Obviously, although censorship is by no means a thing of the past, in general the climate of censorship has alleviated since the 1960s. Consequently, there is a great deal of difference between the level of explicitness in gay and lesbian art work created before the lessening of censorship as a consequence of the (hetero) sexual revolution of the 1960s and art that was created afterwards.
Pre-Stonewall art is a work produced prior to the 1969 Stonewall uprising that inaugurated the more militant phase of the gay rights movement which deals with homosexual subject matter is typically covert or indirect. Artists were forced to adopt strategies of concealment in order to avoid controversy or possibly even imprisonment. The meaning of their work is often discernible only through a decoding of signs and signals, or by reading the art in terms of the artists" biographies.
Conversely, an overt, even confrontational stance is much more common for post-Stonewall gay and lesbian artists. The imagery they employ is more often explicit and unguarded. They are increasingly likely to create openly homosexual work, just as they increasingly are able to conduct their lives openly.
Charles Demuth is one of the painters who involved in some striking examples of the suppression and censorship of pre-Stonewall artists' work with homoerotic content. He become best known for his landscapes of industrial America, featuring bridges, grain silos, factories, and so on. These landscapes earned him a reputation as an important artist. Early in his career, he shifted his art through a series of sailors with their genitals uncovered, but he wasn't able to exhibit his works. He also painted flowers, fruits, and vegetables in a way that suggests human sexuality without directly portraying it. In 1950, the officials of New York's Museum of Modern Art excluded his major art entitled "Distinguished Air" because they considered its sexual theme too controversial.
