Was francis bacon gay
Stephen Taglieri, Marketing & Communications Coordinator
June 12, 2023
The American Forest Foundation’s work is based off the significant biologists and botanists who laid the groundwork for healthy forest stewardship, conservation, and climate change move. June is Pride Month, which is a moment of celebration for Queer people and a hour to honor the contributions they have made, including in the fields of conservation, environmentalism, and other natural sciences.
In this blog, we feature a scant of the many Queer scientists who have made significant contributions with their work and research and connect their foundations to the conservation work we do today.
Sir Francis Bacon
Sir Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) was a lawyer, statesman, philosopher, scientist, and a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community. Francis Bacon, knighted in 1613, both discovered and popularized the use of the scientific method we rely on today. His function emphasized the importance of collecting and analyzing statistics during experimentation to decide the nature of the world around us. This was a significant difference from Aristotle’s scientific theories which put more emphasis on logic-based
Francis Bacon is considered to be one of the most important and formative painters of the 20th Century.
His vast career spaned over many important decades in human history. His works explore the distortion of the human figure, referencing images of sexuality, violence and brutality.
Francis Bacon’s figurative works are celebrated for their bold, graphic, and often tortured imagery. Inspired by the anatomy of animals, the distinction between human and creature is often blurred in Bacon's paintings.
Bacon's portraits often represent the subject as meat like characters without identity. The boundary between beast, animal and human is challenged and distorted which allows the viewer to question their control human mask and disguised animal urges.
Francis Bacon
Study of a Human Body after Ingres
Signed
Lithograph in colours on arches paper
60.5cm x 88.5cm
In his early years, Bacon had a difficult partnership with his parents especially his father, who struggled with his son’s homosexuality. At a time when being gay was a criminal offence, Bacon was open about his sexuality. At the tender ag
An artist that marked me: Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon was missing from my being when I was youthful, although I didn’t understand it.
Francis Bacon, an Irish artist known for his surrealist and disturbing function, is somewhat predictable as the choice for my favourite artist. Growing up, I was always interested in somewhat disturbing ideas and media. Although I was a fairly pleased kid, I just had this innate attraction to horrific ideas and images, albeit through a childish lens – my favourite film was The Nightmare Before Christmas, and my favourite book was the Goosebumps version of Phantom of the Opera.
These interests were not deemed especially unusual, but the way I expressed them was. I particularly remember, at around the age of five or six, drawing a picture of a vampire with blood around its mouth. My mentor was, I suppose understandably, a little concerned about this, but I could only react with a sense of annoyance. I didn’t like the implications of her concern, that there were things I had to restrain myself from expressing, for the benefit of…who? What? So people could be more comfortable? I felt that would be lying somehow. I liked vampires! I wanted to draw them, I th
Sir Francis Bacon
While Renaissance men were rapidly expanding all the frontiers of knowledge—in geography, philosophy, medicine and astronomy—Sir Francis Bacon was devising a deductive system for empirical research which has earned him the title "the Father of Modern Science."
Most scientists today still owe him a debt of gratitude. They repay this debt by giving his capsule biography in almost every text for high-school or college-level courses in most branches of science. But they carefully dodge mentioning that he was gay.
Bacon did not marry until the late age of forty-eight, and contemporary figures relate that he was by preference homosexual. John Aubrey in his Brief Lives says quite bluntly that Bacon "was a pederast" and had "ganimeds and favourites" ("pederast" in Renaissance diction meant generally "homosexual" rather than specifically a lover of minors; "ganimed" of course d
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