Cissies Looking at Phosphenes

Gregory Salter

Collection: Herbert Museum And Art Gallery, Coventry 

Keywords: John Yeadon, Disco, Gay, Left Wing, Commercialism

 In John Yeadon’s Modern Art, Disco Drawing, 1982 (fig.1), three male figures stand amidst a visual cacophony of multicoloured squiggles, blotches, and hazes, formed of fluorescent paint, spray paint, and glitter. These areas of colour are representations of phosphenes, flashes of light or spots of colour that appear when the eyes are closed, produced internally by the brain rather than by external influences. Here, they occur in a disco or a nightclub, as the title of the drawing suggests. Their colour effects are echoed by the coloured lightbulbs which line the frame of the drawing; when plugged in, they light up one by one, out of sequence (fig.2). Initially added to help the drawing stand out when it was first exhibited in a staff drawing exhibition at what was then Lanchester Polytechnic (now Coventry University) where Yeadon taught, they also, now, give the drawing the look of a lightbulb-lined mirror found in a theatrical dressing room. [1] In this way, they draw attention to our position as viewers, as if we sit in front of this ‘mirror’ and see not us but this group of men amidst the phosphenes. As if to underline this, written at the bottom of the drawing are the words ‘Cissies Looking At Phosphenes’. This text refers to the depicted figures, these nude men occupying a nightclub, but it also incorporates us – we’re the cissies on the other side of this representation / mirror, looking too. [2] Contemporary queer viewers have been increasingly encouraged to ‘see themselves’ in museums and galleries in recent years. [3] Yeadon’s playful evocation of a mirror and implication of his viewers into the artwork both speaks to this more recent phenomenon and departs from it, as I will explore here.

Perception and ‘gay art’ 

The figures, in contrast to their surroundings, are drawn and rendered without colour. On the left, a nude man stands with his back to us, though he turns and appears to look over at the figures to his right. These two figures are also nude; the figure in the foreground appears to return the gaze of the figure on the other side, one hand resting on his thigh near his genitals and the other raised towards his chest. Behind him, a companion, less clearly visible, rests his hands on the front figure’s shoulders. Their composition is inspired by an unfinished painting by Michelangelo, known as the Manchester Madonna, c. 1497, in the National Gallery, London. These facing figures are rendered rather differently: the contours of the left figure’s body are depicted with heavy shading and hatching, and his head is simple and cartoon-like, with a baseball cap on his head, while the body of the figure on the right is created out of much more delicate shading and his face depicted with much more realism. Distinguished by the style Yeadon adopts to depict them, they have the appearance of two ‘types’ who appear to meet each other’s gaze yet may not do so on quite the same terms. But remembering the text at the bottom of the drawing also calls this into question – these two cissies might just be looking at phosphenes after all.

How do we know that what we perceive – when looking at an artwork or at reality more generally – is real? In 1984, a selection of the work that Yeadon had produced in the first part of the 1980s was exhibited in a show called Dirty Tricks at the Herbert Art Gallery And Museum in Coventry, where he lived and worked (it would go on to travel to the Pentonville Gallery in London, and two works from the exhibition were also included in the British Art Show in 1985). In the exhibition catalogue, Yeadon explained that he used ‘tricks’ to make reference to ‘contradictions, lies, manipulations, follies, the tricks of our society, its politics and ideology’; at the same time, he noted that a ‘trick’, in gay culture, also referred to a sexual encounter. [4] Though Modern Art, Disco Drawing was not included in Dirty Tricks, it works with similar ideas in its merging of references to homosexuality with the visual and perceptual trickery of phosphenes. The implication of Yeadon’s writing for Dirty Tricks, and which we might retain for thinking about Modern Art, Disco Drawing, is that he viewed his practice in the early 1980s as concerned with exposing and undermining the ideologies of society at large and creating new forms of culture; and that homosexuality was a subject that could fundamentally assist in this but was also, at the same time, not excluded from the interrogations of his critical practice.

The specific implications for Modern Art, Disco Drawing can be understood if we consider Yeadon’s statements on his approach to sexuality and a category known at the time as ‘gay art’. He made sexuality a central aspect of his art because he considered it, in part, ‘a device of accessibility (as we all have a body)’ and recognised that it could inform ‘powerful images that disturb, amuse, or offend’. [5] Sexuality opened ways into mocking and dismantling dominant structures of morality, class, and empire – key subjects for his practice in this period, in works such as the triptych Democratic Circus, 1982. As a result, Yeadon rejected the assumption that his work could simply be described as ‘gay art’:

I do not consider the use of sexuality in the painting as being purely homosexual as I do not regard there to be any such thing as ‘gay art’. My work is not propagandist in that narrow sense. Simply homosexuality is my access to the imagery, indeed the paintings do have a personal basis. They are in some way self-transformational and have a certain amount of independence. [6]

Yeadon was an artist who was also a gay man – his sexuality was one of many factors that shaped his art and something of a point of departure; a position from which to work, outwards. In the last line of this quotation, he seems to suggest that this approach could produce artworks that visualised something new or different to the subject position – homosexuality, here – with which they began. It is in this context that we might interpret Yeadon’s figures ‘looking at phosphenes’. Those colourful visual interruptions float and disrupt our perception, demanding that we reconsider our relationship to what we think we see and know.

Since the mid-1970s, ‘gay art’ had become a category of discussion in the gay press and was beginning to shape artistic production. A key figure here was Emmanuel Cooper, a potter, writer, and activist, who was Gay News’ art critic at this time; he would go on to produce a book on the subject, The Sexual Perspective, published in 1986 and in which Yeadon is discussed. [7] In his articles, he addressed the difficulty of defining gay art, sought to trace its history, and asked artists, gallery directors, and curators whether such a thing even existed; most respondents were doubtful. [8] Nevertheless, an audience and market for ‘gay art’ emerged at this time, through exhibitions, at least one commercial gallery that specialised in it, and, increasingly, funding initiatives from local authorities, most prominently the Greater London Council. This is not to suggest that Yeadon can be easily subsumed into the category of ‘gay art’. It is to show, rather, that this category was a contested one, considered with ambivalence by the majority of artists but also increasingly prominent as a reference point for critics, institutions, and audiences. Yeadon, in short, was not the only artist who resisted or negotiated such labels. It is vital to remember such positions adopted by artists like this and make them a part of ‘queer histories’ that museums and galleries have been seeking, rightly, to articulate with a renewed energy over the last decade.

Sexuality and left politics in the early 1980s 

In recent years, viewers of Modern Art, Disco Drawing have produced readings of the artwork that are quite different to Yeadon’s statements on his art in the early 1980s, as he has acknowledged. A new gallery label for the artwork was produced when Array Collective, eventual winners of the Turner Prize in 2021 which was held in Coventry, chose to highlight it as resonating with their activism and practice. Here, Yeadon suggested that the HIV/AIDS crisis had, over the years, become a narrative attached to the artwork, though he never set out to make work that explicitly addressed the crisis. [9] It was produced in 1982 when the disease and its horrific implications were little understood; you can see how an image of desire and hedonism on the cusp of the crisis might appear, retrospectively, prescient, and Yeadon has commented that it responded, in part, to the denialism in the gay community around the role that dark rooms in nightclubs (where men could go for anonymous sex) played in the early years of HIV/AIDS. [10] Yeadon has also acknowledged the ways in which contemporary viewers consider the disco or the nightclub as forms of ‘refuge’ and spaces of community and celebration. [11] Such narratives have been explored in academic work over the last few decades and have filtered into queer consciousness more generally, becoming an aspect of the marketing and production campaigns adopted by musicians to reach queer audiences and connect their music to these seemingly radical and utopic histories. [12]

In 1984 however, Yeadon’s position in relation to his subject was quite different, and was heavily shaped by his left-wing politics. He joined the Communist Party in 1971, was on the editorial board of Artery the Marxist cultural journal that was founded at the Royal College of Art in the same year, and had produced anti-fascist banners as portable works of art that were often used in demonstrations in the mid–1970s. [13] Yeadon, like many other gay men, found that he had to keep his sexuality largely separate from, or unarticulated within, these activities, as left wing political groups were frequently hostile, or at best indifferent, to homosexuality. [14] Despite this, his art was frequently a space where these two things could meet. In Modern Art, Disco Drawing, Yeadon actively critiques the disco or nightclub as a capitalist space in which gay men are drawn into positions of escape, introspection, and denial:

The gay scene offered on the surface a tangible and greater sense of freedom than the more political gay liberation struggles had produced, but this was an illusionary freedom that could easily be withdrawn. Real freedom and equality had to come through extra Parliamentary political struggle. [15]

The phosphenes serve a symbolic role here again, as signs of disconnection from reality and intoxication, caused by inhaling amyl nitrate (known as poppers) which was prevalent in these spaces – a related page from Yeadon’s sketchbook makes this link explicit (fig.3) – as well as the seductions of capitalism more generally.

The establishment of large-scale gay nightclubs in Britain’s cities from the late 1970s – such as Heaven in London, which opened in late 1979 – signalled a more mainstream gay presence in British nightlife and were just the latest manifestation of gay culture’s entanglements with capitalism. Following the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967 and the impact of the Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s, the identity category becoming known as ‘gay’ found articulation through gay businesses, gay pubs and clubs, and gay media – we might think of homosexuality finding a limited kind of acceptance in Britain in this moment via its ability to open up new opportunities for consumption. [16] For some gay men, this was welcome; for others, like Yeadon, it signalled that the aims of sexual liberation had only partly been achieved. [17] In his sketchbooks from this time, Yeadon plotted out the composition of Modern Art, Disco Drawing and, in the process, alternated or paired the accompanying text ‘cissies looking at phosphenes’ with the more directly critical ‘zombies looking at phosphenes’ – an implication that the intoxicants of the new post-liberation nightlife were anesthetising and limiting the possibilities of gay life (fig.4).

In this light, the entirely understandable desires of present-day viewers of Modern Art, Disco Drawing to remember the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis or to recognise a contemporary investment in the queer nightclub risk erasing the ways in which Yeadon saw a critical and subversive potential in the tensions between homosexuality and capitalism. Such connections and disconnections between how sets of ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ people perceive each other are arguably dramatized, already, in Modern Art, Disco Drawing; think back to the two ‘types’ who occupy the space, one cartoonish and the other rendered more realistically and delicately. He was not alone in this concern, either. Emmanuel Cooper, who was writing extensively on ‘gay art’ at this time for gay publications as I have noted, had been a member of the Gay Left collective between 1975 and 1980, a group that sought to forge a bridge between gay politics and left politics, and wrote art criticism for left publications the Morning Star and the Tribune. Yeadon was one of the few gay artists that Cooper covered in the left-wing press; Colin Hall, who produced paintings and installations that placed homosexuality at the centre of ordinary life in a similar manner to Yeadon, was another. [18] Such occasional crossover moments suggest that Cooper, like Yeadon, was interested in art that began with ‘gay’ experiences but also moved outwards from there to speak to society at large.

For the Tribune, Cooper reviewed Yeadon’s Dirty Tricks show when it travelled down to the Pentonville Gallery in London from the Herbert. In Coventry, Yeadon’s art had been the subject of attack by local councillors who branded it ‘overtly pornographic’. Their outrage made the front page of the Coventry Evening Telegraph and was supported, a day later, by an editorial that described his work as ‘lavatory-wall smut, the product of a contorted mind sated by self-gratification and an immature desire to shock and repel’. [19] Both responses focused on Yeadon’s use of homosexual imagery as a particular subject of criticism. At the same time, the newspaper received many letters in response that defended his work, publishing a small selection, and footfall at the Herbert increased by 40%. [20] Acknowledging this controversy, Cooper framed Yeadon’s work as ‘a shattering attack on the political theory and practice of capitalism, often using sex as a metaphor’. Homosexuality, he argued, was something that could expose ‘bourgeois hypocrisy’ and had the potential to ‘challenge, and possibly change, conventional attitudes’. [21] It was precisely this potential that would shape Thatcherite attempts to limit public expressions of homosexuality – by local authorities, in schools, and by groups and individuals – as the decade continued, culminating in the passing of Section 28 of the Local Government Act in 1988. [22] In a fitting response to the controversy, Yeadon’s works, including those from Dirty Tricks, were reshown in the Coventry Evening Telegraph building in 2018, which had been empty since the newspaper moved headquarters in 2012.

Conclusion

At the heart of Modern Art, Disco Drawing and Yeadon’s practice more generally in the early 1980s then, is an ongoing dialogue between left wing politics and homosexuality – one that takes in the potential for gay cultures to undermine as well as be neutered by capitalism. In the drawing, Yeadon roots this dialogue in a nightclub where naked figures are engulfed by a haze of phosphenes. These flashes of light and blotches of colour become metaphors for the unsteadiness of perception, evoking a sense that what we see may be shaped by tricks – of light and of the system of ideas that holds society in its place. Reconnecting Yeadon’s drawing with these contexts and ideas is important, not simply as a way of insisting on historically precise interpretations of artworks but because it reanimates a more dynamic relationship to art than one of ‘reflection’, to evoke again the mirror metaphor with which I began. Later in his career, Yeadon returned to the subject of perception in a 2005 essay, quoting a passage from the writer Colin Wilson’s Beyond the Outsider (1965):

Perception is not passive but active. This is the difference between looking and seeing, listening and hearing. Perception requires imagination.

And looking finishes the art. [23]

How do we ‘finish’ a work of art like Modern Art, Disco Drawing, particularly as ‘queer’ viewers in 2025? Yeadon’s practice suggests that this will never be as simple as a linear process of recognition, of seeing someone or something like yourself, in an artwork. Instead, Modern Art, Disco Drawing sets up a sense of instability relating to perception and reflection, reanimating a ‘gay’ subject with a critical relationship to capitalism and class. This is the ‘finish’ of Yeadon’s work – a new beginning.

For more information on John Yeadon’s work, visit johnyeadon.com and @yeadonjohn on Instagram.

Gregory Salter is Associate Professor In History of Art at the University of Birmingham.

Acknowledgements: the author would like to thank John Yeadon, and Martin Roberts at the Herbert Museum And Art Gallery, Coventry.

Notes

[1] John Yeadon in interview with author, 15 January 2025.

[2] Yeadon noted an interest in artworks as ‘mirrors’ at around this time, stating ‘I like the physical and illusionary possibilities of mirrors which are ideological’ and expressing an interest in pictorial device that implicate ‘the viewer in the dialogue – that is extremely political and coercive’. See John Yeadon, ‘Old tricks and dirty tricks’ in Dirty Tricks, exhibition catalogue, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum (Coventry, 1984), 7.

[3] See, for example, the campaign that launched Queer Britain, the UK’s first LGBTQ museum: The Place to Be Seen, produced by QB x M&C Saatchi, 2022 [accessed 25 March 2025].

[4] Yeadon (1984), 5.

[5] Yeadon (1984), 6.

[6] Yeadon (1984), 6. See also similar, later comments in John Yeadon, Notes on the Congeries Carnis Series – 1999/05, May 2005  [accessed 25 March 2025].

[7] Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, second edition (London, 1994), 299–300.

[8] A key early article on ‘gay art’ by Cooper is Emmanuel Cooper, ‘Good Art? Bad Art? Gay Art?’, Gay News, 16–29 November 1978, 18–19; he also published a related version as Emmanuel Cooper, ‘Gay Art’, Gay Left 7 (1978/79), 6–8. Examples of the many occasions where Cooper raised ‘gay art’ with artists are Emmanuel Cooper, ‘On All Fronts’, Gay News, 22 March 1979, 39 and Emmanuel Cooper, ‘Novelist in Paint’, Gay News, 16 October 1980, 12–3.

[9] Reproduced at John Yeadon, 2021: 2Tone, Turner Prize & City of Culture Orchestra, 17 October 2022 [accessed 25 March 2025].

[10] Yeadon in interview with author, 15 January 2025.

[11] Yeadon in interview with author, 15 January 2025.

[12] For an overview of this academic work, see Chal Ravens, ‘Is Everyone Talking About Dancing, Rather Than Doing It?’, The Quietus, 17 October 2024  [accessed 25 March 2025]. The most recent and most high profile evocation of queer nightclub histories by a contemporary musician is Beyonce’s Renaissance album (2022) – see Sam Damshenas, ‘Beyoncé’s Renaissance: All the queer moments explained’, Gay Times, 29 July 2022 [accessed 25 March 2025].

[13] For examples of Yeadon’s banners from this period, see John Yeadon, Banners 1971/86  (also to be found here) [accessed 25 March 2025].

[14] ‘I think to some extent I kept those notions separate, I think because it was difficult’– Yeadon in interview with author, 15 January 2025. For a history of the relationship between gay men and the left, see Lucy Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-War Britain: How the Personal Got Political (Manchester, 2007).

[15] John Yeadon, email to author, 13 March 2025.

[16] See Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulations of Sexuality Since 1800, third edition (London, 2014), 366.

[17] ‘I was never part of the scene. It was too American – those guys with moustaches and the Hi-NRG… I thought, “well, where’s the British queer stuff?” And it was there, but…’: Yeadon in interview with author, 15 January 2025.

[18] See Emmanuel Cooper, ‘Grotesque yet strangely sensitive’, Tribune, 2 March 1984, 9 and Emmanuel Cooper, ‘Lived experience’, Morning Star, 6 April 1981, 4.

[19] Elaine Gear, ‘Art Show Branded As Porn’, Coventry Evening Telegraph, 31 January 1984, 1 and Anon., ‘It’s smut, not art’, Coventry Evening Telegraph, 1 February 1984, 8.

[20] Various, ‘‘Obscene’ paintings mirror life today’, Coventry Evening Telegraph, 7 February 1984, 8.

[21] Cooper (1984). Yeadon echoed these possibilities more recently – ‘There’s a notion that homosexuality disrupts the nuclear family and destroys society – great!’: John Yeadon in interview with author, 15 January 2025.

[22] For a clear-sighted account of Thatcherite politics relating to sexuality, published just after Thatcher left power, see Martin Durham, Sex and Politics: The Family and Morality in the Thatcher Years (Macmillan, 1991).

[23] Yeadon (2005).