After analyzing the Toulouse-Lautrec’s Sapphic artworks, we return to his more familiar oil painting At the Moulin Rouge: The Women Dancing and notice that it essentially is the last work that involved some form of embracing before Toulouse-Lautrec’s encounter with his uncle’s art-burning incident. 
InThe Women Dancing the partners are holding hands but are not embracing each other in an intimate manner. It is not obvious that they are lesbians, even though many academic studies say they are. Toulouse-Lautrec seems to be unacceptable of lesbians, and we can best connect this to his possible homophobia. In the works that followed, the coziness of the women is lacking as Toulouse-Lautrec had begun having some doubts about the purpose of these women’s behavior. He was not ready to embrace such liberalism. Toulouse-Lautrec once said, “I have two lives” - his art career and his duty as an aristocratic citizen of Paris with moral obligations to uphold. (Frey 17) At the end of the five years he spent sketching the lesbians, he submitted to the latter life. He drew the lesbians far apart in order to ease his withdrawal from the furia with them. He was not successful in his attempt to accept. His later works depict lesbians individually, not together, so once again the sexual orientation is not apparent. In the end, Toulouse-Lautrec did not allow the Sapphic works to “come out” of his locked closets, and he wished for them as well as the lesbians they portrayed to remain confined to their private rooms.