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New York Times

How ‘Gay' Became an Identity in Art

When did homosexuality change from a description of what people do to a definition of who they are? How was an act transformed into an identity? In this precarious moment, as White House pronouncements, court decisions and public polling indicate backsliding support for gay rights in this country, such questions, long chewed over by scholars of sociology, philosophy and gender studies, are addressed in two impressive art exhibitions in Chicago. Six years in the making, 'The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,' at Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago, through Aug. 2, is an eye-opening global survey of same-sex-oriented art. With roughly 300 works on view, venturing beyond Europe and North America to include Latin America and Asia, it is a huge show. Yet the curator Jonathan D. Katz, who was assisted by Johnny Willis, said that procuring loans from international museums for an exhibition with this title and focus was a struggle, and more often than not, the requests were refused. Indeed, at the last moment, two promised paintings from Slovakia, which is governed by a socially conservative populist party, were withdrawn; a large black-and-white reproduction of one is hanging on a wall. Coincidentally, a superlative exhibition nearby, 'Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World' at the Art Institute of Chicago until Oct. 5, explores how the Impressionist master concentrated on the portrayal of men, at a time when turning the male gaze on another man was almost unthinkable. Most of his depictions are not overtly homoerotic. However, in a large painting, scandalous in its day and startling even now, he viewed from behind a naked man drying himself. It's the sort of boudoir picture that his friend Edgar Degas frequently made of female bathers. Caillebotte, who died at 45 in 1894, lived with a woman and never identified as gay. An important lesson drawn from both shows is that categories like gay and straight are markers of our time, not his. As documented in the erudite and sumptuous 'First Homosexuals' catalog, the term 'homosexual' (and 'heterosexual') came into being in the 1860s, along with 'urning,' a newly coined word that has not lasted so well. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, divided humanity into those who are innately attracted to the opposite sex, and the 'urnings' who are enamored of their own. A few years later, the writer Karl Maria Kertbeny came up with 'homosexual.' Unlike Ulrichs, he viewed sexual choice as a changeable taste, not a binary division, akin to deciding what dish to cook for dinner. Yet in the years that followed, Ulrichs's hard-and-fast split between gay and straight came to be popularized with Kertbeny's terminology. Katz argues that at about the turn of the 20th century, in light of behavioral and psychological research, same-sex attraction shifted. Instead of something that could turn like a weather vane, it came to be regarded as an immutable orientation, and the objects of erotic fascination for gay and lesbian artists changed, too. Earlier gay artists embraced indeterminacy and represented bodies that blurred the line between masculine and feminine. But once homosexuality was no longer viewed as a momentary preference, androgynous adolescents gave way to muscular men and buxom women. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.