This exhibition chronicles the evolution of the meaning of the word “homosexual” from its genesis in 1869 until its usage in 1939, which is not much different than the word’s meaning today. This is shown via works of art collected from all around the world that illustrate how the term developed through the kind of images that artists made at a particular time. Strictly speaking, this show is more of a history lesson than an art exhibition, and it is open to varied interpretations depending upon the orientation of the viewer. With that in mind, the New Art Examiner has assigned three different writers to review it. Paul Moreno, our New York editor, looks at it from the point of view of a practicing Catholic gay man. (His visit to Chicago was made possible by Tom Tunney and the Ann Sather Restaurants who underwrote his transportation.) Annette LePique examines it as a woman familiar with the LGBTQIA+ community, and, in early July, Andrew Hart Benson will respond to the show from the perspective of a nonbinary member of the LGBTQIA+ community. We hope these three views will give the reader an appreciation for the depth of content present in this show.

 

A Word is Worth a Thousand Pitures

by Paul Moreno

        The title of this exhibition, The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869–1939,” demands to be parsed. The conceit of the show is that in 1869 the term “homosexual” was coined by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, and as it was disseminated, an identity was born. The homosexual (adj.) was one thing—a word that might be used to describe a singular act or a fleeting moment or a passing fancy—a concept we knew about from the ancient Greeks, at least. But the Homosexual (n.) was something altogether different and, for some, troubling. This was a person whose very nature, whose repetition of homosexual acts, whose identity, was now named and othered. This exhibition looks at these others, combing the history and margins where they lived, often in plain sight, and attempts to re-create a very concentrated tableau of the art this intellectually rich margin left us. The show points out that the artists involved were not the first to experience homosexuality but were the first to have their work subjected to the power of that word. Further, work that preceded the invention of this word was now viewable through a new lens that gave that work a new appeal to some and a new stigma to others.

 

        The challenge of a show like this is that unlike one dedicated to an artist, a movement, an era, or a genre in art history, the criteria for inclusion become quite vast. Even an exhibition dedicated to landscape, which could include artists as different as Caspar David Friedrich and Joan Mitchell, would still have some established qualities of “landscape” by which to estimate the relevance of selected works. In this case, there is not so much a list of qualities as much as a keeping an eye out for a vibe. Is the artist or the subject of the work doing something, blatantly or tacitly, to evoke a kind of knowing? The show contains over 300 objects, many by artists you very likely have never heard of, that were gathered to illustrate something that is not at all subtle but by its very nature, is not obvious. The show almost feels like a dance floor crowded with queers, where, if you are a queer, you at once feel safe in the panoply of faces and bodies, and when you leave, there are things that amalgamated indistinctly into the aforementioned vibe. But there will likely be that handful of faces, bodies, moments, that become indelible and fill your mind with thoughts and fantasies. Here are a few of mine.

 

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        This painting was easy to walk past in a passageway surrounded by larger works, yet, in an almost humorous moment, it caught my eye and has since remained in my mind. Four male figures in pale blue-gray habits are paired off and engaged in sexual acts. The environment is a barely lit room, but the cluster of men are illuminated, almost glowing. One pair is concentrated in their activity, and both their heads are severely bowed, while in the other pair, one attentively watches the first couple and one looks into the darkness. Though the chiaroscuro of the work is not unusual for the 1700s, the quickness and vagueness of the brushwork feels quite modern. It is in some places hard to understand what exactly is being depicted—for example, is the platform one pair occupies a table or a bed? And what is the golden explosion of light upon it? The head and face of the friar to the furthest left is a blob of light and shadow. Still there is a fussiness of details: the erotically large sandals that rest in the foreground, a toppled jug and goblet, an open book that appears to have fallen on the floor. But there is the tidy stack of books on a stool, and the shelf at the top of the painting contain a sparse collection of vessels.

        The wall text accompanying the picture reads, “This scene from the first decades of the 1700s satirizes the monastic vow of celibacy—while underscoring how contemporary assumptions about monks in monasteries have a long prehistory.” I have to imagine this painting was shocking at the time of its creation. It is still a bit shocking now. I would posit though that the shock is not from the sex depicted, as I would also speculate that viewers of the show have seen such things depicted elsewhere, if not maybe even seen them live and in person. The tantalization is generated from the art’s context. On one level, one does not go to the museum expecting to see a painting of four men having sex nor does one expect an artist in the 1700s to have portrayed such a private moment. But on a deeper level, it is the use of the friary as subject that shocks and all that the friary implies: morality, sacrifice, celibacy, the forsaking of the flesh for the sake of the spirit.

           In this picture, the artist depicts an orgy. It is simple to say this is a satire of moral men who vow to forsake their base desire for sex; but that satire is dependent on the viewer understanding, if not sharing, that base desire, as well as a resentment for anyone who actually categorizes that desire as base. It is some 300 years after the creation of this painting and there is still suspicion around the clerical vow of celibacy. We are dubious of people whose outward relationship to sex is different than our own. We assume that there is something wrong with them, that they are hiding something. In this painting, Magnasco creates a fantasy in which what was hidden is now exposed. In doing so, he symbolically obliterates the tension between sexual desires and the judgements of them. But has he offered another option? He has not created a new and better connection between bodily desire and spiritual thirst. He has simply prioritized one over the other. He has provided a critique of a community’s sexuality—if we understand abstinence as a sexuality—rather than an openness to another person’s proclivities.

 

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        One of the most challenging artists we meet in the exhibition is Elisar von Kupffer. For better or worse, we are presently in an era where the biography of an artist can overshadow their work. Important and innovative creatives, such as Picasso, Philip Johnson, and Leni Riefenstahl, are all examined through a lens in which their private lives and politics distract from their work. This must be an even greater obstacle for lesser-known names such as Elisar von Kupffer. Though he was a sexual libertine who made blatantly queer work, his ephebic eroticism and his commitment to Arianism presents an obstacle to evaluating his work. Yet, one of the most memorable pieces in the show is his work, La Nuova Lega (The New Union).

        Even more so than An Erotic Scene with Four Friars in an Interior, Kupffer’s work is reliant on almost fetishistic references to the Catholic aesthetic combined with allusions to Greco-Roman classicism. In the painting, three voluptuous and nude young men form a dancerly triangle that evoke the Moirai. They appear to be in front of a Christian altar behind which are richly colored stained glass windows depicting Mary and the baby Jesus, John the Evangelist, and Christ the King. Two of the young men hold swords with cruciform handles, and one holds his hand high in a salute, while resting on another young man’s sword. A thurible is at their feet. At the left of the painting, the artist himself enters in a lavender robe, holding a lavender book with a stylized cross. Passion flowers, roses, morning glory, acacia, and columbine decorate the scene. The characters all have a peaceful gaze. The center figure stares out at the viewer and his feet, one on the rich green carpeted step and one partially hanging off, suggest the feet of Jesus as he would hang on the cross or perhaps ascend into heaven.

        The painting is held in an elaborate blue and gold frame that lends it the air of a medieval altar piece. It is all quite over the top. It calls to mind Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp, to quote:

        “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it.”

        I am drawn to this picture both because it honors things I love both as a Catholic and as a queer. I am also disturbed by what appears to be a casual disregard for the sacred value of the Catholic symbology, and my inability to not see the artist’s devotion to Arianism and, in the raised hand of the young man on the right, the artist’s known affinity for Hitler—even though I know this raising of the hand was first a Christian thing and was not a Nazi thing for years after the painting was made. But by employing all the symbols he does, the artist creates a complex picture that is almost laughable, mocking, lacking self-awareness, totally intentional, beautiful and tacky. This union is triumphal in how it pushes the value of same sex relationships, but also tragic in that the artist feels compelled to soil the sacred in order to make the union real.

 

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        This little treasure of a painting delighted me. Fussell was a friend of Thomas Eakins and a mere four years older. Fussell never married but remained friends and colleagues with Eakins their entire lives. Eakins made a couple portraits of Fussell throughout his own career. I think what I found poignant about this work is that I, like many artistic boys, discovered Eakins when I was quite young, looking through art books at the local library. Eakins’ male nudes awoke something in myself. This portrait of Eakins, taking on the role of the subject, the young male nude, was not something I knew existed. Within the context of the show, it was a rather quiet moment but encapsulated a central theme of the show for me. I was drawn to the beauty of the picture, the careful rendering of the body, a modest portrayal of nudity, the simple somber background, the playfulness of Eakins painting in the nude—was Fussell also seated and painting in the nude across from Eakins? My being drawn to the painting, my having the memory of the Eakins book in the library, the esoteric connection I made between these artists—this is all a kind of queer seeing, a kind of queer knowing, that is enough in itself and could well be marred by overthinking.

 

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        On a single monitor in a corridor of a gallery, two videos played, one above the other. One was of Loïe Fuller, a Chicago-born performer known for her “serpentine dance,” in which she twirls and spins an extravagant amount of fabric around her. The second video was of an homage to the “serpentine dance” performed in drag by Italian performer Leopoldo Fregoli, known for his quick-change routines and impersonations of leading figures. An early practitioner of improvisational dance, Fuller’s performance, though filmed in black and white, was known for its use of colored lights bounced of the white fabric she spun around herself. The film of Fregoli’s performance adds the color through special effects.

        This was an entertaining view but what I found most interesting is that just a week or so prior I had seen a performance by contemporary drag queen, Bosco, on Rupaul’s Drag Race All Stars. Bosco’s performance was yet another re-creation of Loïe Fuller’s original act. I cannot know if this was an intentional carrying on of Fuller’s legacy, but in a way it does not matter. If Bosco had known this performance and chose to emulate it, with the burlesque conclusion of ending the dance in a striptease, then it is to her credit for knowing her queer history. But even if she was not aware of Fuller’s performance, it speaks to the power of tropes to transcend time and venue. The human tornado of fabric inherently has a queer quality—a transcendent joy. It may very well be that a boy, somewhere, is spinning around his room, knocking objects off dressers, as a bedsheet twirls around him.

 

        In a similar way, Hartley’s Pansy painting—depicting a larger than life ochre and burgundy pansy resting on a violet and teal background—is on one level a simple act of early modernism that forsakes strict representation to explode in thick gestural painting, gloopy brushwork, and exaggerated yet sophisticated use of color. But our word pansy, comes from the French pensée for the flower’s resemblance to a face deep in thought. In the early 1900s there was a craze for pansies among American gardeners who loved their expressive quality and delicate nature. It was these same qualities that lead to the word pansy being applied to men of a gentle nature—of course, derisively. Hartley painted this pansy, almost as a self-portrait, a confession, an esoteric jape. A few decades later, queer poet and painter Joe Brainard would make his own pansy paintings. In the early 90s, Pansy Division would become the first openly gay rock band.

        What we see depicted in this show, is for the most part, not homosexuality in the purest sense. What I mean is, you do not need to see a depiction of someone ____ing a ____ to perceive that that someone is a homosexual—though the show does have that. But really, you just need to witness the way a person moves through a space, the way they communicate or dress, to know they might be homosexual. But what you are then witnessing is not homosexuality. You are witnessing gayness, queerness. You are witnessing a performance of gender. And if you think you can see it, you can only see the obvious parts. What you are missing is the subtlety, and what this exhibition is about, by and large, is the subtle and not so subtle ways queerness is expressed by homosexuals, be they the first, the past, the present, and perhaps presciently the future.

Paul Moreno is an artist, designer, and writer working in Brooklyn, New York. He is a founder and organizer of the New York Queer Zine Fair. His work can be found on Instagram @bathedinaftherthought. He is the New York City editor of the New Art Examiner.

 

Becoming a Woman at Wrightwood 659’s “The First Homosexuals”

by Annette LePique

        What is art supposed to do? A loaded question to be sure, especially in an age where donors and institutions are beholden more and more to craven, and devious, special interest groups. These days I don’t know what an aesthetic experience should or could resemble. Does art need to do anything? Now I think that depends. Art should move you. Art can be political, and art can be politicized. These are not necessarily bad things, especially when one’s humanness is put up for legislative debate or is outright denied by an ever-transforming social contract. Art can be visual culture, and visual culture can contain the presence of people who would otherwise be erased or silenced by forces outside of themselves. I’m making these vague pronouncements, teasing these grand-sounding theses, because in an age of increasingly hate-filled anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric and the dangerous scapegoating of the trans community, Wrightwood 659’s immense “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869–1939” is a brave, and frankly moving, stand against the erasure of history and human diversity.

        The crux of the show, and its span of countries, artistic movements, and time periods, rests on the fact, as stated in the exhibition text, that “Homosexuality is in fact not an eternal category, but a historical one, subject like all of history, to ceaseless change.” Viewers are witness to such change through eight sections and three floors in which we’re taken through loose thematic chapters like Colonialism and Resistance, Performing, and Beyond the Binary which serve to detail the development of the “homosexual” identity as a distinct and recognizable social category. The exhibition is massive and may be better recognized as a well-developed historical archive rather than a gallery show, for these thematic groupings traverse the globe for seventy years, including the turn of a century and one world war.

        Though this is a show about identity and one’s position, it’s difficult for me to write from my own position as a woman. I don’t know how my perception of “The First Homosexuals” might differ from that of a man or non-binary viewer. However, there was a quiet yet persistent thread throughout the exhibition, that moved me, as a person, and more specifically, as a woman. This thread is the encroachment of fascism upon one’s freedom and ability to move throughout the world.

        The philosophy of fascism wants to tell you how and what a woman should be. Neigh, fascism wants to force a narrow and violent view of women into existence by any means necessary. Whether you are cisgendered, trans, straight, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, or if you feel more comfortable with different (or no) labels that define your gender and sexuality under the broad umbrella of womanhood, fascism wants to remake and mold you into something else: something starved, something pliant, something amenable to an authority not your own. Fascism wants to take away your pleasure and make you so hungry for desire that you will soon confuse pleasure with pain, but eventually that pain will sour too.

 

        On the second floor of the exhibition, there are documentary photos which detail the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany and the burning of the non-profit Institute for Sexual Research (a research center for various public health initiatives and the earliest trans clinic) and people holding Nazi flags. The photos are an overt, yet prescient, reminder that sexual difference (and I’ll say again, pleasure) was punished by fascism, as it was and is incompatible with the philosophy’s worldview.

        We see this friction again in the cinema alcove, located on the first floor. In a clip from the 1931 feature length German film, Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform), longconsidered to be the first lesbian and anti-fascist film, our protagonist Manuela (Hertha Thiele) is sent to a boarding school that functions as an allegory for the rise of Nazism in inter-war Germany. It’s at this violent and repressive school that Manuela falls for her kind teacher (who cares for her in return) but is almost driven to suicide by the administration’s cruelty for her “difference.” Though (spoiler alert) she’s saved by her classmates, we’d do well to remember that Manuela did not feel this desperation in a vacuum, she was driven to her breaking point by the forces that surrounded her and deigned to tell her who and what she could be.

 

        There are countless life events that make a woman a woman. We’re born time and time again through the interlocking lenses of social and cultural expectations, just like Simone de Beauvoir would write in her 1949 Second Sex (“one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”). It is to the credit of “The First Homosexuals” that it explores many manifestations of womanliness under Fascism’s creeping threat decades before Beauvoir’s work was published. There’s the intimacy of Jeanne Mammen’s Weimar sex workers in her “Bilitis” series, Gerda Wegener’s loving portraits of her partner Lili Elbe (one of the earliest documented transwomen), the subversive performances of Josephine Baker, Claude Cahun’s own challenge to gender through their intricate drag, and even the riotous sexualities drawn in the shape of women by Austin Osman Spare in his Psychopathia sexualis series.

 

        In Félix Vallotton’s 1907 painting of Modernist author and poet Gertrude Stein (titled: Gertrude Stein), a relatively demure portrait, the author looks straight ahead and is posed in a manner reminiscent of kings long past or other elder statesmen—people, in short, with power. She has closely cropped dark hair and is wearing a warm brown covering similar to a monk’s robe. I mention this painting because in many ways Stein typifies the ethos of women existing in innumerable forms; she was a genius with money and power who lived openly with her longtime partner during a time that such privileges were not afforded to many, if any, other women. She was also an ardent supporter of the fascist Vichy government in France. To state that Stein was a Fascist would be too much of a simplification of her sometimes-inchoate politics, but she ultimately wanted the United States to “return” to its traditional values and looked towards the Vichy government to make such a change a reality.

 

        Women are not a monolith. Women can be jerks, assholes, fetishists, sex maniacs, dancers, working girls, innocents, despots, demons, guilty souls, the kindest people you’ll ever meet, desperate schoolgirls, secret yearners, bad girlfriends, lost Ophelias, party animals, or all of the above. Fascism wants to take this away from us, to reduce us to the flattest mechanics of the body given up to service of a nation state.“The First Homosexuals” warns us of this ever-encroaching creep, as it asks us to remember our shared history and shows us the many ways that a woman can be.

Annette LePique is an arts writer. She has written for Momus, Hyperallergic, Newcity, ArtReview, Chicago Reader, Stillpoint Magazine, Spectator Film Journal, and others. She was the winner of a Rabkin Prize for Art Journalism in 2023 and has an interest in psychoanalysis.