Arts & Entertainment
‘The First Homosexuals’ Exhibition Explores Same-Sex Desire Through Art at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 Gallery
“The Darned Club” by Alice Austen (Courtesy of Historic Richmond Town)
Hundreds of rare, extraordinary and often erotic artworks fill a new exhibition, and many have never been seen in the United States.
But will they be seen only in Chicago?
“The First Homosexuals” is a greatly expanded version of a 2022 show that now takes up all three floors of the Lincoln Park exhibition space Wrightwood 659.
So far, Chicago is the lone city to host this thought-provoking show.
“We spent three years trying to travel this exhibition both within the U.S. and across the world,” curator Jonathan Katz told WTTW News. “Not only did they not take it, we offered it to them for free, including transport. Nobody picked it up.”
Too bad, because the exhibition brims with great and challenging artwork, all of it presented with scholarly depth and context. Queer and nonbinary identity is shown in some of its earliest depictions. Also note: Some explicit imagery makes this a show for mature audiences.
Loans came from Japan, Switzerland, Peru and across the globe. There are works by John Singer Sargent, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Marsden Hartley and lesser-known artists worth knowing. Paintings dominate, but there’s plenty of alluring sculpture, prints, film and photography to explore.
It’s presented by the exhibitions branch of the Alphawood Foundation, and it comes at a pivotal time, said executive director Chirag Badlani. “We are even more proud to support it now amidst a global wave of anti-LGBTQ actions.”
Tomioka Eisen, kuchi-e (frontispiece) with artist’s seal Shisen, c. 1906. (Tirey-van Lohuizen Collection)
Subtitled “The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” the show begins even earlier with a section called “Before the Binary.”
Prior to the late 19th century, same-sex passion and different-sex passion were not always seen as distinct opposites. Early artworks make the case that desire was more fluid in antiquity and that Indigenous people were more accepting, including the gender variance among Native Americans now known as “Two-Spirit.”
The word “homosexual” wasn’t even in the public discourse until 1869.
“Before the coinage of the word ‘homosexual,’” Katz said, “same-sex desire marked something you did, not necessarily who you were.”
As an example, Katz points to a series of erotic Japanese prints on view that make no value distinction between homosexual and heterosexual acts — a man is seen on top of a woman in one image, and the same man is under another man in the next.
Katz sees homophobia as an export of colonialism.
“One of the less-accounted-for horrors of colonialism was the rewriting of Indigenous customs regarding sexuality, which were often extraordinarily open and free,” Katz said. “There’s an image of the Burmese court before colonialism in which male and female is completely invisible — hair, dress, it doesn’t matter. Gender wasn’t an operative category in Burma at the time. Colonialism changed that.”
He continues: “And with the opening of Japan, rules were issued that said ‘European nations will laugh at us if we continue to accept homosexuality. We have to conform to them.’”
Left: “La Confidence (The Secret),” by Ida Matton, 1902. (Joel Bergroth / Hälsinglands Museum) Right: “Lili With a Feather” by Gerda Wegener, 1920. (Reproduction by Morten Pors Nielsen)
“The First Homosexuals” is an extensive look at the development of LGBTQ+ representation in visual art, yet some governments would not participate.
“There were two extraordinary paintings slated to come from the National Gallery in Slovakia,” Katz said. “They have a new government that’s an echo of Trump, and the loans were canceled.” [Note: In January, 100 employees of the museum resigned to protest the far-right takeover of the country’s flagship cultural institutions.]
“Also, you’re not going to find many works from India or the Middle East, yet in Iran it wasn’t until the late 18th century that you could write a love poem to a woman. Until that point it was exclusively boys.”
There’s always room for paradox in an exhibition of this scope — one artist who rejected gender norms also supported Hitler. Another became a favorite of the fascists under Franco in Spain.
The exhibition concludes with a chilling scene from the 1930s — the infamous photographs of Nazis burning books in a public square.
All of the books being torched came from the library of the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science, the first modern queer rights organization.
“We wanted you to leave through here in order to make clear the dangers we face,” Katz said. “It’s a warning of the far-right’s profound hostility toward human difference, which is to say, to life itself.”
“The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” is open through July 26 at Wrightwood 659.
Marc Vitali is the JCS Fund of the DuPage Foundation Arts Correspondent.
