Gay artwork said to not be gay

Since visiting Italy and seeing Ancient Greek art, Roman art, and Renaissance art I have been thinking about gay art. Classical artwork contains a lot of nude imagery, and so does Renaissance artwork. Western culture since classical times has avoided discussing sexuality, and consequently, there has been a disconnect between high art and the values of Western society. Access to high art has been continuous in Western society from at least since the Renaissance, so typical people in big cities in Western countries have known that sculptures and paintings of nude sexy people are being produced in their communities. At the same time, there seems to be a longstanding tradition in Western culture of depicting nude sexy males then denying that the work is erotica. This raise a few issues –

1. Why is there a Western tradition of saying that gay erotic art from before LGBT liberation is not gay?
2. To what extent is it possible that artists and art purchasers collaborated to produce gay art without intending for the art to be gay?
3. Do contemporary perspectives call certain art erotica, when in times past no one would have thought the work to be erotic?
4. What historical records, if any, exist in the arts for establishing that any given historical art was intended to be for a gay audience?

As an example, consider Guido Reni‘s Saint Sebastian painted 1615 and now in the Capitoline Museums. The painting is of a cute guy, healthy and fit is always attractive, wearing a loin cloth which is falling off, well old enough to have body hair but seemingly shaved everywhere including pubic hair and underarms, in an open body pose, shot with arrows but not having any response that introduces negativity to the work. In contemporary times, any photo taken of a person like that in any similar pose and dress would only be taken for the purpose of producing male erotica for a male audience. There are lots of similar depictions of Saint Sebastian, so this is representative of depictions of that Saint. There are lots of other historical artworks like this in other contexts. So far as I know, there is no history of saying that such artwork is gay. There might have been times when such things were said to be too exciting or prurient in general, but not any history of saying that there is a gay culture with works produced in a style that meets the demands of that culture.

In Italy I saw classical and Renaissance sculptures and paintings. Some were obviously gay and sexy. I just checked the Wikipedia article on Saint Sebastian, who is traditionally depicted as gay erotica. There seems to be some doubt that gay erotica produced as art is actually gay erotica, and that instead it might be some kind of symbolic artistic game which communicates deeper meaning through artistic conventions.

While I was in Italy I bought a 60-page booklet on Caravaggio which mentions sexual themes in his art on several pages. The book denies that Caravaggio ever intended his work to be gay erotica. It is silly to say so, since his work looks similar to that intentionally produced for the gay erotica marketplace. If the gender were switched, and females instead of males were posed as his figures, then there would be no doubt that the works were erotica. I think this is because of a double standard, and a dated presumption that male erotica targeted at males is not possible to produce. One of the image captions in the book says, “the splayed legs hark back to a symbolic code also used by Michaelangelo to signify resurrection, victory, and triumph” when describing the Amor Vincit Omnia. There are any number of other books and critiques which say similar things about similar works by any artists, and suggest that in the contemporary time of the work no one imagined eroticism. I think this is total bunk, and is the culture of another time in which everyone was under some pressure to believe unreasonable things about sexuality. Anyone who wants to read lots of essays about a single artist producing gay erotica can read about Caravaggio, because it seems like the academic consensus of his work is that it is not gay, which is a silly conclusion.

For considering subject matter by many artists which is said to not be gay erotica, check reviews about Saint Sebastian. The Wikipedia article on Saint Sebastian currently has almost no coverage of the gay interest of the figure as a gay icon. Nowadays, I think public taste for gay erotica is better established, because there is an open marketplace for defining the genre, and settling the taste for such art. When people are free and encouraged to produce gay erotica, they produce art that looks like traditional depictions of Saint Sebastian. Traditional depictions of Saint Sebastian did not influence taste for gay erotica, but rather, they both draw from deeper desires for this kind of imagery. Despite centuries of denying that Saint Sebastian icons are gay art, they are, and instead of believing the weird rationalizations of non-gay art scholars over the centuries, the reasonable thing to do is consider the views of communities which can say and express themselves without restriction or social pressure. In the case when an art critique might include addressing a taboo topic, I put more value on contemporary art critiques than those made before the advent of Internet. People who are under no social pressure can freely say that sexy Saint Sebastian icons would only be produced in a sexy way by someone who intended to make sexy art. It is a cultural curiosity that there are so many critiques of Saint Sebastian depictions which do not recognize, accept, and comment on this.

My best answers to the questions above are –

1. Homophobia in society made it taboo to identify any nice artwork or respectable artist as having produced homoerotic work. Since it was not an option to say that any good art was gay, all that is left is communication which says other than that.
2. I do not think that it could have been possible to produce homoerotic work or purchase homoerotic work continually over time without realizing the theme. For artists, I would expect that anyone who was more likely to produce male nudes was someone more likely to commit more time of their life to working with nude male models, and who had their own taste. I doubt that any artist was compelled to make male nudes for lack of artistic commissions to do otherwise.
3. It is often said in older critiques that attitudes on nudity used to be different, and that more often, males were more visible nude in public more than today. The idea is that there are new modern privacy customs, and looking back, the lack of privacy might be viewed as a flirt instead of just daily life. Sometimes such explanations might be true, but also, these kinds of explanations should be considered in the context of being all that could be said. When there was more to say, like homoerotic intent, those parts had to be left out. Even historical critiques giving correct information are dubious for not being able to tell the whole story.
4. Gay culture has not been developed yet and it is still uncertain what historical records exist. Cataloging what exists would be useful before drawing conclusions. As of right now, there are not clear authorities to be found among LGBT books. Something like “Survey of Male Erotic Art before 1930” probably has not been written. There ought to be research on this topic for every culture just to providing supporting evidence of norms.