head-and-neck portraits or the
fully clothed figure. His overriding preoccupation was with the male nude, and
it is for this reason that I will be entirely focusing my study on his depictions
of the male form. Fuller (1985, p. 554) summarises Bacon’s motivation when
he suggests that Bacon seems to suffer from a “glazing of vision when he looks
at anything other than the male body”.
In this article, I want to contextualise Bacon’s representations of homosexu-
ality —— that is, same-sex relations between men. The male nude made its
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appearance in Bacon’s work in the early 1950s, “forcing itself on a cultural

scene where even female nudes were a rarity” (Domino 1997, p. 39). There is
a specificity about the construction of homosexuality in Bacon’s work that dif-
fers from the work of his contemporaries. Other British homosexual artists,
such as Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, steered clear of representing
homosexuality, whilst others, such as John Minton and Keith Vaughan, depicted
homosexuality in their art in an ambiguous and diffuse fashion, often with
recourse to the homoerotic. Vaughan’s studies of men exercising focused on
the strength and virility of the male nude, and were erotically charged without
being overtly sexual. Minton painted closely observed portraits, mostly of men,
which have a sensual quality to them, such as Artist and Model (1953).
In contrast, Bacon chose to be more explicit in his depictions. He did not
simply allude to, but pointed to the homosexual act of copulation. Given that
Bacon was painting at a time when homosexuality was illegal, how can these
images be explained and what was Bacon attempting to do? I will explain his
motivations by drawing on his cultural and theoretical background. What is evi-
dent is that there is not one homogeneous interpretation of his depiction of
homosexuality, but multiple readings, which develop over Bacon’s lifetime. His
depictions can be explained with recourse to his biography, art historical influ-
ences, political activism and his existential awareness of death. I will also
demonstrate how changes in the political landscape affected his portrayals in
what I will describe as four thematic phases in Bacon’s art.
The first phase is where he depicts the single male nude not engaged in any
sexual activity, but in innocuous poses, such as sitting or standing. The nude
may be interpreted as homoerotic or encouraging homoerotic urges. However,
this is not the motivation of the figure, which has been inadvertently subsumed
into a homosexual discourse. In these examples, Bacon is marvelling at the
nude male form. The second phase is more sexually explicit and involves “cou-
plings”, which are two male figures that are entwined around each other in a
host of different locations. The third phase involves self-identification through
reference to the biographical —— Bacon depicts himself as homosexual and is
represented alongside his lover. The final phase is what I describe as the more

1. Although it should be noted that many of his portraits of Henrietta Moraes were sexually
enticing.
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF HOMOSEXUALITY 45

experimental phase of Bacon’s work, which occurs in the late 1960s to the
1980s and involves Bacon exploring aspects of homosexuality more widely.
In scholarship on Bacon, there has been a tendency to relegate discussions
about homosexuality to his biography2, thereby identifying his paintings with
his sexuality —— what Werckmeister sees as “the autobiographical self-
representation of a homosexual artist” (cited in Schmied 2006, p. 100). The
predilection to couple homosexuality and biography has led to a paucity of
critical appraisal or evaluation about the representation of homosexuality in
his work.3 Another tendency has been to overlook the sexual content of the
image and focus instead on the formal aspects of the aesthetic. Zervigón
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(1995, p. 88) describes how Sylvester (who was Bacon’s primary interviewer)
would nullify the sexually charged violence of Bacon’s images by focusing on
the aesthetic aspects. For example, “such motifs as screaming bloody mouths
were seen as harmless studies in pink, white and red”, instead of sexualising
them by likening them to orifices. However, it is highly plausible that given
that Sylvester was writing about Bacon before 1967 (when homosexuality was
legalised in Britain with the Sexual Offences Act), Sylvester would have been
keen to deflect negative attention away from what could be seen as sexually
provocative images, which would have, in turn, affected the way Bacon’s work
was received. Weinberg (1993, p. xiii) identifies this tendency of keeping work
and life or personal identity apart as the desire to isolate the work of art from
what is taken to be the polluting force of homosexuality.
It is perhaps understandable why critics such as Sylvester wanted to under-
play or distract the viewer from the sexually charged imagery of Bacon’s oeu-
vre for fear of a reprisal from the conservative British art world. However, it is
important now to recoup Bacon’s images of the male nude and to address the
ramifications of the homosexual gaze that he expressed in his representations.4
In his varied depictions of homosexuality, Bacon articulated the complexity
and problematic nature of same-sex desire. His repertoire of images and
vocabulary of pictorial forms are important constructions of homosexual desire
that functioned to reflect and represent the different facets of homosexuality,
such as the hysteria surrounding the act of copulation between two men and
the clandestine measures that men resorted to for sexual gratification. In con-
temporary British society, homosexuality enjoys greater representation in dif-
ferent spheres of cultural life, but in Bacon’s era homosexuality was an
underdeveloped subject that was raised surreptitiously. Bacon’s art reflected
the nuances of homosexual desire from the scopophilic gazing at the male
body to the mechanics of copulation, and provided sustenance for men who
shared the same preoccupations. The potential that Bacon’s work has as an

2. Such as Farson (1994) and Peppiatt (1997).

3. However, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the more theoretical aspects of
sexuality in Bacon’s paintings, as evidenced in Ofield (2001, 2008) and Hornsey (2007).
4. In Lost Gay Novels, Anthony Slide (2003) recoups 50 early twentieth-century American novels
with gay themes or characters, most of which would not have been considered as gay at the time,
and discusses their homosexual aspects, including characterisation and themes.
 46 ARYA

invaluable repository of codes of desire for homosexuality in the visual arts has
not been pursued sufficiently in scholarship. This article seeks to expose the
importance of his artistic representations —— “about seeing and being seen,
about desiring and being desired” (Houlbrook 2005, p. 67) —— that functioned
in the “closet” of coded meanings in cultural representations.5

Formative Influences on Bacon’s Constructions of Homosexuality

In this article, I am taking the social constructivist perspective, which takes

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the view that “sexual identities are constructed by the society and have
meaning only in terms of a complex matrix of culturally determined roles”
(Weinberg 1993, p. xvi). I will begin by examining aspects of Bacon’s biography
to evaluate critically Bacon’s understanding of homosexuality and further elu-
cidate his interpretations. Bacon’s sexual identity was defined in opposition to
his father’s interpretation of masculinity. The person who exerted the greatest
(albeit negative) influence in Bacon’s life was his father, Anthony Edward Mor-
timer Bacon, who was the grandson of a general and was himself once a cap-
tain in the army. On retirement, he owned, bred and trained racehorses. His
militaristic background was reflected in his conservative views about gender
roles. Bacon’s desire to be a painter and his effeminate ways turned his father
against him. His father would attempt to “straighten” his son out in a variety
of brutal and hostile ways. The turning point in their deleterious relationship
came when the 16-year-old Bacon was caught trying on some of his mother’s
underwear. This transgressive action led to his irate father expelling him from
the house, and Bacon then moved to London and lived on an allowance that
was supplied by his mother.
Bacon did not attempt to change his ways or make himself more amenable
to his father. However, the wounds left by his father’s ultimate rejection were
deep, and many of Bacon’s choices and much of his behaviour in later life
stems from the patterns set in these early years. Bacon admitted to a strong
erotic attraction towards his father, and in later years his lovers possessed the
masculine traits and attitudes that his father embodied. For example, Peter
Lacy (who was Bacon’s lover in the 1950s) was a fighter pilot turned pianist,
“whose romantically tinged brand of sadism was exactly attuned to Bacon’s
masochistic leanings” (Schmied 2006, p. 11). In his sadomasochistic relation-
ship with Lacy, Bacon can be said to have enacted the unbalanced and tor-
tured relationship that he had with his father, where Bacon was the victim of
Lacy’s beatings. His next significant relationship (which was in the mid 1960s)
was with the working-class East Ender George Dyer, who would have been
classed as “rough trade”.6 Both relationships ended disastrously: Lacy died of

5. For an excellent study of how ‘the closet’ functioned to give voice to a range of homosexual
desires, see David (1997).
6. ‘Rough trade’ or ‘a bit of rough’ was used to describe working-class masculinised men who had
sex with other men, and was central to the homosexual experience (David 1997, p. 43).
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF HOMOSEXUALITY 47

alcohol-related problems and Dyer was found dead in a hotel room in Paris,
where he and Bacon were staying for the opening of Bacon’s exhibition at the
Grand Palais in October 1971.
In the nomadic explorations that followed Bacon’s expulsion from the family
home, he was exposed to culturally shifting perspectives on homosexuality. In
Ireland, where he was born and spent an early part of his life, Bacon experi-
enced the militancy and restraining hand of the Church.7 Bacon’s subsequent
visits to Berlin and Paris in 1927 provided him with experiences of the more
wide-open possibilities of city life and the spirit of cosmopolitanism. Particu-
larly in Weimar Berlin —— which W. H. Auden described as “the bugger’s day-
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dream” (Peppiatt 1997, p. 29)8 —— Bacon experienced the gayness and

decadence of the Jazz Age.
In his adult life, Bacon lived in London, which was more suited to his bohe-
mian lifestyle than Ireland. London life was cosmopolitan and homosexual
activity was part of the seedy underworld. Houlbrook describes how

London was, nonetheless, the site of a vibrant, extensive, and diverse queer
urban culture. Overlapping social worlds took hold in parks, streets, and uri-
nals; in pubs, restaurants, and dancehalls; in Turkish baths; in furnished
rooms and lodging houses. Across this city, men met in these places, brought
together by their desires for sex or sociability. (Houlbrook 2005, p. 3)

Before the legalisation of homosexuality, homosexuals existed on the fringes of

society along with the criminal underworld of London life, and homosexual encoun-
ters were confined to certain places. It is important to note that many experienced
the law differently, depending on such factors as age, class and status.
Ofield (2008, p. 71) states that the Second World War provided an opportunity
for unspecified social and sexual pleasures between men both within the armed
forces and on the streets of London, especially in and around Soho, and these
activities continued in the post-war years with National Service. Another outlet
for expression and release was in the form of artistic and literary representations
of gayness —— what David (1997, p. 33) describes as “the essential sense of dif-
ferentness” —— which gave voice to the feelings and attitudes of hosts of men.
Given the intolerance towards homosexuality in both its attitude and practice,
visual pleasure was often confined to magazines, which were culturally accessi-
ble. And so desire was exercised in looking at other male bodies in bodybuilding
magazines. These types of magazine came to be regarded pejoratively as being
associated with the cultivation and sharing of the male body —— what Ofield
(2008, p. 67) describes as “the sites of production and seduction”. They enabled
spectatorship to occur —— where men put themselves on show to be looked at.

7. The proliferation of papal images in the 1950s can be interpreted as the revenge that Bacon
took on a figure who opposed his sexual and cultural identity (as an English Protestant, he repre-
sented the minority).
8. Bacon’s father sent Bacon to Berlin under the chaperone of a close friend, who was given the
honorary title of ‘uncle’, in an attempt to ‘straighten up’ his son. The irony is that the trip to
Berlin encouraged Bacon’s homosexual tendencies.
 48 ARYA

Ofield (2008, p. 64) singles out the magazine Physique Pictorial as one such publi-
cation, which he notes could be purchased from 1952 and a copy of which was
found in Bacon’s studio (7 Reece Mews) around this time.

Bacon’s Attitude towards Homosexuality

The history of homosexuality in Britain is long and complex. The term “homosex-
ual”, as a category of identity, was not coined until 1869. In this conception,
“sexual acts and desires became constitutive of identity. Homosexuality as the
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condition, and therefore identity, or particular bodies is thus a production of

that historical moment” (Somerville 1997, p. 37). In this first usage, it was
regarded as a medical-legal term. The next milestone was the publication of the
Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). The revolutionary
findings of Kinsey provided the first study that tallied the instances of same-sex
relationships in the general public and discovered how comparatively widespread
homosexuality was. Cooper (1994, p. 210) observes how this breached the taboo
on homosexuality. Thus, the focus of homosexuality moved from the peripheries
of medical and legal discourse to the realm of public discussion. Other studies,
albeit on a smaller scale, such as the Wolfenden Report in 1957, raised aware-
ness of the prevalence of male homosexuality in Britain and recommended the
decriminalisation of private sexual relations between consenting adult men.
During the early twentieth century in Britain, representations of homosexual-
ity were divided by a fundamental distinction, which related to identification.
Some men identified themselves as being homosexual, queer or whatever neolo-
gism took their fancy9, whilst others styled themselves differently: as men who
have sex with other men. These men often engaged in emotional and sexual rela-
tionships with women as well as men, but did not consider themselves as homo-
sexual. They separated their gender (masculinity) from their sexual desire for
men and did not view their predilections as a component of their larger overarch-
ing male identity. It is worth noting that the binary opposition between hetero-
sexuality and homosexuality was a post-war phenomenon (Houlbrook 2005, p. 7).
Bacon fell into the former category of identifying himself as a homosexual.
In spite of the moral and social recriminations that Bacon faced by his father
for being homosexual, this did not deter his self-expression. In his personal life,
Bacon led a full sexual and emotional life with his lovers. He spent much of his
adult life around Soho, which from the 1920s onwards, and certainly by the
1950s, was regarded as a more louche part of London. Although his sexuality
was a significant part of his life and undoubtedly spurred on his fascination with
the male body, it was not a pronounced part of his social life. His recreational
time was taken up by gatherings with artist friends in select bars and
restaurants. Earlier, I mentioned the tendency for critics (in early scholarship)
to sidestep or take a detour from the explicit content of sexuality in his work,

9. It is worth adding that there was variation in the understanding of these terms.
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF HOMOSEXUALITY 49

and this may have been significant in Bacon’s public profile. He entered the art
scene late (in c.1933), after spending his early adult years as a designer.
Emphasis on what many at the time would have regarded as the indecent
aspects of his personal life may have hindered his development as an artist. In
the early twentieth century, the trial of Oscar Wilde still cast a shadow.
The openness with which he dealt with his sexuality in his personal life was
not altogether reflected in his art. Bacon was more circumspect with his visual
representations of homosexuality and, with the exception of the Black Trip-
tychs that explicitly convey his sexual relationship with Dyer, Bacon opted, by
and large, to depict the anonymity of homosexual encounters. The distorted
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forms and use of various devices, such as striated curtains and peepholes,
enabled Bacon to blur the boundaries between seeing and veiling what would
have been regarded as criminal activities.

The Homoerotic in Art

Study of a Nude (1952–1953; see Figure 1) and Study from the Human Body
(1949) are two examples of the male nude. In both examples, Bacon attempts
to delineate the poise and strength of the male figure, and focuses on the
broad shoulders and buttocks. These images are examples of the homoerotic,
where Bacon is marvelling at the erotic power and strength of the male body.
In his portrayals of male nudes, Bacon was influenced by a range of art histori-
cal sources, from Michelangelo’s “voluptuous nudes” (Russell 1993, p. 155) to
Thomas Eakins’ homoerotic nudes in the nineteenth century.
In Study of a Nude, Bacon concentrates on the splendour and tautness of
the male nude. The figure stands on a rail and takes the position of a diver.
The musculature of his arms and back conveys his athleticism. The from-
behind position of the figure is a deliberate ploy to fix attention on his body
rather than on his personal identity (which would be conveyed by the face).
The figure is contained in a space-frame structure, a device that Bacon used to
concentrate the image down. The spatial ambiguity of the background and
blackness of the background further draws the viewer’s attention to the stren-
uous centre —— the poised figure. The study of the figure is possibly a study of
an athlete or a swimmer, which Bacon may have encountered in one of his
magazines. Open-air venues in London, such as parks and ponds, were sites for
homosexual display. “The ponds became a place where men could see and be
seen, a site of public culture that valued the strength and beauty of the male
body” (Houlbrook 2005, p. 55). In the nineteenth century, the realist painter
Eakins innovated portraiture and took it out of the drawing room into the open
air, into the streets and parks. The Swimming Hole (1884–1885) features
Eakins’ finest studies of male nude forms as they dive, swim and lounge by the
pool. There are similarities between Eakins’ figurative forms in that painting
and Bacon’s representation here in terms of the emphasis placed on the mus-
cularity and strength of the male body. What is idiosyncratic is that there is no
 50 ARYA
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Figure 1 Francis Bacon, Study of a Nude (1952–1953), oil on canvas, 61 cm x 51 cm.

Ó The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2012.

water beneath the figure, which quashes the possibility of a transition from his
poised state to the action of diving. In other words, the action is going
nowhere, and hence the focus on the body is gratuitous and has the purpose of
eroticising the male body. The influence of Michelangelo can be seen in the
“attitude of maximum anatomical tension” (Ficacci 2006, p. 44). Michelan-
gelo’s male nudes are renowned for their poise and musculature detail, and
Bacon adopted these features in order to add to the tension of his work.

Structuring Desire

Bacon’s first two explicitly homosexual images are Two Figures (1953; see
Figure 2) and Two Figures in the Grass (1954). Both examples feature two
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF HOMOSEXUALITY 51

naked men, with bodies entwined, in the throes of what seems to be a passion-
ate tryst. They have been described as couplings. The charged and energetic
dynamic of the two figures differs greatly from Bacon’s treatment of the single
male figure in the previous example, which is poised and tender. The addition
of another figure creates a power dynamic —— one figure exerts power over
the other, and the union is not tender and loving, but aggressive and intense.
In this visual pair of entwined bodies, Bacon eliminates any sense of social
propriety and exposes the human in its most animalistic and ravening state.
We can see here the influences of two artists who were important in his formu-
lation of the male body. In the musculature and serpentine forms that many of
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his figures exhibit, we see the influence of Michelangelo. In his desire to por-
tray the body in motion, we see the influence of the nineteenth-century pho-
tographer Eadweard Muybridge, in particular his sequence of photographs from
The Human Figure in Motion (1887). Muybridge’s photographs of the 1870s and
1880s changed the way people understood animal and human movement. Muy-
bridge wanted to show movement as it actually is and strove to capture the
continuity of motion. He made sequential photographs of animals and humans
to show the progression of movement as a horse gallops, for example.

Figure 2 Francis Bacon, Two Figures (1953), oil on canvas, 152.5 cm x 116.5 cm.
Ó The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2012.
 52 ARYA

Although the figures in The Human Figure in Motion are clearly wrestling,
Lucie-Smith (2004, p. 119) comments on the sexual charge that they impart.
Bacon manipulated this to enhance the ambiguity of his figures and, in the
depictions of Two Figures, Bacon combines the stature of Michelangelo’s nudes
with the explorations of movement and the multiplicity of viewpoints of the
body in Muybridge’s forms.10 He transformed the objective and clinical aspects
of Muybridge’s studies into carnal and frenetic portrayals, and explores the
boundaries between intimacy and brutality.
A recurring feature in Bacon’s couplings, which is particularly pronounced in
Two Figures, is the ambiguity of action displayed by the two figures. The
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activities that come to mind when looking at the two figures are that they are
wrestling or copulating. But rather than having to make a choice between one
or the other activity, it is also possible to entertain both activities
simultaneously —— it is a double reading. At the level of perception, we see
either “wrestling” or “copulating”, but, at the level of thought, both interpre-
tations can hold.11 Bacon cleverly employs coded meanings that mean he is able
to present an image which operates on different levels. The more “innocent”
reading denotes the sport, whilst the more loaded meaning refers to the trans-
gressive act of male copulation. Indeed, a further reading indicates a temporal
continuity of action —— the wrestling is a prelude to copulation. By being able
to oscillate from one to the other, Bacon was providing his viewers with a
socially acceptable image, whilst also appealing to male homosexual desire.
The ambiguity of action here could result in inducing “homosexual panic”.
This phenomenon, first coined by the psychiatrist Edward J. Kempf in 1920,
describes

an acute, severe episode of anxiety related to the fear (or the delusional
conviction) that the subject is about to be attracted sexually by another
person of the same sex, or that he is thought to be a homosexual by fellow
workers, etc. (Campbell 2009, p. 462)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick develops this concept and suggests that if homophobia is
a type of social blackmail which increases the level of vigilance between men in
terms of how they should behave towards each other in case they are labelled
“gay”, then homosexual panic is the defence mechanism undertaken when a
man finds himself being aware of his attraction to another man. However slight
this attraction may be, the former man may experience a range of conflicting
emotions —— the attraction becomes revulsion, horror and may even result in
violence (Crain 1994, pp. 33–34; Sedgwick 1985, p. 89). Homosexual panic may

10. Bacon remarked to Sylvester that he often found it difficult to separate out the influences that
he gained from both: ‘Actually, Michelangelo and Muybridge are mixed up in my mind together,
and so I perhaps could learn about positions from Muybridge and learn about the ampleness and
grandeur of form from Michelangelo, and it would be very difficult for me to disentangle the influ-
ence of Muybridge and the influence of Michelangelo’ (Sylvester 1993, p. 114).
11. See Žižek’s (2000, pp. 5ff.) analysis of Casablanca (1942) in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime
for a study of split readings in the film.
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF HOMOSEXUALITY 53

explain the oscillation from one reading of Two Figures to the other. The viewer
is taken aback by the presence of two figures copulating and reinterprets their
behaviour as that of sport, hence resolving the initial fear.
In depicting homosexual copulation, Bacon was drawing attention to what
would have been regarded as an unspeakable act and grounds for prosecution.
He was reacting against the politics of the time, which forced homosexual men
to be furtive and secretive about their identities and practices. There was always
the risk of being discovered. Bacon concentrates on the very act of contention
—— what was regarded as the most unspeakable aspect of homosexuality —— the
act of buggery. Crain (1994, p. 34) explains how, “once revulsion at the particu-
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lar act of homosexuality is transcended, it can be seen as a different, and no

worse, structure of affection”. But by overtly placing the act in the public gaze,
before society showed any signs of tolerance towards the act, Bacon was under-
scoring its difference and, paradoxically, alienating society further.
Bacon exercised cunning in his depiction of the two figures. Not only does
he make the actions occurring ambiguous, but he also uses striated smudges to
blur the faces (and therefore identities) of the figures. Bacon had to present
his views circumspectly. Shows of homoeroticism or homosexuality were kept
away from the public gaze for fear of recrimination. Higgins (1996, p. 272)
comments on the scrutiny that homosexuals were under in 1954: “in no year
before or afterwards were so many trials for homosexual offences reported in
the press”. The collective imprisonment in the 1950s of well-known figures
Lord Montague, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood for homosexual
offences, and the clandestine life that homosexuals led, inevitably drew them
towards anonymity and ambiguity. It is significant that the couplings would
recur in other images such as Triptych, Studies from the Human Body (1970),
Three Studies for Figures on a Bed (1972) and Two Figures with a Monkey
(1973), all of which were painted after the legalisation of homosexuality.
The portrayal of two men embroiled in a physical tryst would have been
regarded as a highly controversial image in the 1950s. In gay politics, it was
a positive move, as it increased visibility of male homosexuality during a
time when it was not seen in mainstream culture. Bacon had established his
reputation by this time, and his images would have been circulated widely.
However, a more negative reading suggests that he was inadvertently sup-
porting the stereotypical view of homosexual sex —— that it was base, anon-
ymous and lacking in any civilised conceptualisation of love. George Shrady,
author of one of the earliest medical discussions of homosexuality in the
USA, classified homosexual acts as among the “lowest forms of bestiality and
sensuousness exhibited by debased men” (cited in Weinberg 1993, pp. 6–7).
The setting of Two Figures in the Grass adds to the animalistic overtones of
the union. Homosexual acts were regarded as alien and abnormal, and
Bacon’s images of the two figures could have added to the marginalisation
and suspicion surrounding homosexual behaviour. However, I am inclined to
suggest that rather than viewing these as perpetuations of negative stereo-
typing, they should be viewed as realistic accounts of the situation that
 54 ARYA

faced homosexuals in Britain in the 1950s. Bacon was opposing a social sys-
tem. He was condemning a system that inhibited the freedom of expression.
The social taboo attached to homosexuals meant that encounters were brief
and transitory; this was not a matter of choice, but of necessity. The need
for discretion, and the apprehension involved in the seeking out of sexual
encounters, thwarted the possibility of emotional interchange. The violence
of the act in Bacon’s portrayals conveyed the urgency of seeking sexual
relief. The clenched teeth of the lower figure adds to the desperation of the
union. Encounters were often brief, anonymous and urgent, and took place in
dark and desolate hideouts. Here, the starkness of the room adds to the
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impersonality of the encounter.12 The nature of the meetings is reflected in

Bacon’s art, “in the scrambled figure, the sporadic gesture, the chance
encounter, the reverse image, the sudden slippage, the lowered guard” (Bea-
ver 1981, p. 105). In Three Studies of Figures on Beds (1972) and Sleeping
Figure (1974), Bacon uses circular peepholes, which draw attention to the
illicit nature of their activities.

A Discourse on Death

Two Figures can also be subsumed into a discourse on death. The struggle
between the two figures can be interpreted metaphorically as a struggle
between the forces of life and death, which was a recurring preoccupation of
Bacon. The impersonal nature of the relationship conveys the impersonality of
death, which indiscriminately snatches people from their lives. In critical the-
ory, eroticism is often used to show the mechanics of death. Ficacci (2006, p.
49) develops this argument. He interprets the act of buggery between the two
men as an “antecedent fact”, and the more pressing issue he identifies is the
existential condition of humankind. What we are seeing in this struggle of fig-
ures is the struggle between life and death, and the ghostly imagery present in
the painting supports this reading:

It is wholly transformed in the whiteness of the sheet, the anthracite black

of the background, the blending of white, grays and bluish tints on the lov-
ers’ bodies . . . The exasperated desires of the amorous act are rendered by
the bluish gray magma of the bodies, the blurred anatomical parts, and the
faces crushed by a fleeting sensation, fixed in tragic expression, trapped in
the tangle of vitality and death. (Ficacci 2006, p. 49)

Another reading points to Bacon’s prescience. His ghostly depictions could be

intimating the AIDS crisis, which haunted the 1980s. Although there is now
much more education and knowledge about the causes of AIDS, at the time
the homosexual population was targeted and there was an inordinate amount
of scaremongering, which equated homosexuality with the disease. Dollimore

12. However, it is worth adding that Bacon’s interiors are notoriously stark and neutral. They have
been described as looking like hotel rooms. In that respect, this is not a special case.
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF HOMOSEXUALITY 55

(1998, p. xi) notes that “in certain hostile representations of AIDS, homosexu-
ality and death have been made to imply each other: homosexuality is seen as
death-driven, death-desiring and thereby death-dealing”.

Unveiling the Self

Triptych August 1972 (1972; see Figure 3) was painted shortly after homosexu-
ality had been decriminalised in the UK. It involves a coupling and so relates
back to the previous phase. However, what is distinct, and why I have chosen
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to group it in a different phase, is that the identity of the figures of the couple
are known —— it shows the relationship between Bacon and his late lover,
George Dyer. Bacon explored this subject in his triptychs. One would expect
the relationship between the two figures to develop from panel to panel, but
the typical configuration consists of the central panel involving the sexual
union of the bodies, whilst the other two panels convey isolation, detachment
and the absence of communication. In Triptych August 1972, the left and right
panels echo one another —— Dyer in the left panel, sitting alone; Bacon in the
right, likewise. Each man is represented in a state of solitary confinement,
against a black background, where the blackness signifies the void. The figures
could either be absorbed in the contemplation of the abyss or could equally be
in the act of masturbating, but, in either case, they display a wilful narcissism.
The middle panel consists of what looks like the two bodies, one on top of the
other, engaged in copulation. This coupling involves the division of power,
where the figure on top can be viewed as the victor/violator and the figure
underneath can be viewed as the prey. The imbalance of power is divisive and
results in the breakdown of communication and union in the other panels.
Their union is not joyous, but only serves to augment the despair and loneli-
ness. Their sense of incompleteness (demonstrated by their fragmented
bodies) is not made whole in the encounter.

Figure 3 Francis Bacon, Triptych August 1972 (1972), oil on canvas, each panel 198
cm x 147.5 cm. Ó The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2012.
 56 ARYA

The shock of Dyer’s death was reflected in the series of three narrative
paintings (known as the Black Triptychs) which document and commemorate
this influential relationship, and which include Triptych August 1972. In the
painting, Bacon is revealing his identity as homosexual. In previous examples,
the male figures portrayed were anonymous, but after legalisation Bacon may
have felt a need to express this essential aspect of his life, and to be more at
liberty to articulate homosexuality without fear of recrimination. The shocking
circumstances of Dyer’s suicide add to the drama of the work.
In the USA, the new social movements of the 1960s, such as the Black Power
movement, inspired many homosexuals (males and females) to become more
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politically active and fight their cause, with the result of the Gay Liberation
movement emerging towards the end of the decade (which was undoubtedly
facilitated by the Stonewall riots of 1969). The activism in the USA had an
effect on both sides of the Atlantic, and homosexuals in Britain and Europe
started to become more politically active. This affected the visibility of homo-
sexuality in the arts.
In Triptych August 1972, Bacon was positioning his professional and sexual
self on the same canvas. He was the artist, but he was also a homosexual.
Although he had not been secretive of his sexuality in his social life, this was
the first instance of an explicit statement, which constituted an unveiling of
the self. The shift in conceptual understanding from regarding the act alone to
considering the person who performs the act can be mapped in the transition
from Two Figures to Triptych August 1972. In the aforesaid painting, Bacon is
engaged in the homosexual act and then embodying it.
Given the shift in thinking about homosexuality and the greater rights that
homosexuals had in the 1970s, it seems rather bleak that, in spite of auda-
ciously unveiling his identity as a homosexual, the narrative in the triptych
conveys a distinct breakdown of emotionality. It looks like the transitory com-
ing together of two strangers rather than the lovemaking of two lovers. Possi-
ble explanations for this treatment include Bacon’s volatile attitude towards
his lovers. In his interviews, he discusses the destructive and obsessive effects
of sexual relationships. It is plausible that the earlier wounds created by his
dysfunctional relationship with his father re-emerged in his later life in the
subsequent relationships that he had with his lovers. In these relationships,
Bacon exercised his sadomasochistic impulses. This is given graphic portrayal
in his work, as depicted by the motif of the struggle (between predator and
prey). In the triptych, the figures of Dyer (in the left-hand panel) and Bacon
(in the right) are both looking in different directions. Their lack of wholeness
can be interpreted metaphorically —— they are incomplete and their union
does not make them whole. Another factor that adds a different perspective
to the argument is that Bacon is drawing the viewer’s attention to the aspect
that caused the most disgust. Media, legal and medical attention on homosexu-
ality in his lifetime was fixated on the physical act, and not the emotional
aspects of same-sex relationships. The emotional experiences were relegated
to literature and other forms of high culture.
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF HOMOSEXUALITY 57

Parodying Gayness

In his later work, in the 1970s and 1980s, Bacon also expressed an interest in the
portrayal of sportsmen (footballers, boxers, wrestlers and cricketers), as seen
in, for example, Study of the Human Body (1982; see Figure 4) and Study from
the Human Body, Figure in Movement (1982). In these examples, Bacon is able
to be more experimental and to indulge his fantasies by displaying the athleti-
cism of sportsmen with their genitals on show. This exposure lacks the guarded
and voyeuristic sense of Two Figures, and is an explicit statement of sexuality.
The focal point is the male organ and the fragmented nature of the body deflects
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the focus onto the (absent) person. One possible interpretation is that Bacon is
liberating the desire of the very body part that had been denied to him by social,
political and religious norms. The unveiling of the organ is concomitant with the
unveiling of himself. In this final phase, Bacon felt more at liberty to explore the
subject of homosexuality and opted to explore sportsmen, whom he had a pen-
chant for in his personal life. Bacon is claiming, or reclaiming, gayness for him-
self. “Gay” as opposed to “homosexual” indicates a further development in
sexual politics. It implies the naming of one’s sexuality in one’s own terms,
instead of in terms defined by medical or legal bodies.
Another more sinister and paradoxical reading suggests that sexual libera-
tion is followed by sexual exploitation. Bacon is objectifying the male by
reducing him to a stereotype that conforms to his fantasy. By stripping away
the face, reducing the body to a mere fragment and placing symbols of mascu-

Figure 4 Francis Bacon, Study of the Human Body (1982), oil on canvas, 198 cm x
147.5 cm. Ó The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2012.
 58 ARYA

linity —— the cricket pads —— on the legs, Bacon is objectifying the male body
for his own pleasure. The amorphous fragment of the body operates porno-
graphically, to draw the viewer’s attention to the body part rather than the
whole body. Bacon is fetishising the male form. The elevation of the mutant
body onto a table further enhances the grotesque form of the fragment and
situates the genitals at the viewer’s eye level. If each phase outlined corre-
sponds to a progressive liberation of homosexuality, then Bacon has succeeded
in moving representations from an underground subculture to the focal point
of the viewer.
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Refiguring the Boundaries of Desire

In his depictions of homosexuality, Bacon overturns the erstwhile normative

position of heterosexism and its ramifications in modernist art. Bacon’s art
posed a threat to binary sexuality, which had hitherto framed Western art. In
this binary understanding of sexuality, masculinity and femininity were pitted
at opposite ends of the spectrum with desire being constructed and fulfilled
along a heterosexual axis. Bacon’s art represented a challenge to the viewers
in his day, who would have been accustomed to female nudes and the fulfil-
ment of patriarchal norms and male heterosexual pleasure.
From the very beginnings, the history of Western art was oriented towards
the axis of subject/object, where the male artist/viewer assumed a position of
power and possession over the female object (where the viewing position that
coexisted with this theory is known as the male gaze). In “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema”, Mulvey (1975) explicates the differences: the (active) male
promotes a stance of identification whilst the (passive) female is objectified.
In Bacon’s day, the notion of the male gaze13 had been the subject of ongoing
critiques in feminist art, which sought to subvert the male focus and enable
women to speak about their own experiences and pleasures, and to construct
their own identities aside from the constructions of patriarchal discourse.
Bacon is working according to a feminist ideology in the broadest sense in that
he queries the validity of viewing positions and the constructions of sexuality.
He shifts the focus onto the male body and articulates the constructions of
desire in relation to personal identity. His depictions enable the viewer to
experience the various facets of homosexuality, from the admiration of the
male physique, to the anonymity and impersonality of homosexual sex. In his
portrayals, Bacon conveys a range of attitudes and approaches to homosexual-
ity. Although he depicted his passionate engagement with Dyer in his 1972 trip-
tych, he would also have been aware that such a stance of self-identification,
of unveiling himself as a homosexual, was not typical.

13. The gaze is a trope used in the visual arts to refer to the distribution of power across a het-
erosexist axis.
 CONSTRUCTIONS OF HOMOSEXUALITY 59

Another hitherto established notion that Bacon thwarts in his art is the fulf-
ilment of the gaze, which completes the circle of desire: the subject requires
the gaze of the other to bestow form (Van Alphen 1992, p. 117). In viewing his
paintings, wholeness is not conferred on the viewer: we do not read fulfilment
and satiation, but despair and desperation. The veiled faces in Two Figures
indicate that the self is denied and true identity is suppressed because of ille-
gality. In his later phase in the 1980s, Bacon reclaims his identity by being able
to paint the penis, but the fragmented and grotesque nature of these figures
inhibits the possibility of viewing fulfilment. It would seem that the construc-
tion of self in a self/other relationship is denied in Bacon. The figures resist
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“being gazed upon” and remain oblivious to one another. Since the subject,
who is dependent upon the other for construction, resists the other/viewer,
desire is not fulfilled. Van Alphen (1992, p. 115) argues that the subjects in
Bacon’s paintings are all represented as trapped in an entirely inner sensation
of self. Desire is not satiated but is frustrated in the very act of perception. By
displacing the heterosexist discourse which structures the dynamics of viewing,
Bacon is withholding the viewing pleasure that we are so accustomed to shar-
ing through viewing. The viewers experience the ruptured effects of the jouis-
sance that consumes the figures, and, in the case of the copulating figures in,
for example, Two Figures and Triptych August 1972, the orgasm experienced
expresses isolation, alienation and the loss of self. As the Baconian figures are
flayed to their bare flesh, we as viewers are taken apart and our nerves are
exposed. Viewing therefore becomes a wounding experience.

Conclusion

Bacon makes a very important contribution to the history of visual representa-

tions of homosexuality in British art in the twentieth century. From a personal
perspective, his representations can be viewed as cathartic. He was repri-
manded for his sexuality by his father and had to battle against social con-
straints and the numerous homosexual arrests that were made in Britain. For
the majority of his life, Bacon had to exercise caution about a fundamental
part of his identity. His representations can be viewed as an attempt to
reclaim what had once been withheld, and the urgency of this outlet may
explain “the tangibly violent sexuality that suffuses so much of his imagery”
(Peppiatt 1997, p. 17).
Bacon’s relentless representations of the male nude throughout his career
demonstrate his fervent struggle against a society which knew of the existence
of homosexuality but wanted to deny it and eliminate it: the homosexual
“stands on the fringes of both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, fertility and the law”
(Beaver 1981, p. 99). Bacon brings homosexuality to the forefront of his aes-
thetic and demonstrates the complex range of emotions and experiences that
are central to the homosexual life in his time. He does not sublimate homosex-
ual desire, as many artists and writers did in former times, but conveys its
 60 ARYA

complexity in different registers, which I have schematised in a series of visual

snapshots. These snapshots convey the pain and isolation of encounter, the
urgency of fulfilment and the insatiability of desire. Bacon lifts the veil on
homosexuality in a series of stages, which begins with the homoerotic and pro-
gresses to openly gay portrayals. This reflects the changing politics of his time
and also conveys the multifaceted nature of homosexual expression.
Bacon’s art offers a corrective to the binary schism between male subject
and female object. He dislocates these pre-existing structures and works
within a feminist paradigm by problematising the gaze (by resisting the confer-
ral of wholeness) and by presenting a range of critical experiences without
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implying closure or mastery, thus anticipating many of the ideas and practices
of queer theory.

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful to an anonymous referee for this journal for their

invaluable comments.

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