..Stockholm’s Kungsträdgården, or St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect offered the homosexual viewer a pictorial starting point from which to intuit non-representational, highly personal meaning.

There was surely no comprehensive codebook that these men could use to ascertain the meanings of such symbols; it is more likely that homosexual men learned to recognize and interpret particular patterns over time. Like a Symbolist sign, a tattoo glimpsed while cruising Hamburg’s docklands,..

In his 1897 firsthand account of gay life in German-speaking Europe, the Austrian writer Otto Rudolf Podjukl(pseud Otto de Joux) wrote about the highly dev capacity for gay men to “instinctively recognize each other at first sight while average people overlook us,so that we remain hidden from them”

As such, we are left with the task of critically piecing together how such symbols might have functioned on the ground based on the reports of those who made it their task to define and surveille the homosexual body or on rare anonymous accounts that refer to such visual codes.

As homosexual symbols like graffiti and tattoos were intended to function as unspoken pictorial codes, virtually no written archival evidence exists that details how homosexual men tacitly agreed on which patterns or symbols should comprise a queer iconographic lexicon.

Tattoos functioned as another mode of symbolic signaling that sustained gay community nets.As with the aforementioned graffiti,much of the extant evidence that speaks to 19c gay tattoo cultures comes from ethnological or sexological publications,such as Albert Moll’s 1912'Handbook of Sexual Science'

As in most of Europe, homosexual acts were forbidden in Sweden under threat of criminal prosecution; for working- and lower-class men interested in communicating their sexual desires to a receptive homosexual public while avoiding police intervention, erotic symbols were exceptionally useful.

providing those who encountered them the opportunity to puzzle out their meaning and add their own symbols to the wall’s iconographic program. Claudelin clearly understood his project as a kind of sociological study of the sex lives of Stockholm’s homosexual men.

Sometimes these icons were paired with explicit requests for sex or personal details; often, they were standalone symbols that spoke for themselves. While many of the pictures recorded by Claudelin are easily recognizable as genital sex acts, other graffiti verged on abstraction,

Bengt Claudelin,who was an employee of the Hallwyl Museum,Stockholm,began his project c 1905 documenting a phenomenon that was commonplace thru the 19th and persisted into the 20th: the doodling of erotic symbols and icons on the walls of public toilets & urinals by men seeking sex with other men.

The use of pictorial symbols as communication devices used by marginalized subsets of European society was a topic of great interest to late-nineteenth-century scientists and researchers, who provide useful material for contextualizing Symbolist art within this practice.

Much like the Symbolist, the homosexual both encoded these signs as symbols of his subjectivity and developed strategies to interpret the symbolic signs of others as deeply personal and meaningful.

Alienated from the world of normative signs by a public quick to detect and persecute his subjectivity, the homosexual was compelled to find coded and symbolic meaning in signs that had been revised and incorporated into a subcultural lexicon.

Gay subcultures have long depended upon symbols for their survival. Harold Beaver powerfully articulated the contours of a gay semiotic system by which gay men view and interpret signs in ways that nourish personal subjectivity and create points of connection between them.

Fortunately, many of Gant's pictures are captioned. These images open the door to a wider investigation, and they gesture towards a fluid, complex and multidimensional account of masculinity.

As Dalley writes, pictures are useful sources in 'the histories of less tangible things, such as emotions, sensibilities, mentalités, and beliefs'. Sometimes they give up the 'involuntary confessions of history, the things tucked away in the corner of images'.