David Hockney depicted a 'peaceful, gay paradise' when homosexuality was a crime

There is an underground quality to some of Hockney's early work. His pictures are reminiscent of graffiti: spiky, expressive and defiant, rendered in bold lines and block colours."He was really pioneering as somebody who was unashamedly proud of his queerness before the legalisation of homosexuality in '67," says Dominic James Bilton, the co-leader of the Queer British Art Network.In these early paintings, Hockney "showed and made work on same-sex relationships and desire and sexuality" at a time when "not a lot of people were doing that".Hockney's style changed radically a few years later, after he travelled to California for the first time in 1964. There he painted his famous swimming pool pictures.In one 1966 painting, Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, a nude man climbs from the water of a swimming pool, his back to the viewer, head turned as though in conversation with someone just out of frame.The 1963 painting Domestic Scene, Los Angeles shows one man in a shower while another man washes his back."Those works are so queer, so sensual and sexy and playful and joyous," Bilton says, adding they also show the "domesticity" and "dull aspects of gay relationships".Hockney was "normalising same-sex relationships... that we take for granted", Bilton suggests, adding the artist showed that gay people "are just normal people... doing normal stuff, looking at our partners and thinking: 'oh, you're beautiful'".