A new art exhibition says we've gotten sexual identity all wrong

CNN

17-06-2025

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.'