Remembering Forgotten Desires
At times, a caress, a glance, or a burst of shared laughter survives only in the memory of a single person, fragile and fleeting like a flame in the wind. Every intimate recollection is precarious by nature: it belongs only to those who lived it. Yet when it comes to moments of closeness between men, this fragility was compounded, over the centuries, by a merciless threat for anyone who might have preserved the record: society’s censorship. These memories were not only destined to vanish with those who carried them, but whatever might have borne witness was systematically cast out of collective remembrance.
The double erasure
The risk of forgetting exists for every private memory, but when it comes to loves between men, history multiplied the silences. Oblivion was not only individual; it was collective, familial, institutional. From canvases taken down to family albums expurgated, from mutilated antiquities to rewritten biographies, each era devised a hundred ways to wipe away the traces of male desire for other males.
For centuries, oppression broke the chain of transmission. Generation after generation, gestures of tenderness faded without leaving a mark. Diaries destroyed by their authors or their kin, intimate photos discarded, letters reduced to ashes: so many shards of remembrance deliberately erased over time. Nor did this disappearance spare famous figures. Even when works or archives survived, they often reached us in a truncated form—smoothed by family members or publishers to conform to the moral dictates of their age.
Biographers themselves often prolonged this work of censorship. Their role was not only to transmit but to reshape lives so they would remain compatible with prevailing norms. In Michelangelo’s case, his love poems to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri were published with masculine pronouns altered to feminine, as if desire itself had to be recoded to remain acceptable.
For Leonardo da Vinci, the accusations of “sodomy” that shadowed his youth were omitted by his earliest biographers, who preferred to construct the legend of the visionary genius rather than risk the stain of suspicion. Closer to our own time, the first biographies of Oscar Wilde, written after 1900, softened the scandal of his relationships with men, speaking of “weaknesses” or “deviations,” reducing what had been central to his work to a shameful parenthesis.
With Caravaggio, the Italian painter of the seventeenth century and master of dramatic chiaroscuro, violence and restlessness were abundantly noted, while his intimate ties to his male models were long erased or minimized. Similarly, in the telling of Jean Cocteau’s life, the French avant-garde artist, or Grant Wood, the American painter best known for American Gothic, biographers preferred to speak of “solitude” or “special friendships” rather than acknowledge the evidence of emotional and sexual bonds between men.
Such strategies produced another kind of narrative: one where artists were reduced to their abstract “genius,” stripped of flesh, stripped of passion. And this editorial bias shaped cultural memory itself: generations of readers and students received these biographies as truth, when they were in fact rewritings in which homosexuality was tolerated only as veiled allusion, rumor, or outright denial.
Pushed aside
In the visual arts, the same mechanisms recur. Statues of Antinous, beloved of the emperor Hadrian, were mutilated or destroyed during Christianization, as if to erase a cult too openly tied to male love. Greek vases with homoerotic scenes, long relegated to private collections, saw their museum labels drain away their erotic charge. In Naples, throughout the nineteenth century, the Gabinetto Segreto locked away the frescoes and objects of Pompeii depicting male couples, permitting only a restricted, “respectable” gaze.
And in the Victorian era, several artists paid the price of this climate. Simeon Solomon, a promising figure among the Pre-Raphaelites, was arrested in 1873 for “indecency” and sentenced to prison; socially ruined, he never recovered his career, and his work all but vanished from official exhibitions. William Etty, earlier in the century, became the target of repeated attacks for his bold nudes, accused of “corrupting morality”: his canvases were removed from certain shows, his reputation stained.
Thomas Eakins, in the United States, was forced to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy in 1886 after insisting on the male nude in artistic training; his painting Swimming (1885), showing young men bathing nude together, was reinterpreted in neutral terms, its erotic accents erased by critics. Henry Scott Tuke, for his part, persisted in painting adolescents and young men unclothed in outdoor settings, but his work remained ambivalently received: praised for its naturalism, yet surrounded by unease, his canvases often consigned to the margins.
In Germany, the fate of other artists illustrates the same pattern of erasure. Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, a photographer based in Taormina, created hundreds of classicizing male nudes, often staged in antique settings. His archives faced seizure, his prints targeted by authoritarian regimes of the early twentieth century, showing how fragile queer visual heritage could be in shifting political climates. Sascha Schneider, German painter and illustrator, exalted monumental male bodies infused with heroic symbolism. Celebrated in his time, he was later marginalized: the idealized virility of his canvases, charged with latent eroticism, grew suspect, and his name gradually disappeared from the official narrative of German art.
To this list we can add Gustave Caillebotte. A major Impressionist and patron of his peers, he left a body of work where male figures hold a singular place—whether reclining nudes, rowers, or bathers. Critics and exhibition catalogues long erased the homoerotic undertone of these images. His private life, marked by intimate ties with men, was also silenced. Only recently, through exhibitions such as Caillebotte. Painting Men at the Musée d’Orsay, has this dimension been acknowledged, revealing how thoroughly the memory of his homosexuality was neutralized for over a century.
November: a relay of memory
In November, the invitation to remember takes shape through various rituals. It is also a moment to reckon with what has been forgotten or risks being lost, not only in historical accounts but closer to us. This theme may strike even more deeply for anyone who has lived beside loved ones afflicted by memory disorders. In their eyes and words, one follows the slow, inexorable erosion, the fading of things once infinitely intimate and precious. That erasure, cruel and brought on by illness, intertwines with the deliberate silencing too often imposed on loves between men. Countless are the forms of loss that remind us of the urgency to remember.
What has been suppressed, censored, or hushed away cannot be recovered as it once was. From this absence arises the necessity of questioning the official narrative, long dictated by a morality with no legitimacy to erase lives that did not fit its norms. At all times, but especially in this month of remembrance, each of us can find a way to resist forgetting: preserve a letter, write a page, share a word, or offer a gesture of tenderness fixed in an image and passed on to those we love.
We can also revive those fragments of history buried in family lore: the uncle of whom it was merely said that he lived with his “friend,” the grandfather who left to share his life with a youthful companion, or the familiar face always present at family gatherings, whose true connection to a vanished cousin was left unspoken. Restoring names and stories to these lives is to return them to their rightful place. In this way, that intangible heritage still circulates—fragile yet persistent—and retains the power to reach other lives, affirming to the world these presences, and their refusal to be erased.
