This exhibition explores the history of the term ‘homosexual.' Museums are afraid to show it

Fast Company

14-05-2025

A new art exhibition in Chicago uses more than 300 works of art to trace the historical origins of the word 'homosexual,' mapping how it's shaped our modern perception of queer identity. According to its lead curator, museums around the world have refused to show the exhibition due to the current political climate—even when it's offered to them for free.
The exhibition, titled The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939, is currently on view at the Wrightwood 659 museum in Chicago through July 26. It's the first time that the exhibition—a passion project of over eight years for lead curator Jonathan D. Katz—has been shown in its entirety.
Through sculptures, paintings, prints, and other media from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it explores early, oft-overlooked expressions of queer culture. Further, it examines how the coining of the term 'homosexual' created a binary understanding of sexuality that we're still grappling with today.
The First Homosexuals sold more advance tickets than any other show since the Wrightwood 659 opened in 2018. But Katz says that after pitching the exhibition to many other museums, he's been faced with one rejection after another.
A career in queer studies
Katz, who is a professor of queer art history at the University of Pennsylvania, began his career in queer studies during the Reagan administration.
'When I started, my field was just being born,' Katz wrote in a biography for Northwestern University, where he received his PhD. 'Reagan was in office, AIDS was being instrumentalized by the Right to justify the most odious forms of discrimination, and I had been kicked out of the University of Chicago (among other universities) for pursuing the relationship between art and sexuality.'
In the decades since, Katz has gone on to teach queer studies at several different universities, including Yale, and co-curated a queer exhibition called Hide/Seek Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Katz's new exhibition is inspired by a question that's followed him throughout his years of research.
'The minute you go outside of Europe and its colonies, questions of sexual difference assume a completely different meaning—which is to say that, very often, there's absolutely no issue associated with same-sex sexuality, and it's often understood as part of a continuum of sexualities,' Katz says. 'I was interested, therefore, in trying to decenter the assumptions that we have about sexuality by reference to other cultural norms. That's what motivated this exhibition, as well as a careful investigation of what, literally, the earliest representations look like.'
The first use of the word 'homosexual'
Katz's curiosity led him back to what's believed to be the first-ever use of the word 'homosexual,' found in a letter exchange between two queer activists, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kertbeny, in 1868.
In the letters, Kertbeny takes issue with Ulrichs' relegation of queer individuals to its own class of people (or a 'third sex.'). Instead, Kertbeny argued, everyone has the capacity for both 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' desire.
'What's striking is that we use Kertbeny's language [today], but we have unfortunately held fast to Ulrichs' deeply minoritizing identity category,' Katz says.
Both before and after Kertbeny and Ulrichs' debate, queer sexuality existed on a spectrum—and it was captured by countless artists. The First Homosexuals includes works by 125 of them, from well-known artists like Jean Cocteau and the Lumière Brothers to lesser-known creatives like Jacques-Émile Blanche. They were pulled from an extensive list of sources, including both private collectors and institutions like MOMA.
Works include an 1820s depiction of men dressed as women on the streets of Lima, Peru; a series of scrolls from Japan in 1850 exploring the sexual education of a young man, who's shown sleeping with both men and women in a variety of positions; and an 1891 photograph showing four women in a romantic embrace. The exhibition is divided into eight sections, each dedicated to peeling back a layer of a story that's largely gone untold in the mainstream.
The final portion of the exhibition is an archway wallpapered with photos of Nazis burning books at the Institute for Sexual Research, the world's first queer rights organization. It's a dark closing note that reminds viewers of the many archives of queer history that have been purposefully and violently hidden.
'The idea that everything that flowers over the course of the exhibition can so quickly be destroyed, is, of course, a metaphor for where we are now,' Katz says.
Since the exhibition opened on May 2, audience reactions have been striking.
'It's been profound,' Katz says. 'Lots of emotion, tears, real delight, and a sense of a robbed history that's being restored.'
A 'terrible sign' for museums
For now, though, that history might only be available to a select few.
When Katz first began outreach for collecting the art to be included in The First Homosexuals six years ago, he says 80 to 90% of his requests to museums and collectors were rejected—the highest rate of rejection he's ever encountered.
'There were a number of pieces that didn't come because when you mount an exhibition about the first homosexuals, you know right going in that there are going to be places that just will not want to play with you,' Katz says. 'And that was indeed the case.'
Since then, rejections have continued to plague the exhibition. Katz has been pitching the finished show to museums around the world for nearly four years, in some cases even offering the exhibition for free despite its multi-million dollar valuation, he told the Chicago Sun-Times. So far, he's received near-universal rejections, with the exception of the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, which is currently in talks with Katz to display part of the exhibition at Art Basel 2026. Time and time again, Katz has received the same standard rejection notices from over 100 museums, including the Tate Britain. (The Tate did not respond to a request for comment by publication)
'I wish I knew more—I just get the rejection letters,' Katz says. 'What I hear is, generally, 'It doesn't fit our programming,' or 'We're fully scheduled,' or some typical excuse.' But one director of a major museum, whose name Katz declined to share, did choose to elaborate further. 'They said to me, 'It's exactly the kind of exhibition I want to show, and therefore it's the exhibition I can't show.' In several cases, Katz adds, the initial reception of the proposal was very promising, but it was ultimately turned down, leading him to wonder whether the museums' boards were issuing the final 'no.'
In part, Katz attributes this reaction to a 'hangover' from photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's 1988 exhibition The Perfect Moment, which was cancelled by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. after conservative leaders heavily criticized the exhibition for containing homoerotic content. In the midst of the Reagan presidency, federal funding for the arts had become a hot-button issue, especially as it pertained to work that right-wing pundits labeled indecent.
It's a period in history that feels like an uneasy echo of the arts scene today, as the Trump administration has moved to dismantle funding for local museums and libraries, canceled National Endowment for the Humanities grants, and blocked federal arts funding from going to artists who promote so-called ' gender ideology,' a vague term that the government appears to be using as a dog whistle for any kind of gender expression outside of the binary.
While Katz sent out most of his art loan requests and exhibition pitches before Trump's election, he says this pattern of rejection is a familiar narrative that's plagued the museum world for years.
'It may not be Trump's horrific politics, but it is still horrific politics,' Katz says. 'It's the age old prejudicial politics that animates the museum world.'
More generally, as a queer studies expert who faced repeated instances of institutional homophobia during the Reagan years, Katz feels that the current political attitude toward the queer community is 'worse than a regression.'
'Homophobia was actually bizarrely less naked under Reagan than it is under Trump,' Katz says. 'They still hated us, but they talked about the idea of an inclusive culture. There's no discourse of an inclusive culture now. There are clearly drawn borders and boundary lines in every sense of the word, and a profound sense of us against them.'
For museums that are brave enough to speak out, Katz believes there could be an opportunity to build trust with new audiences by choosing to platform queer stories instead of silencing them.
'I think that museums actually have a remarkable opportunity to build their audience and relevance if they seize it,' Katz says. 'There is a large population that is not a veteran museum-going population that can become a veteran museum-going population by speaking to the social and political issues that haunt this country. That many museums try to avoid that desperately is a terrible sign. What museums need to do is frankly engage with it.'