The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939

A 1920s or 1930s photograph of a building on West Wrightwood Avenue in Chicago, by architect Raymond Gregori

(Image credit: Raymond W Trowbridge / Chicago History Museum / Getty Images)

"There's both power and peril in claiming an identity," said Julian Lucas in The New Yorker. That's one of the lessons of a "monumental" exhibition in Chicago that traces the emergence of modern ideas about sexuality and gender through art that was created between 1869 and 1939. The show's lead curator, art historian Jonathan D. Katz, titled the survey "The First Homosexuals" because its focus is on the decades after Karl Maria Kertbeny, an Austro-Hungarian journalist, coined the terms heterosexual and homosexual and inadvertently transformed same-sex desire into the defining trait of a new identity. As the show illustrates, "'homosexual' quickly became a pathological diagnosis" even as the word "opened a space for collective self-consciousness." The exhibit ends with the rise of Germany's Nazi Party and its attempt to exterminate this recently defined populace. But the more than 300 works that precede that grim conclusion prove art to be "the world's greatest archive of sexual difference, preserving subtle shifts that language evades."

The show "follows so many lines of inquiry that in places, inevitably, it feels thin or tendentious," said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. "But no single strand is less than fascinating," and the works themselves are "consistently dazzling." The curators describe an 1879 Pascal Dagnan Bouveret drawing as the first known image of a modern homosexual couple in European art. And 15 years later comes a double portrait of "breathtaking tenderness" in which the Swedish painter Andreas Andersen depicts his brother and a male friend apparently climbing out of bed one morning after sleeping together. But don't expect a simple progression in artists' interest in queer desire, because "the show's insistence on complexity is precisely what makes it brave, provocative, and unexpectedly poignant." Tellingly, no museum in the U.S. has shown an interest in mounting the exhibition after it closes in Chicago, despite the Wrightwood gallery's offer to pay the costs. I blame that on the current political backlash to recent gains in matters of sexual liberation, all of it motivated by "a pervasive psychological craving for simplicity."

Surprisingly, "some of the show's most fascinating moments are when it reveals queer people lacking a unified sense of political consciousness," said Micco Caporale in the Chicago Reader. In Romaine Brooks' 1923 Self-Portrait, done in the artist's "signature chilly gray scale," the New York City–raised artist looks aloof, and the text below "emphasizes that Brooks, a trust-fund lesbian who rooted her identity in some idea of eccentric genius, had fascist sympathies." Elsewhere, a series of "elegiac" photographs and paintings introduce viewers to Elisàr von Kupffer, a German spiritualist who "saw transness and homosexuality as an expression of God's infinite imagination—provided one is white and able-bodied." Besides creating "excitedly androgynous" work, he "wrote a lot of fan letters to Hitler." Humanist ideals, apparently, only ever go so far.