| Sumario: | In this article Francis Bacon's 1953 painting Two Figure is approached through an archive consisting of popular and banal visual and written texts that are related to social/sexual practices and pleasures that in the 1950s were increasingly identified in the popular press as 'homosexual'. It is suggested that Two Figures can be viewed within a history of social and sexual encounters between men that were orchestrated by class difference and influenced by the visual and sexual economy of 1930s' German modernism. The article explores how this economy is popularized and re-presented on the pages of British and American fitness, physique, and wrestling magazines of the 1950s, and how the classified advertisements in these magazines provide a popular context for making sense of Bacon's painting. Whilst this article may go some way to explain the production of the painting, it is focused more on constructing and exploring possible understandings of the painting that may have been available for some viewers when it was first exhibited in London during 1953. The article also introduces 'cruising' as a historically contingent mode of attention that organizes an approach towards, or circulation around, Two Figures.
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