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New York Times
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- 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last moment, two promised paintings from Slovakia, which is governed by a socially conservative populist party, were withdrawn; a large black-and-white reproduction of one is hanging on a wall.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.
CNN
17-06-2025
- General
- CNN
A new art exhibition says we've gotten sexual identity all wrong
When did homosexuality become a fixed identity? At the Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago, an expansive, century-spanning exhibition charts the period when 'homosexuality' and 'heterosexuality' were new concepts, by looking at the queer subjects and artists of the period and how they depicted love, sex and gender. Set in the contemplative brick and stone space designed by architect Tadao Ando, 'The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939' features 300 works assembled from the collections of more than 100 museums to better understand how restrictive ideas on sexuality and gender became culturally ingrained in society and the labels they came to be known by. Included are Alice Austen's sapphic-coded Victorian-era photographs; Gerda Wegener's 1929 painting of her trans partner, Lili Elbe (the subject of the 2015 film 'The Danish Girl'); portraits of influential LGBTQ+ writers Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin and Oscar Wilde; and figure studies by the painter John Singer Sargent. The exhibition — and forthcoming book of the same name — emphasize a pivotal moment, when the West's notions around sexuality began with a misapplied label, which was then spread around the world as a strict binary. 'There is something specific about the West that sought to police the boundary between the two (homosexuality and heterosexuality), and so I wanted to do a show that looked at how that boundary emerged,' said curator Jonathan D. Katz, a founding educator in several pioneering queer studies programs in the US, who now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. 'We came to realize that, of course, the clean line we wanted to draw between the West and the rest of the world was smudged by virtue of colonialism — and so that then became a big part of the exhibition as well.' The first published instance of the words 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' appeared in an 1868 letter between journalists Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl Maria Kertbeny, two pivotal figures who defined modern ideas around sexuality. Kertbeny officially coined the two terms and advocated for the sexual and political freedom of homosexuals, refuting that it was a fringe identity. In the 1880s and '90s, German psychiatrists co-opted the word 'homosexual' but largely viewed it as a treatable sexual deviation, against Kertbeny's beliefs. Before the late 19th-century, one's sexual proclivities were 'something you did, not necessarily something you were,' the show notes. The earliest works included in a section called 'Before the Binary' shows a number of late 18th-century neoclassical works that used classical themes to portray same-sex desire; artworks made in Peru, Japan and Burma (now Myanmar) that don't conform to modern ideas of sex and gender; racist depictions misunderstanding Native American Two-Spirit people; and a portrait of the the Chevalier d'Eon, who was officially recognized as a woman by King Louis XVI. (While she wasn't the first transgender person in Europe, few achieved her status or fame.) 'From the very get-go… queer and trans have been joined at the hip,' Katz said. 'This idea that we're now experiencing trans as if it's something novel is a complete, complete misunderstanding of history. In many other cultures, questions of sexuality and questions of gender were widely discussed and completely natural.' As the idea of a sexual binary grew in the West it was transported to its colonies, fundamentally re-shaping many parts of the world, as explorers and settlers recasted divergence from heterosexuality as immoral. When Katz began the project, he knew that colonialism transported the concept of homosexuality globally. 'What I didn't realize is how many pockets of the resistance there were to that understanding, and also how profoundly it changed Indigenous cultures,' Katz explained. In the Pacific Islands, for example, which were largely claimed by Britain and France, colonists established strict laws around same-sex acts — which continue to impact LGBTQ+ rights in the region today — while fetishizing and sexually exploiting Indigenous communities there. In artworks from the era, that exoticizing eye can be seen in nearly any major institution of modern art through the Tahitian-era works of Paul Gauguin, who painted idyllic views of the island and its inhabitants while taking multiple child brides. At Wrightwood 659, the show hangs a 1935 work by David Paynter, a Sinhalese-British artist, of two young nude men on the beach, redolent of Gauguin's works but seen as a 'sardonic' take on the artist, according to the show. Among the other featured artists who rebelled against the colonial gaze is the painter Saturnino Herrán, who imagined sensual figures of Mesoamerican cultures in heroic forms, with full lips and outfitted in loosely draped and knotted fabrics. Other photographs and paintings illustrate the erotic Orientalist tropes that both tempted Europeans and reinforced their desire to enforce Western values far and wide. Katz considers art history to be a largely untapped archive of how we might understand sexuality — and one problem is that 'queer art history' continues to be considered niche, when in fact many major classical and modern artists expressed same-sex desire through their work. Many artists are deeply misunderstood to ironic effect — classical art is often upheld by the right wing to support their nationalistic beliefs (from Nazi Germany to thinly veiled X accounts today), though works from antiquity and the Renaissance are often blatant in their depictions of same-sex erotic desire. 'We have so naturalized a heteronormative perspective on art that we regularly turn queer art into straight art, and don't even notice it,' Katz said. 'It's a very weird thing as a professor of queer art history to be saying, 'I pray for the day when my field disappears,' but I do.' The art world maintains this status quo, he added. Museums, beholden to boards, donors and corporate sponsors, often rotate the same artists — and water down the more complex parts of their lives — instead of deepening our collective understanding with new perspectives, he said. Many artists in 'The First Homosexuals' have only just begun to be revisited in recent decades, including the Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon, whose career ended in a sodomy scandal, and Marie Laurencin, an important French avant-garde painter of her time who created sapphic worlds without men. 'There are vast sums of money riding on what we do. And I think there's a mistaken understanding that talking about sexuality will diminish the value of work of art,' Katz said. Despite a decade of increased representation in the arts, Katz warns that the contentious political climate and rollback of LGBTQ+ rights in the US threatens scholarship around queer history and art. The US has a long history of censored LGBTQ+ art, his own shows included: In 2010, he co-curated a landmark show on same-sex desire in American portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery; an exhibited video by David Wojnarowicz, featuring ants crawling on a crucifix, was removed after it was criticized by the Catholic League and Republicans, who deemed it offensive to Christians. 'We keep seeing cyclically that as queer history begins to assert itself, something comes along and, frankly, kills it,' he said. Through 'The First Homosexuals,' Katz hopes to narrow the 'profound and absolute gulf' that has been created to distinguish heterosexual and queer identities, he said. After all, in the context of all of human civilization, it's a modern idea, and one that can be shifted again. 'There's nothing natural about sexuality,' he said. 'It has always been structured by history.'
CNN
17-06-2025
- General
- CNN
A new art exhibition says we've gotten sexual identity all wrong
When did homosexuality become a fixed identity? At the Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago, an expansive, century-spanning exhibition charts the period when 'homosexuality' and 'heterosexuality' were new concepts, by looking at the queer subjects and artists of the period and how they depicted love, sex and gender. Set in the contemplative brick and stone space designed by architect Tadao Ando, 'The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939' features 300 works assembled from the collections of more than 100 museums to better understand how restrictive ideas on sexuality and gender became culturally ingrained in society and the labels they came to be known by. Included are Alice Austen's sapphic-coded Victorian-era photographs; Gerda Wegener's 1929 painting of her trans partner, Lili Elbe (the subject of the 2015 film 'The Danish Girl'); portraits of influential LGBTQ+ writers Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin and Oscar Wilde; and figure studies by the painter John Singer Sargent. The exhibition — and forthcoming book of the same name — emphasize a pivotal moment, when the West's notions around sexuality began with a misapplied label, which was then spread around the world as a strict binary. 'There is something specific about the West that sought to police the boundary between the two (homosexuality and heterosexuality), and so I wanted to do a show that looked at how that boundary emerged,' said curator Jonathan D. Katz, a founding educator in several pioneering queer studies programs in the US, who now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. 'We came to realize that, of course, the clean line we wanted to draw between the West and the rest of the world was smudged by virtue of colonialism — and so that then became a big part of the exhibition as well.' The first published instance of the words 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' appeared in an 1868 letter between journalists Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl Maria Kertbeny, two pivotal figures who defined modern ideas around sexuality. Kertbeny officially coined the two terms and advocated for the sexual and political freedom of homosexuals, refuting that it was a fringe identity. In the 1880s and '90s, German psychiatrists co-opted the word 'homosexual' but largely viewed it as a treatable sexual deviation, against Kertbeny's beliefs. Before the late 19th-century, one's sexual proclivities were 'something you did, not necessarily something you were,' the show notes. The earliest works included in a section called 'Before the Binary' shows a number of late 18th-century neoclassical works that used classical themes to portray same-sex desire; artworks made in Peru, Japan and Burma (now Myanmar) that don't conform to modern ideas of sex and gender; racist depictions misunderstanding Native American Two-Spirit people; and a portrait of the the Chevalier d'Eon, who was officially recognized as a woman by King Louis XVI. (While she wasn't the first transgender person in Europe, few achieved her status or fame.) 'From the very get-go… queer and trans have been joined at the hip,' Katz said. 'This idea that we're now experiencing trans as if it's something novel is a complete, complete misunderstanding of history. In many other cultures, questions of sexuality and questions of gender were widely discussed and completely natural.' As the idea of a sexual binary grew in the West it was transported to its colonies, fundamentally re-shaping many parts of the world, as explorers and settlers recasted divergence from heterosexuality as immoral. When Katz began the project, he knew that colonialism transported the concept of homosexuality globally. 'What I didn't realize is how many pockets of the resistance there were to that understanding, and also how profoundly it changed Indigenous cultures,' Katz explained. In the Pacific Islands, for example, which were largely claimed by Britain and France, colonists established strict laws around same-sex acts — which continue to impact LGBTQ+ rights in the region today — while fetishizing and sexually exploiting Indigenous communities there. In artworks from the era, that exoticizing eye can be seen in nearly any major institution of modern art through the Tahitian-era works of Paul Gauguin, who painted idyllic views of the island and its inhabitants while taking multiple child brides. At Wrightwood 659, the show hangs a 1935 work by David Paynter, a Sinhalese-British artist, of two young nude men on the beach, redolent of Gauguin's works but seen as a 'sardonic' take on the artist, according to the show. Among the other featured artists who rebelled against the colonial gaze is the painter Saturnino Herrán, who imagined sensual figures of Mesoamerican cultures in heroic forms, with full lips and outfitted in loosely draped and knotted fabrics. Other photographs and paintings illustrate the erotic Orientalist tropes that both tempted Europeans and reinforced their desire to enforce Western values far and wide. Katz considers art history to be a largely untapped archive of how we might understand sexuality — and one problem is that 'queer art history' continues to be considered niche, when in fact many major classical and modern artists expressed same-sex desire through their work. Many artists are deeply misunderstood to ironic effect — classical art is often upheld by the right wing to support their nationalistic beliefs (from Nazi Germany to thinly veiled X accounts today), though works from antiquity and the Renaissance are often blatant in their depictions of same-sex erotic desire. 'We have so naturalized a heteronormative perspective on art that we regularly turn queer art into straight art, and don't even notice it,' Katz said. 'It's a very weird thing as a professor of queer art history to be saying, 'I pray for the day when my field disappears,' but I do.' The art world maintains this status quo, he added. Museums, beholden to boards, donors and corporate sponsors, often rotate the same artists — and water down the more complex parts of their lives — instead of deepening our collective understanding with new perspectives, he said. Many artists in 'The First Homosexuals' have only just begun to be revisited in recent decades, including the Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon, whose career ended in a sodomy scandal, and Marie Laurencin, an important French avant-garde painter of her time who created sapphic worlds without men. 'There are vast sums of money riding on what we do. And I think there's a mistaken understanding that talking about sexuality will diminish the value of work of art,' Katz said. Despite a decade of increased representation in the arts, Katz warns that the contentious political climate and rollback of LGBTQ+ rights in the US threatens scholarship around queer history and art. The US has a long history of censored LGBTQ+ art, his own shows included: In 2010, he co-curated a landmark show on same-sex desire in American portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery; an exhibited video by David Wojnarowicz, featuring ants crawling on a crucifix, was removed after it was criticized by the Catholic League and Republicans, who deemed it offensive to Christians. 'We keep seeing cyclically that as queer history begins to assert itself, something comes along and, frankly, kills it,' he said. Through 'The First Homosexuals,' Katz hopes to narrow the 'profound and absolute gulf' that has been created to distinguish heterosexual and queer identities, he said. After all, in the context of all of human civilization, it's a modern idea, and one that can be shifted again. 'There's nothing natural about sexuality,' he said. 'It has always been structured by history.'
Fast Company
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
This exhibition explores the history of the term ‘homosexual.' Museums are afraid to show it
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.'
