Evans is a place on Earth: Queer British Art:From the closet to the clear blue sky.

"For me, to use the word 'queer' is a liberation; it was a word that frightened me, but no longer" - Derek Jarman.

I saw an internet troll commenting that Tate Britain's Queer British Art 1861-1967 was a reductive exercise in that it reduced artists down to their sexual preferences. Like most trolls he'd failed to actually read in detail or investigate the very thing he was up in arms about. As with the British Library's recent Gay UK:Love, Law and Liberty this exhibition was being hosted to mark fifty years since the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men. So it was more celebration than reduction. Though I guess the real celebration comes in the, hopeful, follow up show that focuses on queer British art from 1967 to the present day.

Not only is it a celebration of sorts, it's a story worth telling, and it's both interesting to show the development of British art through the prism of attitudes towards homosexuality and the development of attitudes toward homosexuality through the prism of British art. Starting in 1861 when the death penalty for sodomy was abolished it's a long, slow story of gradual liberation, identification, and community building. The Tate, in a cautious, if probably wise, disclaimer, have opted to use the word 'queer' to "avoid imposing more specific identity labels".

Despite its reputation for prudishness the Victorian era seemed to have been bursting at the seams with latent, or even blatant, homosexual lust. Simeon Solomon's work was criticised for 'unwholesomeness' and 'effeminacy' and his Bacchus described as "a sentimentalist of rather weak consumption; he drinks mead, possibly sugar and water, certainly not wine".

Simeon Solomon - Bacchus (1867)

Frederic Leighton - Daedalus and Icarus (1869)

Whilst the heterosexual men were sipping their wine, Frederic Leighton was pondering the potential homosexual desires hidden in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Walter Crane was appropriating the work of Sandro Botticelli to reflect his own interests and desires. Over in Taormina, Sicily, Wilhelm van Gloeden looked admiringly through his lens at the young Sicilian men. All of these works were open to interpretation. If you wanted to see them as gay art you could but most chose not to and so long as the artists themselves weren't physically acting out their desires then all was fine and dandy.

Walter Crane - The Renaissance of Venus (1877)

Wilhelm van Gloeden - Head of a Sicilian Boy (1890s)

Henry Scott Tuke - The Critics (1927)

Even if Henry Scott Tuke's 1927 The Critics evokes homoerotic desires as much as it does the masterful impressionistic ripples of the sun dappled Cornish sea to our modern eyes it seems it was possible, ninety years ago, to compartmentalise this kind of thing (think, decades later people wouldn't believe Freddie Mercury was gay despite parading around in leather vests, peaked caps, and calling his band Queen).

Edward Carpenter, in that respect, was a man very much ahead of his time. He lived in the Peak District, openly, with his gay lover George Merrill. He was an advocate not only of same sex marriage but of vegetarianism, socialism, and women's rights. When the taste maker Fry painted him he remarked upon Carpenter's "very anarchist overcoat".

Roger Fry - Edward Carpenter (1894)

As the nineteenth century rolled over into the twentieth a series of scandals, along with more in depth scientific studies by the likes of Henry Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, pushed the debate about sexuality and homosexuality into the public eye. There's some stuff about Oscar Wilde's trial (including, on display, somewhat bizarrely, the prison door of his cell in Reading Gaol), and a small section devoted to Michael Field.

Michael Field is a most curious case and one I'd hitherto been unaware of. Michael Field wasn't one person but two and neither of them had been born male. Katharine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper used the joint pseudonym for the poetry and verse drama they wrote together. It wasn't the only thing they did together. They lived together too, as lovers, for four decades. When they died less than a year apart they were buried together in St Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic Church in Mortlake. The lesbianism is, of course, perfectly acceptable to all right-minded people now, and most won't have a problem with the fourteen year age gap, but physical love between an aunt and niece still seems rather problematic.

If you have to drill down into the details of the story of Michael Field to find something shocking then Aubrey Beardsley, quite literally, puts it right in your face. Alongside some Cecil Beaton photographs and Beardsley's own illustration for Wilde's Salome we're presented with the artwork he provided for Aristophanes' Lysistrata, a classical Athenian play performed as far back as 411BC which used ribald humour to tell the story of a woman's extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnesian War by denying all the men of Greece any sex. I once went on a date to see this play (in Hammersmith) and I wonder now what kind of message I was being sent! Certainly if my date was expecting me to look anything like Beardsley's Herald they'd have been very disappointed! My hair's much shorter.

Aubrey Beardsley - The Examination of the Herald from 'Lysistrata' by Aristophanes (1896)

Angus McBean - Danny La Rue (1968)

Beardsley himself, by all accounts, wasn't gay (despite clearly loving drawing massive cocks) but he dressed in a dapper fashion and behaved in an affected manner that may mark him out as a forerunner of the whole 'metrosexual' thing we heard so much about a decade or so ago.

Gay or not he'd have probably been described as a 'theatrical type', which was the euphemism du jour (and lingers to this day). There's a room given over to female impersonators, a portrait of Glen Byam Shaw (who, it is claimed, was almost certainly the lover of Siegfried Sassoon) from John Gielgud's Hamlet, Noel Coward's dressing gown, and sets of headphones where you can listen to Coward's 'Mad About The Boy', Ella Shields singing 'Why Did I Kiss That Girl?', and Douglas Byng's camper than John Inman skipping 'Cabaret Boys'. It's a nice touch (as are the assorted visitor response cards testifying to people's own personal experiences of coming out as gay, more often than the art, that are displayed alongside said art).

Glyn Warren Philpot - Glen Byam Shaw as 'Laertes' (1934-1935)

Ethel Sands - Tea with Sickert (1911-1912)

The Bloomsbury Group, as we often hear, "lived in squares and loved in triangles" although trying to work out exactly who was married to who, who slept with who else, and whatnot seems to suggest something far more confusing then the straightforward triangle. Whatever their 'profoundly queer experiment in modern living' did for their personal lives it seemed to have worked wonders for their art. At least judging by the selection on display at the Tate.

Ethel Sands takes her cues from Matisse, Vuillard, and the Post-Impressionists while Ethel Walker, by way of Cezanne and Gauguin, goes back even further to find inspiration in Greco-Roman friezes and Homer's Odyssey. Best of all is Duncan Grant's Bathing from 1911. Inspired by summers spent at the, then well known London cruising spot, Serpentine, the rendering of the wave is almost an early form of Abstract Expressionism, the muscular swimmers' bodies are rendered as pointedly as a Tamara de Lempicka portrait but with the studied Mannerism of the High Renaissance, and there's something about the seeming desperation of those bathers to return to the boat that's an inversion of the majesty of Theodore Gericault's 1819 Raft of the Medusa.

Ethel Walker - Decoration:The Excursion of Nausicaa (1920)

Duncan Grant - Bathing (1911)

Edward Wolfe - Portrait of Pat Nelson (1930s)

Marlow Moss - Composition in Yellow, Black and White (1949)

If sexual conventions could be defied then so could artistic ones. Marlow, born Marjorie, Moss did both. She lived in Paris with her lover, the Dutch writer Antoinette Hendrika Nijhoff-Wind but, as you can see from the above composition, the major influence on her work was Piet Mondrian.

Claude Cahun (who had an excellent double header show with Gillian Wearing at the National Portrait Gallery recently which I was unable to find time to write about, sadly) was another artist who toyed with the ideas of identity. Mostly hers. Often posing in masks or dressed up she's clearly been a huge influence on Cindy Sherman as well as Wearing.

While Cahun was pioneering the still controversial idea of non-binary gender, Virginia Woolf's liberal approach to sexuality and how women should behave and her affair with Vita Sackville-West attracted more attention. To the extent that she became the subject for a snapper as celebrated as Man Ray. Woolf refused to wear lipstick for her portrait until Man Ray explained to her that it was merely a technical measure and wouldn't show in the finished photograph.

Claude Cahun - I Extend My Arms (1931-1932)

Man Ray - Virginia Woolf (1934)

Alvaro Guevara - Dame Edith Sitwell (1916)

There's a copy of Woolf's Orlando in a vitrine but more interesting are the works by Cecile Walton, Dora Carrington, and Laura Knight. They all seem to call into question the duality of the female body from the perspective of artists living inside those bodies yet equally observers of them.

Walton takes it a step further. 1920's Romance shows a young lady, clearly soon after giving birth, looking quite dispassionately towards her offspring and appearing surprisingly relaxed considering that offspring's just come out of her. It's a painting that's initially comforting but becomes more jarring with a more sustained consideration. It's rather fine.

Cecile Walton - Romance (1920)

Laura Knight - Self-Portrait (1916)

Dora Carrington - Female Figure Lying on Her Back (1912)

Edward Burra's armoured and muscular Soldiers at Rye could hardly be more different to Dora Carrington's exposed and vulnerable Female Figure Lying on Her Back and it's odd to consider that some would find a naked body more shocking than an image of people potentially killing each other.

In the fifties and sixties Soho become the UK's epicentre of queer culture. Francis Bacon called it "the sexual gymnasium of the city" and many of the artists in this part of the Tate show were friends and shared studios. Though they were based, mostly, in London travel became a theme of their work and they were often sunning it up in the Med or hanging around in 'seedy American bars', Burra's Izzy Orts, with a blank eyed soldier staring ominously out at us, was inspired by a dancehall in the docks of Boston, MA.

Edward Burra - Soldiers at Rye (1941)

Edward Burra - Izzy Orts (1937)

Keith Vaughan - Kouros (1960)

Johns Craxton and Minton, and Keith Vaughan, were described as 'neo-romantics' though Craxton preferred the term 'Arcadian' and although his works, like the Head of a Cretan Sailor and Pastoral for P.W. have something of the urgent city life often expounded upon by the Futurists and the Cubists they also pay homage to the outdoor life of Greek island shepherds and seamen. Horses, trees, and goats populate the geometric abstractions and pyramids of Craxton's mesmerising output. Robert Medley also found inspiration in antiquity and the rural, his Summer Eclogue references Roman poet Virgil's Eclogues in which pastoral tranquillity is disrupted by erotic forces.

Vaughan's are harder to read and seem almost coded. It seems that Vaughan was uneasy about his homosexuality and was concerned that there were clues to it in his work and his secret would've been uncovered. In the private drawings of men sucking each other's dicks and wanking each other off he was decidedly less shy.

Robert Medley - Summer Eclogue No.1:Cyclicts (1950)

John Craxton - Head of a Cretan Sailor (1946)

John Minton - Cornish Boy at a Window (1948)

John Craxton - Pastoral for P.W. (1948)

Public opinion was gradually, slowly, changing but the law had not caught up with it yet. Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell had separate beds in their tiny flat to maintain the pretence that they weren't a couple, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu was sent to jail for "conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons", and avant-garde photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer was thrown out of her room for leaving a copy of Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness in plain view.

There's a selection of the library books that Orton and Halliwell defaced and collaged (and got themselves incarcerated for doing so), a Picture Post story about Roberta Cowell (the former racing driver who was the first known British transsexual woman to undergo sex reassignment surgery), and an impressively large box of buttons collected by Richard Chopping and Dennis Wirth-Miller to celebrate their 'liaisions' with soldiers. It's an interesting introduction to the final room in which the flowering of proud, and overt, homosexuality became further explicit in the hands of two of the most respected, and admired, artists of the 20th century.

Stephen Tennent - Lascar, a Story of the Maritime Boulevard

John Minton - Horseguards in Their Dressing Room (1953)

David Hockney - Cleanliness is next to Godliness (1964)

David Hockney and Francis Bacon are a pair of big hitters, no doubt, and two artists who have long since moved on from being defined by their sexuality. It's there to see though, both in Hockney's hat tips to body building magazines like Man's World and Health & Strength and Bacon's more visceral, almost excruciatingly physical, portraits of bodies contorted either in passion or, in homage to Eadweard Muybridge's 19c motion-picture projections, combat. Perhaps both. Bacon's intensity would certainly suggest this to be a possible interpretation.

Hockney and Francis Bacon may be considered to be the two artists, pre-1967, who made the boldest and bravest depictions of same-sex desire before the law changed but without the artists, many unheralded, and many who had their works destroyed and have been completely forgotten, that went before them they'd have not had the foundations or the platform from which they launched their careers. This show did a splendid job of sketching out the story of how homosexuality and art in the UK have often walked hand-in-hand, sometimes looking carefully around in fear of provoking violence, but, more often these days with a sense of pride. Reductive? Nah, not here mate.