At 16:10 on 16 October 2010, robbyit wrote:Īgree with almost all comments that disagree with homophobia. Hockney's work becomes even more important in this context Only a couple of years ago there were thouands of gay men (I think not lesbians) in gaol for activities which would not be illegal if they were straight.
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Plus the definition of "in private" was laughable - a hotel room did not count, neither did a private house if there was someone else in the building. Gay men below the age of 21 continue to go to jail for having consensual sex with younger partners (who were over the age of consent for heterosexuals). I'd prefer to say they were "partially decriminalised". Not so sure about the accuracy of the BBC blurb though "Homosexual acts in private were decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967". Look forward to the episode, towards the end of such a great series. At 16:34 on 11 October 2010, MikeW wrote: But if I played a little part of it I’m proud – I might have done, I think, made people open their lives a bit. …I wasn’t speaking for anybody else but I would certainly defend my way of living…. Yes, it was, and probably helped a little bit – I don’t know. I was rather proud of it at the time, and I would have thought of it as good propaganda –…I said that and that’s what some of my work was. I think I did 12 drawings – 12 etchings – some were drawn from life, some were drawn from my drawings some were drawn from photographs. …You couldn’t buy this book in England at the time. And actually, I never took it back – I kept it. I looked it up in the index, catalogue, it wasn’t on the shelf because they didn’t want too many people reading these poems, or something, but I got it out. I think it was Lawrence Durrell published in the back of one of his books a poem by Cavafy, and I’d found Cavafy in the Bradford Library. Shami Chakrabarti, Director of the civil rights organisation Liberty The death penalty, in some cases, just for being themselves – just for perfectly consensual adult feelings and relationships based on love. I think the image is really important because you can look at it and see a rather sweet, not desperately erotic, but essentially intimate picture of two men lying in bed on a Sunday morning, or something like that, and see it as really quite a sweet image, but I’m sure that there are bigoted people who are still horrified by that idea all over the world, and lest we get too complacent in modern Britain, there are still people who fear deportation from Britain to countries where they might be seriously persecuted, criminalised, imprisoned, or worse. This is not big politics, this is not legal judgement and legislation, this is about understanding what it is to be a human being, and respecting it. As I say it’s a picture of two gay men but it’s not to my eyes desperately erotic or racy or controversial its two people obviously in some kind of intimate relationship lying next to each other in a relaxed way in bed.Īnd it reminds me of what Eleanor Roosevelt said about human rights ‘human rights begin in small places close to home’.
I think that this is a wonderful image to represent what human rights are all about. Homosexual acts in private were decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967 Many of the illustrations were actually drawn in Hockney's Notting Hill flat, however, using two friends as models. Hockney visited Beirut in Lebanon, which had replaced Alexandria as the region's cosmopolitan capital, to draw inspiration for his series. When Hockney created this print Britain was in the grip of its own sexual revolution - homosexuality was decriminalised by Parliament in 1967. How did the Hellenic world inspire Hockney?Ĭavafy was born in the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria in Egypt and his poems frequently express same-sex love in the Hellenic world. The etching is not a literal interpretation of the poem's subject matter - homo-erotic fantasies in a sleepy, provincial village - but instead evokes the poem's mood of relaxed intimacy through the use of a crisp and spare line. Cavafy was one of the earliest modern authors to write about same-sex love and proved an inspiration to the young Hockney, who stole a copy of Cavafy's translated poems from Bradford Library in 1960.
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This etching is from a series created in 1966 by David Hockney to illustrate 14 poems by the Greek poet C.