As anti-LGBTQ legislation spreads across the United States and queer content is purged from school libraries, social media platforms, and public institutions, it’s clear: this is not just a culture war. It is a war on visibility. It is a war intended to erase our existence as queer people.
At the center of this erasure is a particular kind of target, homoerotic art. Sensual, tender, subversive, and often explicit, it is the first to be labeled obscene, immoral, or dangerous. While drag shows have become a beloved form of entertainment, rooted in parody, performance, and celebration of expression, they are not inherently designed to provoke or challenge political power. Homoerotic art, on the other hand, has always been intentionally subversive. It is created to confront societal norms, to reclaim desire from shame, and to challenge rigid constructions of sexuality, masculinity, and control. Where drag playfully entertains, homoerotic art provokes, demanding that we see, feel, and reckon with the raw truth of queer existence. Homoerotic art has always been dangerous to authoritarians, censors, and anyone who fears desire they cannot regulate.
The past informs the future. In Ancient Greece, the male nude was not hidden or shamed, it was idealized. Love between two men was woven into sculpture, poetry, and philosophy. The Kouroi statues and the dialogues of Plato weren’t merely expressions of aesthetics, they were articulations of intimacy and power. Roman emperor Hadrian’s grief-stricken deification of his young lover Antinous created one of the most enduring icons of homoerotic beauty in Western history. Yet as Christianity rose, so did repression. Queerness was driven underground, painted over with religious allegory, and buried in coded language.
During the Renaissance, artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo exalted the male form while their own desires remained criminalized. Their work survives as high art, but the queerness at its core was long erased by interpretation. In the 19th century, German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden captured nude images of Sicilian boys posed like Greek gods, works that were admired by collectors but censored by courts. Each of these moments reveals the same pattern: when queer art begins to flourish, repression soon follows.
In the 1920s, Berlin’s Weimar Republic became a sanctuary of queer culture. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science pioneered gender studies and LGBTQ advocacy. Queer clubs, journals, and visual art flourished. Then came the Nazis. Every step in queer advancement has been confronted by a repressive backlash. Hirschfeld’s books were burned in the street. His institute was ransacked. Queer people were arrested en masse and sent to concentration camps. Homoerotic art went from galleries to contraband.
In Francoist Spain, the poet Federico García Lorca’s lyrical explorations of forbidden love let to his execution. In the Soviet Union, Sergei Eisenstein’s films brimmed with revolutionary energy and queer subtext, but his personal and artistic freedoms were policed under Stalinist rule. And in America, decades later, Robert Mapplethorpe’s
elegant yet provocative images of gay desire would ignite a national controversy over public funding for the arts, making clear that even in a democracy, queer aesthetics remained a flashpoint. His work, like that of Tom of Finland, became a cultural battleground; a war over who gets to be seen, who gets to be desired, and who decides what is art.
Homoerotic art stands firmly in direct conflict with authoritarian regimes because it embodies everything they seek to suppress: autonomy, vulnerability, nonconformity, and the unapologetic expression of desire. Where authoritarianism demands obedience, uniformity, and control over bodies and narratives, homoerotic art disrupts those boundaries, celebrating the fluid, the intimate, the forbidden. Across history, from the burning of Magnus Hirschfeld’s archives by the Nazis to the censorship of Mappelthorpe’s photographs in the Reagan-era America, regimes have targeted queer art not because it is weak, but because it is powerful. It dares to visualize a world where desire is free, identity is self-determined, and love refuses to be legislated.
Today, we are witnessing this pattern once again. Social media platforms censor LGBTQ creators. Following the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Meta (Facebook/Instagram/Threads) implemented significant policy changes affecting LGBTQ communities. Meta terminated its third-party fact-checking program, replacing it with a Community Notes system similar to that of Elon Musk’s X. Concurrently, Meta relaxed its hate speech policies, now permitting derogatory comments about sexual orientation and gender identity, including allegations of mental illness or abnormality. Politicians are banning queer books. Lawmakers are proposing legislation to “protect children” by removing any acknowledgment of our queer lives. The targets are familiar: vulnerability, softness, eroticism, gender non-conformity, and any artistic depiction of queer joy. Any expression that threatens the hypermasculine toxicity of conservative men of our era. But homoerotic art has never existed to make people comfortable. It exists to tell the truth. It dares to depict desire without shame, intimacy without apology, and bodies that defy easy classification. It challenges the fascist impulse to categorize, discipline, and sanitize.
In a world that demands conformity, homoerotic art is a mirror that reflects what authoritarianism tries to hide: the fluidity of identity, the power of pleasure, and the beauty of being different.
The recent work of photographers like Gruenholtz, whose series The Fine Art of Erections frames male intimacy with vulnerability and sensuality, continues this lineage of resistance. His portraits are not provocative for their nudity, they are provocative because they make space for emotion, for softness, for a masculinity untouched by violence, shame or social expectation. In a culture climate increasingly defined by performative strength, toxic masculinity, and emotional suppression, this kind of imagery is radical. It offers another way to exist in a world that profits from repression and hails toxic heteronormative sexuality.
We are living in an everything-all-at-once moment in history. Some will argue that now is not the time to focus on art. But art is not a distraction, it is a weapon. Homoerotic art, in particular, has long been one of the most enduring forms of queer resistance. When laws criminalize our relationships, art records them. When society devalues our bodies, art glorifies them. When the world tells you to disappear, art makes you immortal. This is not just about art galleries or Instagram algorithms. It’s about whether queer people are allowed to see themselves fully, beautifully, without shame. And it’s about whether we, as a society, will continue to let history repeat itself or finally break the cycle.
Queer art carries the testimony of those erased, the intimacy of lives once hidden, and the defiance of those who chose truth over safety. And above all, it reminds us: desire, it in its rawest, most honest form, is a force fascism will never fully control. It slips through borders, resists translation, and endures beyond regimes. Queer desire, expressed through art, is not just a celebration of the self, it is an insurrection of the spirit. And it will always find a way to be seen. To resist, we have an obligation to exist in our fullest, most authentic expressions of ourselves.
When fascism rises, queer art doesn’t retreat.
It creates.
It confronts.
It survives.
And above all, it reminds us: unfiltered desire is a language of freedom that no regime can ever fully silence because raw desire and expression never asks for permission. It refuses to be regulated, and in that refusal, it becomes revolutionary.
