A look at The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity at Wrightwood 659

A landmark exhibition, The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939, is being hosted at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago from May 2 – July 26, 2025. Organised by Alphawood Exhibitions, this major international loan exhibition presents over 300 works including paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, photographs and films, drawn from more than 100 museums and private collections across 40 countries, and "many presented for the first time within the context of global queer and colonial inquiry," according to the exhibition space. The show explores a pivotal cultural shift: the emergence of the term 'homosexual' and its profound impact on global visual culture.

The exhibition spans seven decades, anchored in the year 1869—the first known use of the word 'homosexual'. It considers how this new identity was shaped and expressed through art. From well-known masterpieces to rarely seen works, The First Homosexuals offers an expansive, multi-layered narrative of how artists worldwide engaged with, and helped shape, the new identity.

The ongoing show is curated by art historian Jonathan D. Katz, associate professor of Practice in the History of Art and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a founding figure in Queer Studies in Art History, alongside Johnny Willis, curatorial fellow at Wrightwood 659. The art exhibition represents six years of research and collaboration among 22 international scholars. According to Katz, "Before the coinage of the word 'homosexual,' same-sex desire marked something you did, not necessarily who you were. The First Homosexuals examines how, after this watershed moment, for the first time, homosexuals were cleaved from the rest of the population and given an identity which turned on their sexuality."

"Art can tell this story uniquely well. While written narratives must necessarily use specialised words to describe ideas, visual imagery is more elastic, allowing for coincident layers of meaning," he mentions in the exhibition text.

According to Wrightwood 659, 125 artists are represented in The First Homosexuals, including well-known ones such as Berenice Abbott, Léon Bakst, Charles Demuth and Katsushika Hokusai. Also represented are artists whose work is lesser-known in the United States and 'who deserve more scholarly and public notice', including Benjamín de la Calle (Colombia), Lionel Wendt (Sri Lanka), Gabriel Morcillo (Spain), Emilio Baz Viaud (Mexico) and more. Among the international museums which contributed to the show are: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The exhibition unfolds across all three floors of Wrightwood 659's Tadao Ando-designed building. It begins with Before the Binary at the top floor, tracing pre-1869 understandings of desire. Highlights include George Catlin's painting of a Two-Spirit spiritual leader's feast, and Japanese erotic prints, including two by Utamaro and Hokusai, "which make absolutely no value distinction between homosexual and heterosexual acts," the press release states.

On the floor below, Portraits examines artists and writers who actively claimed or expressed same-sex identity, such as Félix Vallotton’s 1907 portrait of Gertrude Stein and Florine Stettheimer's fanciful self-portrait. This large section also features works such as Thomas Eakins' tender oil portrait of his friend and lover Walt Whitman, and rare self-portraits by Armenian-Egyptian photographer Van Leo that challenge gender norms.

On the same floor, the Relationships section surveys varied depictions of same-sex bonds, from Alice Austen's 'boldly transgressive' photographs to Marie Laurencin's Cubist-inflected paintings of young women dancing. In Changing Bodies, Changing Definitions, on the second level, the show considers how artistic nudes evolved in tandem with shifting sexual definitions. For example, Romaine Brooks' portrait of her lover, dancer Ida Rubenstein, conveys androgyny, while Tamara de Lempicka's later work celebrates the muscular, mature female form.

The show's History section revisits how classical ideals inspired artists like Hans von Marèes and Rupert Bunny to explore an imagined, timeless past through homoerotic imagery. In contrast, Colonialism and Resistance interrogates how European artists linked same-sex desire to 'exotic' cultures, a domination tactic, and how colonised artists responded by affirming pre-colonial sexual diversity, as in Saturnino Herrán's Nuestros dioses antiguos (Our ancient Gods, 1916). "This section explores the homoeroticism of the Orientalist genre, wherein Europeans imagine the East as rife with forms of sexuality foreclosed in the West," the museum conveys.

The First Homosexuals also celebrates the vibrant lives of Harlem Renaissance artists and performers, such as Richmond Barthé's sculpture of the Senegalese cabaret dancer Feral Benga, which fuses classical European sculpture and new attempts to create a distinctly African American art and ethos. The Performing section captures the exuberance of same-sex love in the arts through works such as Léon Bakst's portrait of dancer Léonide Massine and Lady Una Troubridge's bronze bust of Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

The final section, Beyond the Binary, delves into the "extensive investigations of the mutuality of homosexual and trans identity in their earliest formations," the show's text shares. It features some 60 works, including Danish artist Gerda Wegener's depictions of her partner Lili Elbe, one of the earliest representations of a trans woman in art; and paintings from The Elisarion, "an art-filled villa and grounds established on Lake Maggiore in Switzerland early in the last century, whose founder Elisàr von Kupffer helped promulgate Clarism, a new religion proposing the division of people by gender was a perversion of divine will," according to the press release. Eight of these rare works, never before shown in the US, include the first same-sex wedding scene in art history.