{"id":8488,"date":"2025-06-04T21:37:39","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T21:37:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/06\/04\/exhibition-review-the-first-homosexuals-at-wrightwood-659\/"},"modified":"2025-06-04T21:37:39","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T21:37:39","slug":"exhibition-review-the-first-homosexuals-at-wrightwood-659","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/06\/04\/exhibition-review-the-first-homosexuals-at-wrightwood-659\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhibition Review: \u201cThe First Homosexuals\u201d at Wrightwood 659"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, La Blanchisseuse (The Laundress)<\/em>, 1879; graphite, ink and ink wash on paper. Private collection, California. Courtesy of Schiller & Bodo European Paintings<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,\u201d an exhibit at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, is enormous and overwhelming, very much in contrast to the museum, which, nestled on a residential street, looks modest and unassuming. Inside, though, it is spacious with three full exhibition floors positively crammed with paintings, sculpture, photographs, prints and a novel\u2019s worth of explanatory text chronicling the development of, regimentation of and gaps within homosexual, lesbian and queer identities. The show is stunning, energizing and exhausting.<\/p>\n

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That was the intent, according to Johnny Willis<\/a>, associate curator of the exhibit along with Jonathan David Katz<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s what we were going for: an overwhelming experience,\u201d Willis told Observer. The curators wanted visitors to be \u201coverwhelmed with the sheer scale of the contributions of queer and trans artists<\/a>, and also how that\u2019s been overlooked in art history and in museums.\u201d<\/p>\n

Searching outside the Western canon widens the scope of that contribution considerably. Europe in the 19th Century, which is when the terminology of \u201chomosexuality\u201d developed, was in most respects more homophobic and more censorious than other cultures, and the exhibit provides images demonstrating the range and diversity of gender and sexual identity and practice across the world.<\/p>\n

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SEE ALSO: <\/i><\/b>Boston\u2019s Triennial Reimagines Public Art Through the City\u2019s Social, Historical and Ecological Realities<\/i><\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The early part of the show includes a mid-19th-century hand-painted Japanese scroll signed by \u201cTamechika<\/a>\u201d showing a young man having sex with both women and older male lovers in a seamless sequence without censure or much distinction. An 1800 cloth painting by Saya Chone<\/a> depicts the royal family of Burma with no marks of gender difference, demonstrating the culture\u2019s validation of androgynous beauty. Western painter George Catlin<\/a> paints a vivid depiction of a Sac and Fox feast for Two-Spirit people (to which Catlin appended his own transphobic and racist commentary).<\/p>\n

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Saya Chone, Royal Family<\/em>, late 19th Century; gouache on cloth. Collection of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even broader than the geographical diversity, perhaps, is the dizzying array of queer portrayal, recognition, identity and understanding. \u201cHomosexual\u201d was first used as a term in Germany in 1869. Before that, people might have sex with a range of people without those sexual encounters defining their identities; afterward, who you slept with or wanted to sleep with became (to a greater or lesser extent) who you were.<\/p>\n

The creation of the homosexual\/heterosexual binary was, in some ways, a step toward greater visibility and more political rights. In other ways, it was a step toward increased stigma and oppression. But what the Wrightwood 659 exhibit demonstrates is that even as terms became more fixed and less flexible, queer sexual expression took on a dizzying range of forms, expressions and contexts.<\/p>\n

Some of these contexts remain visible or legible to us today. Wealthy American coal baron Romaine Brooks<\/a>\u2019 1923 self-portrait in male attire was a shockingly frank declaration of lesbian identity at the time, and it still says what it says a century later. Andreas Andersen<\/a>\u2019s 1894 painting of his brother Hendrik waking up nude beside American painter John Briggs Potter<\/a> couldn\u2019t be much more frank, then or now.<\/p>\n

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Janet Cumbrae, Stewart, La Biondina (The Blonde)<\/em>, 1920s; pastel on paper. Private collection \/ Image: Jessica Maurer<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In other instances, though, identity relies on signs and representations that no longer resonate in quite the same way because identity and representation change over time. A sailor in a painting or a classical scene doesn\u2019t instantly mean what it meant, though people in the know still know. But Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret<\/a>\u2019s 1879 graphite and ink drawing La Blanchisseuse<\/i> (The Laundress<\/i>) requires expert translation for most viewers. The image shows two men strolling by the Seine in Paris while a laundress sits on a bench, pointedly ignoring them. The wall text explains that laundresses at the time often had to make ends meet by doubling as sex workers. Her lack of interest in the men signifies that they are not customers because they aren\u2019t interested in women. Identity here is created through a carefully deployed knowledge of sexual marginalization, both winking and affectionate.<\/p>\n

Other artists create a landscape of desire that is either idiosyncratic or reflects a context that is now lost. Lesbian Australian painter Janet Cumbrae Stewart<\/a> created canvases like the 1926 La Biondina<\/i> (The Blonded<\/i>), which portrayed nude women from behind. The wall text suggests this was a way to refuse a sexualized gaze or replace commodification with \u201cgentle eroticism.\u201d But the view from the back also de-emphasizes or obscures gender; it could be seen as a kind of male drag, performed by removing rather than donning clothing. Is the reversal here really gentle or less possessive? Or is the artist expressing her own erotic preferences and her own erotic gaze through an inversion which obscures its own intent by focusing on it so openly?<\/p>\n

The way in which Stewart\u2019s painting focuses desire on androgynous or \u201cmale\u201d aspects of a woman\u2019s body highlights the way in which sexuality and gender identities were not rigorously distinguished during the 19th and early 20th Centuries in most queer communities and representations. \u201cYou can\u2019t tell gay history without trans history,\u201d Willis explained. \u201cFrom the very beginning, when these theorists were inventing sexual identity categories in the 19th Century, the very first definitions proposed that gay men had a female soul and a male body and that lesbians had a male soul and a female body. From the get-go, gay and trans are born together and they grow up together.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Romaine Brooks, Self-Portrait<\/em>, 1923; oil on canvas, 46 1\/4 x 26 7\/8 in. (117.5 x 68.3 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist, 1966.49.1<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Part of that intertwined history is the history of persecution. The exhibit includes photos of the Nazi book burnings at the Institute of Sexology, which created pioneering, and now lost, research on trans and queer people. It also acknowledges present-day fascist attacks on LGBT people. A frank androgynous 1928 self-portrait drawing by Colombian artist Hena Rodriguez<\/a> is represented here by a reproduction because the lender feared that the Trump administration might attempt to seize and destroy the artwork. The Slovak National Gallery agreed to send two paintings by Baron L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Medny\u00e1nszky of working-class men, but the government of Slovakia blocked the loan at the last minute. More than 100 curators and staff of that museum have resigned due to right-wing attacks on the institution.<\/p>\n

Hatred of queer people has, as the exhibit makes clear, been a part of Western modernity for as long as queer people have existed as a concept and likely before. Hatred doesn\u2019t need logic or a reason, and \u201cThe First Homosexuals\u201d does not try to explain it. But walking through the show, looking at so many different visions of desire and self and the relationship between the two, it\u2019s hard not to think that the fascists are so afraid of homosexuality and queerness because they hate the fact that humanity and love take on too many forms and too many lives to be catalogued or policed. \u201cThe First Homosexuals\u201d is overwhelming, in part, because human beings of whatever gender and sexuality are\u2014delightfully, bafflingly, gloriously\u2014overwhelming, too.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/b>The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a\u00a0New Identity, 1869-1939<\/b><\/a>\u201d is at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago through July 26, 2025.<\/b><\/p>\n

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