The Kiss

In the search for the earliest moving images of a kiss, we stumble upon Eadweard Muybridge’s The Kiss (1882). Two nude women meet, shake hands and share a loving kiss – imprinting for posterity a moment of homosexual intimacy more often than not torn from the pages of history. Cinema, unlike painting, has found a far more judgemental audience when it comes to the representation of nudity and same-sex relationships. Muybridge’s experiment is a remarkable trailblazer, particularly considering Victorian moral values. Because that society’s focus on male–male or male–female relationships fostered a partial ignorance of relations involving only women, the sexism and prudishness of the day ironically forced the director to stage a lesbian embrace, if he was to show any kiss at all.