Inside the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office: LGBTQ+ art and history

In 1965, David Hockney produced the lithograph, Picture of a Still Life that has an Elaborate Silver Frame. This was also the year when Arthur Gore, 8th Earl of Arran, proposed the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts in the House of Lords.

Hockney moved to Los Angeles in 1964, where he was able to embrace a more open expression of his sexuality. This lithograph was completed the following year as part of the series A Hollywood Collection.

‘It’s a kind of joke thing, a kind of home-made art collection with bits of everything in it, a nude, an abstract, a landscape and so on. I was working with a printer in Hollywood whose workshop was behind a framer’s. He had all these marvellous frames in the window. I got interested in this trompe l’oeil thing – a picture of a thing with something else within something else…’

In 1967, Mark Lancaster made the screenprint Eighths. This was also the year when the Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalised homosexual acts between two consenting adult men over the age of 21 (homosexual acts between women had never been illegal).

Long open about his sexuality, Lancaster visited New York City for the first time in 1964, working briefly as an assistant to Andy Warhol and appearing in several of his films. During this time, Lancaster befriended other contemporary artists and became interested in American abstraction. Drawing on Frank Stella’s early colourful geometric paintings, Lancaster’s Eighths is a minimalist screen print that pays homage to grid as the organising principle of abstraction.

In 1992, Craig Wood created the screenprint Safeway Gel Air Freshener, Alpine Garden. This was also the year when the FCDO lifted the ban on homosexuals working in the UK diplomatic service.

Made as part of London, a portfolio of eleven prints by twelve artists living and working in the city, Wood’s contribution explores the paradoxes and blindspots of consumer capitalism. The work’s cut-out floral pattern and light green colour is based on the ‘Alpine Garden’ variety of gel air fresheners produced by the British supermarket, Safeway. Wood’s print mocks the synthetic, stylistic version of nature found in air fresheners and the ways these products mask, rather than eliminate, unwanted smells from the air – a process of layering visible in the print itself.

In 1997, Anya Gallaccio produced the screenprint Broken English August ‘91. This was also the year when Stephen Twigg and Ben Bradshaw became the first openly gay politicians to be elected as Members of Parliament and when the Government first recognised same-sex partners for immigration purposes.

Gallaccio’s print is based on an installation created for the exhibition Broken English (1991) at London’s Serpentine Gallery. In a shallow tray of water, Gallaccio floated approximately a thousand passport photographs of artists, curators, gallery staff and critics. In the water, the images created their own narratives as some grouped together and others sank. For the print in 1997, Gallaccio placed the salvaged photographs in a tray of water and re-photographed them. The work offers a meditation on moments of togetherness and the passage of time.

In 2024, Gallaccio won a competition to create a permanent HIV/Aids memorial in London.

In 1998, Emma Kay created the series Shakespeare from Memory. This was also the year when Watkins and five other colleagues – Jackie Connor, Nicole Davison, Jonathan Drew, Averil Fairley and Roy Wilson – created FLAGG, an LGBT+ group within the FCDO.

As You Like It is one of 26 prints from the series Shakespeare from Memory, in which Kay rewrote the complete works of Shakespeare from memory. Her presentation of these works is fallible and depends on the accuracy of the artist’s own memory. They accordingly vary in degrees of faithfulness to the original. This print is completely blank, suggesting that Kay was not able to attempt even a cursory description of the plot. In these gaps and mistakes, the series exposes the discord between the subjective nature of memory and the myth of a collective, objective interpretation – a schism also found in collaborative endeavours.

In 2007, Isaac Julien produced the photograph Untitled (Déja-Vu No. 2, Baltimore Series). This was also the year when the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations was passed by the UK Government, outlawing discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities, services, education and public functions on the grounds of sexual orientation.

With a body of work exploring sexuality and race, Julien’s photograph emerges from a 2003 multi-screen video installation, Baltimore, which centres around two Baltimore institutions: the Walters Art Museum and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum. In the video, the Black kitsch wax figures invade the painting galleries, collapsing these two separate worlds. In this image, Julien places one of these figures in front of the Venetian artist Leandro Bassano’s painting Allegory to the Element of Earth (1580). The work emphasises the continued segregation of Black culture from predominantly white, mainstream institutions.

In 2017, Eddie Peake made the screenprint Opinel Hoard Shadow. This was also the year when the UK Government issued a posthumous pardon to all gay and bisexual men who were convicted under sexual offence laws in the last century, which allowed police to criminalise people for homosexual acts.

To create this three-coloured print, Peake used torn newsprint to stop each layer of ink as it was pushed through the screen. The result is a cinematic white glow in the centre surrounded by Peake’s signature acid colours. Released by Chrisenhale Gallery, this print is connected to the artist’s performance at the gallery in 2012, which addressed the process by which gender and sexuality can be read and signified in performative contexts.