Jupiter Embracing Cupid, Raimondi – Participant Interpretation

Seeing two men being intimate was something I never saw growing up in small town UK. I was 18 before I saw two men kissing, that was on TV and was just the briefest of pecks. It caused quite a scandal at the time.

I was a teenager in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, pre-internet.  Like most gay kids in those days, I grew up feeling abnormal and that there was something wrong with me that I didn’t really understand.  Being gay wasn’t something people spoke about then, unless in an abusive tone, and there was a lot of that.  Even talking about it in schools then was illegal.

We had a lot of books at home including some large illustrated volumes on the history of art, which are mine now.  I only saw images like this in those books, I thought at the time that it was ok for men to love men in centuries past, just not in the 20^th century.  This early 16^th century etching of Jupiter embracing Cupid by Marcantonio Raimondi, reminds me of those self-affirming images I loved to see in those books.

Written by Ed Flanagan.