Art Exhibition: "The First Homosexuals"

 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-art-world/how-the-first-homosexuals-shaped-an-identity?utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=bluesky&mbid=social_bluesky&utm_brand=tny

How “The First Homosexuals” Shaped an Identity

A timely exhibition dissects the emergence of modern ideas about gender and sexuality—and the backlash.

 

By Julian Lucas | July 15, 2025

 

Tolerance was over. Drag shows, activist-driven science, the spurious multiplication of identities—all of these were to be purged, along with the backstabbing liberals, likely collaborating with foreigners, who’d emasculated the nation by abetting such depravity. Doctors fled as their research was targeted. Censors and vigilantes destroyed the works of “degenerate” artists. In Hitler’s Germany, the scapegoat was Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, a center of gay-rights advocacy that also pioneered gender-affirming surgeries. In Trump’s America, it’s an ever-expanding array of teachers, health-care providers, children’s-book authors, and trans athletes. Both crackdowns followed periods of unprecedented visibility for groups previously confined to the shadows. But who were these brand-new people that fascists couldn’t bear to look at?

 

“The First Homosexuals,” at Wrightwood 659, in Chicago, attempts to answer this question, tracking the emergence of modern ideas about gender and sexuality across more than three hundred art works. It focusses on the period between the eighteen-sixties, when the word “homosexuality” was coined, and the nineteen-thirties, when the Nazis shut down Hirschfeld’s institute and burned his research. The flames have again come so close that the show’s co-curators, Jonathan D. Katz — a founding figure in queer art history — and Johnny Willis, struggled to find a venue in the United States. (Next spring, the exhibition will travel to the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland.) Still, they’ve assembled a monumental survey, which includes everything from Qing-dynasty erotica to Félix Vallotton’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. The show hinges on a word, but its insights are resolutely visual. Art is the world’s greatest archive of sexual difference, Katz argues in the catalogue, preserving subtle shifts that language evades.

 

To be sure, same-sex relationships have existed since time immemorial. What’s newly visible is the notion that engaging in them might be an exclusive preference and defining quality — in other words, that one could be “born this way.” This theory coalesced in an 1868 exchange of letters, one of which is on view in the exhibition, between two queer Karls—Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, and Karl Maria Kertbeny, an Austro-Hungarian journalist. It was Kertbeny who coined the words “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality,” which he saw as impulses of which anyone might be capable. Ulrichs, by contrast, believed that men who liked men had female souls, and women who liked women had male ones. More than a century later, their argument is still going: Is it better to fight for universal rights or to advocate for minority recognition? Over time, though, Kertbeny’s word became attached to Ulrich’s understanding of sexuality as innate. The homosexual had arrived.