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cimorene
Apparently Pierrot was taken up as something of a mascot or symbol in the early 1900s by queers or gay men because of his unlucky in love angle, but I couldn't really find much with about queerness and him and Harlequin via a websearch, and somehow there's not really any visual art of them in a particularly slashy context that I can find (apart from the ubiquitous love triangle with Pierrot weeping as Harlequin makes off with a girl, which is admittedly open to such interpretation), even though they've been extremely popular subjects of visual art and iconography for said at-least-200-years (and longer, but the older stuff isn't as easy to find)...
...but what I did find, the only significant written result really, was this scholarly work about Spanish artist and poet Federico García Lorca and his identification with Pierrot, which also revealed to me the apparently well-known-to-scholars fact that García Lorca spent years pining after his close friend, Dalí, after at least one kinky threesome where Dalí watched him with a woman. Apparently García Lorca failed to 'persuade' Dalí to 'change the nature of their relationship', so some sort of active friendzoning was going on, and the writer seems to argue in this book that Harlequin in García Lorca's work can be taken as symbolic of Dalí.
Is this another thing like Tchaikovsky and Hans Christian Andersen where everybody but me already knew about it? Admittedly, you could argue (and plenty of men with bisexual experiences like the above do) that Dalí wasn't queer, and he's the better known of the two. It's less odd that nobody told me about García Lorca because I was only taught about him tangentially in high school Spanish anyway. Still, this discovery distracted me very effectively from my efforts to unearth more written material on queering Harlequin and Pierrot - fortunately, because I still think there's too much of them paired together in the popular imagination for a queer angle to actually be as scarce as the search suggests and it's quite frustrating.
1. To be fair, the reason I say 'crack ship' is more that the idea of shipping clowns makes me laugh incredulously, not that shipping the (for the past two centuries at least) two most prominent characters (Harlequin and Pierrot) together is odd.
