‘Suggestive toothpaste tubes shooting into mouths’: David Hockney’s enigmatic celebration of queer life | David Hockney

SNine decades after David Hockney painted The Biggest Splash, his most famous painting, reproductions have become a visual motif in gay domesticity. I’ve seen framed posters, prints, and postcards of the work—depicting the moment a person jumps from a diving board into a sky-blue pool—in countless LGBT households. In my apartment, it appears on a cushion cover I bought after seeing the real thing at Hockney’s 2017 Tate Britain retrospective.

It’s fitting that A Bigger Splash is now an icon of this pioneer. As a gay artist who depicted homosexual desire in his works long before male homosexuality was partially decriminalized in England and Wales, Hockney and his paintings challenged homophobia within and outside the art establishment. He did this not by using highly sexualized images, such as by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, or with the activist subjects of painter Keith Haring, but by reshaping our ideas of beauty, intimacy and desire. This is how I make the biggest splash.

In 1961, while Hockney was a student at the Royal College of Art in London, he painted one of the earliest expressions of queer identity in British art. “We Two Boys Clinging Together” is a childlike painting that shows two people embracing – and perhaps kissing – each other. The title, which is inescapably written across the board, stems from a Walt Whitman poem that gay readers have long embraced for its description of physical closeness and companionship between men. It’s a reference that only some viewers will understand, and which was vague enough to avoid the censorship laws of the time.

Hockney’s winking method continued in the painting Teeth-Brushing, Early Evening (10pm) W11, painted in 1962. As the title suggests, it depicts two figures – supposedly but not explicitly – men – brushing their teeth before bed. This seems innocent enough, until you see the suggestive placement of two red tubes of Colgate toothpaste shooting toothpaste into each other’s mouths. Once again, there is an ambiguity in how Hockney leaves so little to the imagination of those “in the know” – while still maintaining a claim of innocence in the minds of the masses. It’s an early form of the kind of coding that would soon become deeply rooted in queer culture, where visual signifiers like handkerchiefs and earrings were used to safely identify each other.

When Hockney moved to Los Angeles in 1964—five years before the Stonewall Uprising in New York launched the Western Pride movement—he found greater freedom to live openly as a gay man. His work depicted California as a fantasy land of swimming pools, pristine green lawns, palm trees, and rolling Hollywood hills. His depictions of men – and intimate relationships – became less abstract. In Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, we see a naked young man emerging from a pool, his bare cheeks being the focal point of the painting. An image like this—focusing on the archetypal twink as a figure of male desire—was highly controversial at the time. Other images, such as a 1965 Californian depicting two men on lilies, floating naked on the surface of the water, while an artist’s photograph (A Swimming Pool with Two Shapes) shows a clothed man gazing as another man in white trunks swims.

What is so revolutionary about Hockney’s paintings is not only that they depict male nudity and desire, but scenes of domestic life: men swimming, bathing, and brushing their teeth together. This was a time when homosexuality was not viewed as an “identity” but defined through physical actions. In the UK, it was criminalized through a combination of privacy and decency laws, which banned kissing or holding hands in public, and of course the act of sodomy. There is a palpable excitement at how Hockney’s images hint at sex without ever explicitly depicting it, but there is also a tenderness about them. They stressed that same-sex intimacy and friendship could be considered beautiful – and that same-sex desire did not have to be associated with loneliness or tragedy, but could be full of pleasure.

Hockney provided a meeting point between queer identity and the fine and decorative arts. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol initially struggled to be taken seriously by the New York art establishment, which favored more “high art” (and straight) artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Hockney’s paintings were not only overtly glamorous, but also unashamedly ornate, incorporating patterned armchairs and floral shower curtains.

He was influenced by his surroundings, as well as by his strong friendship with Ossie Clarke – one of Britain’s most famous fashion designers of the 1960s and 1970s. After meeting as students at the Royal College of Art, they had a platonic relationship that fueled their work. When Hockney received critical acclaim for his paintings that reimagined a swimming pool surface as a patterned tapestry, where flowing lines mimic the ripples of water, he proved that “decorative” need not be a dirty word, or the preserve of frivolous “low art.”

In contrast to gay artists such as Haring and David Wojnarowicz, whose work combined art and political activism, Hockney always put himself first as an artist. (Although in 1988 he threatened to cancel a major exhibition at the Tate Museum in protest against Section 28.) Instead, his story is more about achieving gay visibility in institution spaces, both in the UK and internationally. From organizing major exhibitions to breaking auction records, he achieved a level of success that no other gay artist enjoyed during his lifetime.

Visually, Hockney’s legacy is based on an aesthetic that is difficult to describe – when something looks and feels, for lack of a better phrase, “a bit gay”. Whether it’s two men floating in a swimming pool, a wall filled with photos of his pet dachshunds or bright, saturated paintings of Yorkshire landscapes, there is a gay sensibility – and an exciting sense of freedom – radiating from his works. He carried this into the later decades of his career, exploring many different styles and media, from collage to video, printmaking, public art, and iPad graphics.

This kind of renewal, which Hockney shaped throughout his life, is an idea—and a fantasy—deeply ingrained in queer culture. That’s why his work is so enduring: Hockney not only saw the beauty in gay life, he shared it with the world.