David Hockney depicted a 'peaceful, gay paradise' when homosexuality was a crime

David Hockney depicted a 'peaceful, gay paradise' when homosexuality was a crimeImage source, AFP via Getty ImagesImage caption, David Hockney's We Two Boys Together Clinging was shown at a retrospective of the artist's work at the Tate Britain in 2017ByAnna Lamche and Josh Parry, LGBT and identity reporterPublished13 June 2026One of David Hockney's early paintings depicts a couple wrapped in an embrace.Painted in 1961, this picture may sound like it captures a relatively traditional romantic scene.But at the time, it was a radical piece of work. That is because the couple in the painting are both men, and in 1961 it was still illegal to be gay in the UK.Hockney, who has died aged 88, painted We Two Boys Together Clinging as a second-year student at the Royal College of Art.Homosexuality was only partially decriminalised some six years later, in 1967, when the law changed to allow sex between two men "in private", so long as they were both over the age of 21.The 1961 painting, inspired by a Walt Whitman poem of the same name, was an early statement of intent by an artist who would go on to become a defining figure of British – and LGBT+ – culture.Over the next decade, Hockney continued to break social taboos by celebrating same-sex relationships in his art - often by depicting the quiet, everyday moments of gay domestic life.David Hockney's life in pictures: From swimming pools to celebrity portraitsThere is an underground quality to some of Hockney's early work. His pictures are reminiscent of graffiti: spiky, expressive and defiant, rendered in bold lines and block colours."He was really pioneering as somebody who was unashamedly proud of his queerness before the legalisation of homosexuality in '67," says Dominic James Bilton, the co-leader of the Queer British Art Network.In these early paintings, Hockney "showed and made work on same-sex relationships and desire and sexuality" at a time when...