In 1868, Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny, in a letter to his fellow journalist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, coined the term “homosexual” to describe same-sex attraction. He was writing to argue against the criminalization of private sexual acts—a cause he somewhat shared with Ulrichs, best known as the first gay man to openly defend homosexuality. But Kertbeny’s coinage, which publicly debuted in an 1869 pamphlet, would ironically create thorny issues of its own as it echoed through the ages.
For one, queer art historian Jonathan David Katz, who has spent the better part of six years unpacking the significance of the term, has found it often limited rather than liberated identity. “Essentially, the nomenclature helped to inaugurate a gulf between forms of desire that had previously been unified,” he told me over the phone. “What I began to think about was: how did we enter a world in which sexuality not only became bifurcated, but in some sense, became a defining trait of characters?”
Marie Laurencin, or (1913). Musée Marie Laurencin, Tokyo.
But where the terminology has constricted (not helped by its cooptation by the psychology field), Katz discovered a sphere where queer desire remained far from circumscribed.
“Art,” he said, “picked up the slack as the possibilities of language became attenuated.”
That revelation is at the center of “The First Homosexuals,” an exhibition that just opened at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago. Across more than 300 artworks, Katz and associate curator Johnny Willis, leading an international team of 22 scholars, will trace how the birth of the term “homosexual” reframed artistic expressions of identity and sexuality. (The first part of the show, a smaller presentation, ran in 2022.)
Tomioka Eisen, (frontispiece) with artist’s seal Shisen (c. 1906). Tirey-van Lohuizen Collection.
While the show takes 1869 as its watershed moment, it fittingly opens with a section called Beyond the Binary, which arrays early 19th-century works that make no distinction between same-sex and different-sex desires. Erotic Japanese prints by the likes of Hokusai and Utamaro make a showing, as does sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen’s 1823–24 relief on the mythical relationship between Anacreon and Cupid.
Also key here is George Catlin’s Dance to the Berdash (1835–37), which depicts Sac and Fox tribe members dancing in tribute to a Two-Spirit leader, an individual born male who lived as a female.
George Catlin, (1835–37). Smithsonian American Art Museum.
“The Classical past is widely recognized in terms of same-sex desire. This was fairly ubiquitous and unproblematic,” Katz noted. What changed, he argued, is the arrival of colonialism, which “carried that delimited binary across the globe and took what were often extremely accepting indigenous cultures and essentially turned them homophobic.”
Proof is in a later portion, titled Colonialism and Resistance, which explores how Europeans imagined foreign territories and cultures as overrun by what they deemed deviant sexual relations. Artists resisted. Mexican painter Saturnino Herrán, in 1916, produced Nuestros dioses antiguos, which celebrates a pre-colonial indigenous sexuality by depicting ancient gods posing, in Katz’s words, “like camp queens”; while Richmond Barthé, in his 1935 masterpiece Feral Benga, deployed European sculpture traditions to capture a Black sensuality.
Saturnino Herrán, (1916). Colección Andrés Blaisten, México.
In between, in sections including Portraits, Relationships, and History, the exhibition gathers a host of queer art icons. There are paintings of Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde, as well as self-portraits by Romaine Brooks and Florine Stettheimer. There’s a 1923 female nude by Tamara de Lempicka that shatters gender norms, and illustrator Gerda Wegener’s drawings of her partner Lili Elbe, who was born male (and immortalized in the 2015 film The Danish Girl).
Félix Vallotton, (1907). Photo: Mitro Hood.
Other queer relationships come to life in Alice Austen’s 1891 photographs and Marie Laurencin’s paintings of young women mid-dance. Just as intimate are Thomas Eakins’s 1887 painting of his partner Walt Whitman, and Rosa Bonheur’s sketch of her lover Anna Klumpke, which is making a rare outing.
In another unique showing, eight paintings by controversial German artist Elisàr von Kupffer will be making their U.S. debut at “The First Homosexuals.” These works once hung in the Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion, a compound established by Von Kupffer in Switzerland in 1900 as a haven for Clarism, his neo-religious movement that opposed divisions by gender. Their styles bear out the artist’s Renaissance influences, but their subject matter, noted Katz, “illustrated his ideals.” One painting apparently portrays the first same-sex wedding in art history.
Elisàr von Kupffer, (1918). © Municipality of Minusio – Centro Elisarion. Photo: Claudio Berger.
Bringing together these many artworks from across the globe was not without its challenges. Katz rued the lack of artifacts from India (which balked at the show’s title), Russia (loans from which were canceled due to the ongoing war), and Slovakia (whose new populist government scrapped all loans). A Columbian collector, Katz added, also pulled their loans, feeling the works wouldn’t be safe in the U.S. under the Trump administration. “We’ve really fallen,” he reflected.
The last is unsurprising, though, considering the president’s crusade against so-called “gender ideology extremism”—in short, his bid to erase transgender people. In its way, the show offers a fine, resonant riposte that “queer and trans are inseparable,” Katz said, “that the literal first definition of queerness was of a kind of third sex.” He added: “Most other countries beyond the West fully understood that there’s a range of positions within one’s acceptance or refusal of gender.”
Tamara de Lempicka, (1923). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
That latitude may have been first restricted by the emergence of the term “homosexual,” but to Katz, it doesn’t have to remain that way.
“The notion of homosexuality is an historical notion, and as with all things historical, is subject to change. My first hope is that we will come to understand that the definition of sexuality is not a natural definition, but an historical one,” he said. “In the final analysis for me, that is a position of liberation, because it means that we recognize that other possibilities exist.”
“The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939” is on view at Wrightwood 659, 659 W Wrightwood Ave, Chicago, Illinois, May 2–July 26, 2025.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
