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

[Duncan Grant]

2. That would be his California paintings.

From the article. Hope this helps:

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…

"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'".

And if anyone would like to take a deeper dive, there’s this:

David Hockney’s California (1965): ‘it was all so sexy’
Not only did Los Angeles offer the artist endless sunshine and untapped subject matter when he flew in from Britain almost 60 years ago — it also presented him with an erotic freedom that had been forbidden in his native land