The case for David’s homoeroticism depends on two suppositions: First, the figure’s alleged prurient physical deportment; for to look at the bronze, as it stands in the Bargello makes it seem camp, gay, sweet, effeminate or any other gender cliché. Secondly, its iconography must be secular, not religious. For if religious, that is, if the David, Renaissance sensibilities would have rejected the blatant eroticizing of any ancestor of Christ. Reviewing crucial opinions on this work and my own life mistakes on gendering anything or anyone, this talk argues against both suppositions and contends that any intentional gendering of Donatello’s bronze David is adduced from false display, fallacious interpretation, and twentieth-century myopia. In fact, after presenting this same paper in Venice, Italy, in 2010 at the prestigious Renaissance Society of America, a noted scholar began a verbal attack matched with a London barrister and stomped out!

Peter Frederick Weller (born June 24, 1947) is an American film and stage actor, television director, and art historian.
Weller has appeared in more than 70 films and television series, including RoboCop (1987) and its sequel RoboCop 2 (1990) (in which he played the title character), The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). He has also appeared in such films as Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (1995), the Oliver Stone-produced The New Age (1994), and David Cronenberg’s adaptation of William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch (1991).

Aside from a Saturn Award nomination for his RoboCop role, Weller received an Academy Award nomination for his 1993 short Partners, in which he also acted. In television, he hosted the program Engineering an Empire on the History Channel from 2005 to 2007. He also played Christopher Henderson in the fifth season of 24, Stan Liddy in the fifth season of the Showtime original series Dexter, as well as Charles “Charlie” Barosky in 11 episodes in the sixth season of Kurt Sutter’s Sons of Anarchy. From 2012 to 2017, Weller was involved in the A&E (now Netflix) series Longmire both as a director and an actor. In 2017, Weller appeared on The Last Ship as Dr. Paul Vellek.
While enrolled at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), he played trumpet in one of the campus bands. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and began his acting career after attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (class of 1972).

In 2004, Weller completed a Master of Arts degree in Roman and Renaissance Art at Syracuse University, and occasionally taught courses in ancient history at the university.

In 2007, Weller began a Ph.D. at UCLA, in Italian Renaissance Art History. In October 2013 he filed his dissertation, entitled “Alberti Before Florence: Early Sources Informing Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura“, and was awarded his doctorate in 2014.