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.
Image: Saturnino Herrán’s 1969 painting, “Nuestros dioses antiguos (Our ancient gods)”, may have used mythological motifs to conceal same-sex eroticism; Western artists who worked in classical styles often did the same.
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.”
A new binary
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.
