According to Hedquist, Blue Boy is a game-changing symbol in the history of gay rights. Wiley's painting, showing a 21st-Century Blue Boy with dyed blond dreadlocks, Apple watch and baseball cap, marks the culmination of a two-centuries-long journey of Gainsborough's original from a pillar of traditional cultural values to gay icon. Other artists who have identified as gay, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Kehinde Wiley, have cited Blue Boy as a major influence on their later output, with Wiley having recently created a direct homage that is currently on display at the Huntington Art Museum in California (in 1921, Henry and Arabella Huntington bought The Blue Boy from the art dealer Joseph Duveen, who had acquired it from the Duke of Westminster). But the most explicit references to the Blue Boy came in the work of another US ceramicist, Léopold Foulem: according to Hedquist, he "transformed the tentative allusions to gay content found in the work of Lambert and Kottler into a full-blown riot of queer significance" with his highly provocative scenes of the Blue Boy in trysts with characters like Father Christmas and Colonel Sanders. Blue Boy was appropriated frequently by the US ceramicist Howard Kottler, a choice that expressed “explicit homosexual references”, according to art historian Vicki Halper. US artist Robert Lambert created collages of photocopied imagery and sent them via mail to his friends, some of which included the Blue Boy as a signifier of his sexuality.
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It was a full reappropriation and a celebration that the Blue Boy was gay." In the period after the Stonewall riots, this was a galvanising symbol, and has left a legacy of multiple "Blue Boy" gay bars around the world. "They had cruises and hotels where men could be openly gay, wearing 'Blue Boy' T-shirts and carrying 'Blue Boy' travel bags. "The first gay travel agency was called 'Blue Boy'," Hedquist explains. It recommended gay-friendly hotels and bars and fostered a sense of community. The magazine, brainchild of entrepreneur Don N Embinder, continued publishing until December 2007, and advertised products and services whose recurrent symbol was the Blue Boy.
The cover of the first issue featured a photo of Dale, a boxer from Ohio, in a homage to Gainsborough's masterpiece, albeit without any trousers and a conveniently repositioned hat. The reappropriation came in the form of a gay magazine first published in 1974, called "Blue Boy". "The emerging ideas about how people see gay men is so important to how the Blue Boy becomes an iconic image," says Hedquist, "first of all as a source of ridicule and then as a reappropriation." A Dennis the Menace cartoon published in 1976 also featured the Blue Boy, where he was again labelled a "sissy". The cartoon's covert message and sentiment is homophobic Hedquist sees it as Blue Boy's first "outing". In Mad Magazine in September 1970, one cartoon featured a character called Prissy Percy, who is teased by a group of sporty, all-American boys – the final scene reveals Percy to be Blue Boy. It led to sinister comedic parodies of perceived gay behaviour in popular culture, with outlets including cartoon strips. Common stereotypes of gay deportment – now laughable in their ignorance – such as lacy cuffs and fancy shoes, were cited as signifiers of these "enemies within". According to Hedquist, a formative episode was the so-called "lavender scare" in the 1950s in which gay men and women were perceived to be threats to national security and were hounded from government office. How it was interpreted by its new host nation was also subject to the winds of cultural change. Marlene Dietrich dressed as Blue Boy for a comedy revue in Vienna in 1927, and Shirley Temple did the same for the film Curly Top in 1935.Īfter Blue Boy arrived in the US, it became famous, appearing on ceramics, textiles and thousands of reproduction prints.
In 1922, the year that Gainsborough's painting found a new home in the US, Cole Porter performed his musical Mayfair and Montmartre, in which Nelly Taylor dressed as Blue Boy and theatrically emerged from a frame singing a song called Blue Boy Blues. "By the latter part of the 19th Century," she explained, "the magazines are just filled with pictures of girls dressed as Blue Boy."
This, for Hedquist, was the start of the "feminisation" of Blue Boy. And these actors would frequently be girls. This began on stage in the 19th Century, where actors playing "Little Boy Blue" in pantomimes were frequently dressed up in the silks, breeches and lace collar of Gainsborough's Blue Boy. But for Hedquist, the idea that the boy in the painting is dressing up in costume and acting is critical to his later reappraisals: "the Blue Boy invites performance," she says.