Twin figures drawn from Yoruba iconography meet parlor ornament in mirrored intimacy; satin collars and crimson ribbons stage neo-Victorian bondage as couture, chiaroscuro borrowed straight from Caravaggio's tenebrism; corseted fashion portraits blindfold their sitters in ribboned restraint, Pre-Raphaelite nostalgia dressed as rebellion.

Hang either register, academic nude or fetish reverie, and you're collecting queer history that Victorian England tried to keep unseen. Choose your century; both are wide awake, and this collection only grows.

It's a modern framing applied to work made between the two legal turning points in British history: 1861, when the death penalty for sodomy was abolished, and 1967, when sex between men was partially decriminalised. Tate's landmark exhibition on the subject explores connections between art and a wide range of sexualities and gender identities in this period of dynamic change, since terms like "gay" and "lesbian" didn't yet exist as most people understood them.

Because open depiction was legally dangerous. In spite of the Victorian era's prudish reputation, Frederic Leighton's sensuous male nudes and Simeon Solomon's classical figures carried many possible traces of transgressive desire, and Solomon in particular drew sustained accusations of "unwholesomeness." As long as no public suggestion existed that an artist had acted on their desires, ambiguity gave the work room to breathe.

The Tate's own curators explain that "queer" is preferred because it avoids imposing modern identity labels onto historical figures whose lives and desires often don't map neatly onto today's categories — and because the word itself has a documented history of being reclaimed by LGBT people from earlier use as an insult.

They triggered a wave of self-censorship. Novelist Samuel Butler retracted a poem in a panic, fearing it would be read as homoerotic in the trial's aftermath, since the man it commemorated had lived with him for years. The trials made ambiguity a survival strategy across British art for a generation.

Scholars argue that Victorian aesthetes such as Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee treated art as a space where the rules of everyday social life relaxed, letting queer people reflect on their condition and imagine new ways of living — effectively pre-dating modern queer theory by a century.

Simeon Solomon and Henry Scott Tuke are the two most frequently cited. Solomon, a fashionable Royal-Academy-exhibited painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, built a public career on classical myths carrying a bold homoerotic charge, even producing an explicit depiction of female same-sex desire in his 1864 Sappho watercolour. Tuke, meanwhile, became known for outdoor bather and sailor scenes rooted in the Newlyn School.