In a recent issue of the LRB, Tom Crewe asked if the Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte’s fixation with male figures and the male gaze is evidence not just of a homosocial milieu, but of homosexual desire. Meanwhile, in the same issue of the paper, James Butler reviewed Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations 1400-1750 by the historian Noel Malcolm, who excavates archival evidence of sexual relationships and interactions between men in northern and southern Europe while cautioning against applying modern ideas of queerness to historical figures.

Tom and James join Malin to discuss the interplay between their pieces, and to reflect on the ways that modern interpreters attempt to read the history of homosexuality in sometimes patchy archives, as well as on gay art in the past and the present.

Read more in the LRB:

Tom Crewe: Men Watching Men https://lrb.me/lrbpod04142601

James Butler: Cultures of Homosexuality https://lrb.me/lrbpod04142602

Alice Hunt: Out of Rehab https://lrb.me/lrbpod04142603

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