CHICAGO (WGN) — At Wrightwood 659, an almost hidden gallery in residential Lincoln Park, art historian Jonathan Katz is attracting attention with a bold exhibition. It’s a first-of-its-kind art survey of same-sex attraction entitled, “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939.”
“What the show is fundamentally about is the beginning of a gulf between forms of sexuality that were once unified,” said Katz, the exhibition’s curator and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “The word homosexual was actually first publicly promoted in 1869.”
The word “homosexual” first appeared in the private correspondence of two gay rights figures. Katz said it’s a word that forever changed the way we think about sexual identity, by naming and dividing it.
“What language has done is actually impoverish the terms by which we refer to sexuality,” Katz said. “When it became increasingly clear that there were but two options, homo and hetero all the nuanced and complex forms of relationality got caricatured.”
Katz contends that art is better equipped to tell the story of same-sex attraction than language is.
“Language also requires a complicated choreography of known terms and identities, whereas painting in fluid,” he said. “It allows you ways to test out possibilities that your body may never follow.”
The exhibition spans three floors and comprises 300 works by more than 125 artists from 40 countries. There are pieces on loan from both private collections and major institutions.
The First Homosexuals is a controversial show—it was rejected by museums around the world, before finally finding a home at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago.
“In the United States, museums are run by the one percent, and they are presumably touchy on issues of sexuality and gender,” Katz said.
The art shows that homosexuality has existed since the beginning of recorded history, from ancient Greece to feudal Japan. Attitudes only began to change with European colonialism.
“The minute you go outside of Europe, you come to understand that 80% of the world didn’t have a problem with same-sex desire, that in 80% of the world, there was equality among people of different sexualities and in certain societies like Japan, recognized homosexuality as the equal of heterosexuality,” Katz said.
Katz also points out that long before modern political battles over whether transgender people should even be recognized, Native Americans paid tribute to a “two-spirit leader,” a person who was born male but who dressed and lived as a woman.
“This is a ceremony to a two-spirited individual who was deemed holy and once a year the tribe would gather and pay tribute in her honor,” Katz said.
The exhibition showcases the only full-sized portrait of Oscar Wilde painted during his lifetime; A work from bi-sexual polish master of Art Deco, Lempicka; And the first known image of a gay couple in the history of European art – dating back to 1879.
Some of the images are suggestive, others are explicit. If art couldn’t imitate life, it could help create an alternative. “What they’re looking for is a world in which they can exist comfortably, and they paint that world, even if they can’t inhabit it,” Katz said.
Katz earned a master’s degree at the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in art history at Northwestern. He is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. But the overall message of the exhibition is more political than academic.
“I’m not going to pretend it isn’t,” he said. “It is a political exhibition.”
Across the federal government, agencies have been scrubbing written references to and deleting photos of the LGBTQ-plus community from their websites. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the name of gay rights icon Harvey Milk stripped from a naval ship.
Current events – Katz said – are echoing history. The exhibition finishes with a chilling reminder that the Nazi’s burned thousands of books at Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, the first sexology research center in the world and a priceless trove of gay history.
“It is a political exhibition in part about the moment we are in.” Katz said. “Thus, when you leave the exhibition, you leave through the famous scene of the burning library with the Nazis destroying books.”
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