James Saslow: Portrait of the Month March 2013

James Saslow, 1986

James M. Saslow is Professor of Art History at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, as well as an author and a former arts journalist, including many years as New York editor of The Advocate, America’s national gay and lesbian newsmagazine. His teaching interests focus on the Italian Renaissance and Baroque period, with special interests in gender and sexuality in art and the visual aspects of the theatre.  His first book, Ganymede in the Renaissance:  Homosexuality in Art and Society (1986), helped to open art history to consideration of homosexuality and gender in the early modern period. A founding member of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at City University of New York and a two-term co-chair of the College Art Association’s Gay and Lesbian Caucus, he organized the 2004 conference at the Graduate Center on “InterseXions:  Queer Visual Culture at the Crossroads.”  He has also lectured across the U.S. and Canada on homosexuality and art, particularly on Michelangelo, whose poetry he translated. His most recent book, Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts (1999), received two awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation. He is currently working on a study of the outspokenly homosexual 16th-century artist Giovanni Bazzi (Il Sodoma), and a memoir of his 35 years of experience in gay and lesbian culture and the spiritual roots of his activism.