Let us not mince words. David Hockney’s early work, with its sun-drenched pools and lithe, lounging bodies, was not merely a record of pleasure. It was a declaration of war. When homosexuality was still a crime, a secret shame whispered in the corridors of power, Hockney painted a world where it was the most natural thing in the world. He depicted a peaceful gay paradise, a Garden of Eden with a distinctly Californian slant. And for that, we must hail his bravery. But let us also understand what his bravery cost, and what it continues to mean in our own age of moral panic and retreat.
We live in strange times. The Victorians, who gave us the laws that criminalised Hockney’s loves, would be baffled by our current obsessions. On the one hand, we celebrate the liberation Hockney helped bring about. On the other, we see new forms of censorship, new fears of the body and its pleasures. Hockney’s paintings are a rebuke to the nervous Nellies of our own day, those who would sanitise art, who would demand that every image conform to a narrow, approved vision of virtue. Hockney was not virtuous. He was beautiful. And that is far rarer.
Consider his 1966 painting 'A Bigger Splash'. At first glance, it is a study in geometry and light. But look closer. The splash is violent, disruptive. It is the moment of entry into water, into a new element. For Hockney, that splash was the sound of a closet door being kicked open. Every painting of a naked boy by a pool was an act of sedition. Every curl of hair on a wet chest was a defiance of the law. The British establishment, which had driven Oscar Wilde to his grave and Alan Turing to his suicide, now had to look at this unabashed, unapologetic joy. And it blinked.
Hockney’s bravery was not the bravery of the martyr. He did not seek the stake. He sought the sun. He fled to California, where the light was kinder and the laws more relaxed. But he did not forget the grey damp of his native Bradford. His paintings are a memory of what it feels like to be free, a promise that the cold can be escaped. That is a profoundly political act. In an age when we fetishise victimhood, Hockney reminds us that there is a different kind of heroism: the heroism of happiness. To be happy when the world tells you that you have no right to be happy, that your very existence is a crime, is the most radical thing of all.
Now, in 2025, we face new challenges. The rise of illiberal movements across the West threatens to roll back the gains of the past sixty years. Trans rights are under assault. Drag story hours are picketed. And our culture, instead of producing Hockneys, produces committees and trigger warnings. We have become afraid of beauty, afraid of the body, afraid of the very pleasures Hockney celebrated. His work stands as a monument to a more courageous age, an age when artists believed that their visions could change the world. And they did.
But let us not sentimentalise. Hockney’s gay paradise was also an exclusive one. It was white, middle-class, beautiful. It had little room for the poor, the ugly, the disabled. It was a fantasy, and perhaps that is why it was so powerful. Every utopia is a lie, but a beautiful lie can inspire a truth. Hockney’s lie was that paradise was possible. And in making that lie, he made it true for generations of queer people who saw themselves in his canvases. He gave them permission to dream.
We need that dreaming again. We need artists who are unafraid to be happy, unafraid to be beautiful, unafraid to be controversial. We need fewer critics and more creators. David Hockney, now in his late eighties, is still painting, still pushing, still defying. His latest works, done entirely on an iPad, show that the old master has not lost his touch. He is still making the case for joy. And in a world that seems determined to make us miserable, that is the most brave, the most necessary, the most British thing of all.
So let us raise a glass to David Hockney. Let us salute his peaceful gay paradise. And let us ask ourselves: what paradise will we build?
