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Homosexuality has always existed. It just hasn’t always existed under a label or discrete identity.
One might know that, in broad strokes, but it’s quite another thing to see that identity coalesce before one’s eyes. “The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930,” a new exhibit showing through Dec. 17 at Wrightwood 659 in Lincoln Park, trades the shaky imprecision of language for the more visceral realm of visual art, demonstrating how artists across various cultures conceptualized queer identity.
Many of the works on display have never been seen before by the general public — and there’s more to come in a sprawling second part of the exhibition, due to premiere at Wrightwood 659 in 2025 before touring the globe.
“It’s always very difficult when dealing (with queerness) historically, because, of course, the terms are different,” says Jonathan D. Katz, a pioneering queer art historian and lead curator of the exhibit. “I’m cognizant of the special pressure that those of us in queer studies have to deal with in terms of nomenclature, and I resent that pressure, as well. For example, people can talk about ‘marriage’ as a shorthand for 6th century marriage, 12th century marriage and 19th century marriage, despite those being vastly different social formations. I want to be nuanced while still reaching a mass audience.”
“The First Homosexuals” is the third exhibit Katz has curated at Wrightwood 659, a gallery that was founded in 2018 by Alphawood Foundation president Fred Eychaner. It was preceded by “About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and New Queer Art” in 2019 and “Reimagining the Larkin: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Modern Icon” in 2021-2022. In 2016, the former Alphawood Foundation Gallery also hosted a traveling exhibition Katz curated, “Art AIDS America.”
Curated by a global 23-person team led by Katz, “The First Homosexuals” largely begins its survey in 1869, the year the Hungarian writer and activist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” An exception greets visitors at the entrance of the exhibit: an unattributed scroll by a Japanese artist featuring the same subject participating in various sex acts with both men and women, created circa 1850.
“It makes very clear that homo- and hetero- were part of the same erotic continuum,” Katz says.
The anonymous scroll lays the foundation for the exhibit’s more pliant, historically embracing perspective on human sexuality, positing that queerness is something one does, not something one is. It’s a Judith Butler-inspired riposte to the gay and trans rights movement’s necessary embrace of a more innate, static reading of queer identity to curry political sympathy — i.e., the “We can’t help it, we were born this way” rallying cry.
Again and again, “The First Homosexuals” trades that fatalism for the ecstasy of choice. Mexican painter Roberto Montenegro’s 1926 “Portrait of an Antiquities Dealer” (alternatively titled “Portrait of Chucho Reyes and Self-Portrait”) is replete with gay signifiers that still resound today, but its most moving detail is Montenegro’s decision to incorporate himself in the painting. In the lower-right corner, his blurry image, settled behind an easel, is reflected in a concave mirror on Reyes’ desk. Montenegro seems to acknowledge — publicly, bravely — that by looking at Reyes, he sees a part of himself.
Singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey did the same in her hit 1928 song “Prove It On Me Blues,” sung from the perspective of a cross-dressing woman who “don’t like no men” and “talk(s) to the gals just like any old man.” In case Rainey’s subtext — really supertext — was missed by any listener, the song’s illustrated ad campaign featured Rainey dressed in a masculine three-piece suit, a brimmed hat rakishly tilted on her head, talking to two slender, chic women in the street while a scowling police officer watches from the shadows.
The ad, placed in several papers, daringly capitalizes on Rainey’s arrest three years prior for allegedly hosting a same-sex orgy.
“What’s all this? Scandal? Maybe so, but you wouldn’t have thought it of ‘Ma’ Rainey,” the ad text reads.
As a young graduate student in the 1980s, Katz himself chose queer art again and again, a choice that involved serious risks.
Katz lived in Chicago on and off between 1979 and 1995, moving here to complete a master’s thesis at the University of Chicago on Picasso and cubism. However, when Katz declared his intent to pivot to pursue a topic in LGBTQ art history for his doctorate, the department chair threatened to rescind his fellowship funding unless he picked a new focus. Between that and mounting threats from the Great White Brotherhood of the Iron Fist, a hate group that outed and harassed gay students at the U of C, he left Chicago. Katz returned a few years later, finally completing his intended Ph.D. topic (on the gay postwar avant-garde) at Northwestern after similarly fraught stints at Johns Hopkins and Yale.
One would like to believe much has changed since then, but “The First Homosexuals,” with its myriad perspectives and global reach, mostly resists that pat linearity. For example, curators had to swim upstream to borrow artworks from countries with anti-gay laws, from lending institutions objecting to the exhibit frame to research challenges involved in finding those artworks to begin with.
The works that did make it into “The First Homosexuals” often did so by a series of small miracles. Though Katz and his team recognized early on that the prospect of borrowing relevant works from Chinese institutions was “slim to none,” the exhibition was lent some of its Chinese and Japanese works from, of all sources, a chemistry professor who was a hobbyist collector.
The exhibit’s focus on Russian artist Konstantin Somov (1869-1939), also a major coup, is mostly thanks to Pavel Golubev, a Russian scholar and Somov expert formerly working as chief of exhibitions at the Odesa Fine Arts Museum. Because Golubev’s work foregrounds Somov’s sexuality — a scholarly taboo in Russia — he fled Odesa post-invasion, fearing retaliation.
Golubev is now taking refuge as a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, where Katz also teaches. Miraculously, despite the threat of war and vested Russian resistance to queer readings of Somov’s work, the Odesa Fine Arts Museum was able to send the six selected Somov works to Chicago for “The First Homosexuals.”
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Those works, as well as all the art on display in “The First Homosexuals,” is a limited-time offer. Only a few of the 100-plus works on display for this first installment will return for the 2025 touring iteration, though it will feature some of the same artists — like Gerda Wegener (1886-1940), an accomplished, boundary-pushing painter married to Lili Elbe, the transgender painter whose story was fictionalized in the 2015 film “The Danish Girl.” Katz says the touring exhibition will be larger, including some 250 works, and will focus more on “masterpieces.”
“We’re going to be showing major works by major painters. This includes everything from famous works by John Singer Sargent to what is probably the first self-consciously trans image” — Wegener’s 1927 “A Summer Day,” which depicts a male Elbe painting her future, idealized feminine form.
As with the first installment, the next iteration of “The First Homosexuals” will have a global reach. Joining the large curatorial team are also Katz’s protégés at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches the next generation of queer art historians.
“The Alphawood Foundation has given a grant to Penn to create a fellowship program in queer art history, which allows us to produce what one hopes will be a sea change in the field,” Katz says. “We want to bring that which has been repressed back to the forefront.”
“The First Homosexuals” through Dec. 17 at Wrightwood 659, 659 W. Wrightwood Ave.; open Fridays noon to 7 p.m. and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., general admission $15 with RSVP. More information at wrightwood659.org
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.