The First Homosexuals
As LGBTQ+ rights come under renewed attack, a Chicago exhibition reminds us that queerness has always existed, and always adapted
WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s Pride Month—a time to celebrate visibility, identity, and the hard-won freedoms of LGBTQ+ people worldwide. But this year, the mood feels more complicated than celebratory.
Across the United States and around the world, LGBTQ+ rights are under attack once again. From book bans and drag bans to anti-trans legislation and attempts to erase queer history from classrooms and public spaces, there’s a sense that the progress of the past few decades is at risk of unraveling.
That’s why an exhibition like The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939, currently on view at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, is so important. It’s a reminder that we’ve been here before. And that queer people, even in times of fear and repression, have always found ways to live, love, and express themselves.
This is a show about visibility, but not in the way we usually talk about it. Before Pride parades and rainbow flags, before the word “homosexual” even existed, queer people were already making themselves known. They were writing poems, painting portraits, staging plays, and posing for photographs. What they didn’t have was the vocabulary we use now. But they still told their stories. They still found each other. They still lived.
We’ve Always Been Here
The First Homosexuals tells that story across 70 years of global art, from the moment the word “homosexual” first appeared in print in 1869 to the eve of World War II, when fascist regimes sought to eliminate the very idea of sexual and gender difference. More than 300 works by over 125 artists from 40 countries are gathered in this show, making it one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of early queer art in history. Curated by Jonathan D. Katz, one of the leading figures in queer art history, and his associate Johnny Willis, the show is rigorous and revelatory.
What this exhibition does so powerfully is remind us that queer identity is not a modern invention. It didn’t appear in the 1960s or come fully formed after Stonewall. Queerness has always existed. But the language to describe it, and the laws used to police it, are modern constructs. As Katz puts it, before 1869, homosexuality was understood as something people did, not something they were. Once labeled, queer people became easier to criminalize, marginalize, and control. But that same label also gave rise to new forms of solidarity, creativity, and resistance.
Art filled the gap where language failed. The exhibition opens with scenes of same-sex intimacy that predate our modern definitions, including Japanese shunga prints that depict male-male desire without shame or stigma, 19th-century oil paintings of Two-Spirit ceremonies among Native American tribes, and Greco-Roman-inspired neoclassical sculptures that coded homoerotic longing in mythological form.
Reading Between the Lines, Painting Outside the Frame
As the word “homosexual” entered public consciousness, often through the lens of criminal trials or sexological studies, artists began to lean into identity, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly. We see this in portraits of Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, and Romaine Brooks. We see it in photos of women in drag at tea parties on Staten Island. We see it in Florine Stettheimer’s cheeky self-portrait as a modern Venus, attended not by cherubs but by her bohemian inner circle.
One of the most moving aspects of the show is how it insists that modern homosexual identity was born alongside and in conversation with gender nonconformity. The exhibition doesn’t separate “gay history” from “trans history.” It recognizes that these identities emerged in tandem. That many early sexologists believed homosexuals had “the soul of the opposite sex.” That figures like Lili Elbe, one of the first people to undergo gender confirmation surgery, were not anomalies but pioneers of an evolving queer continuum.
This show explores how identity is formed through culture, shaped by history, and expressed through art, as well as how systems of power can weaponize identities. The exhibition doesn’t shy away from the role colonialism played in imposing Western notions of sexuality onto other cultures, often casting colonized peoples as sexually deviant or “invert” while outlawing local traditions of gender fluidity and same-sex love.
As Katz notes, the global spread of the homosexual identity followed the same route as empire, and was often used as a justification for conquest. But the show also highlights how local artists and communities resisted those impositions, asserting queer visibility on their own terms. Whether through sacred ceremonies, coded symbolism, or brazenly modern art, queer people made themselves known.
The Closet Was Never Soundproof
There’s a lot of beauty in The First Homosexuals. But there’s also grief. The show ends with a chilling image: Nazi stormtroopers burning the library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in 1933. That moment marked the end of a vibrant, visible queer culture in Weimar Berlin, one that included bars, magazines, support groups, and some of the first public celebrations of gay and trans lives. It reminds us how quickly progress can be reversed, how visibility can become vulnerability. And how the first great flourishing of modern queer identity was nearly destroyed by fascism.
Which brings us back to today.
In the past year, hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in state legislatures across the U.S. In some communities, teachers are being told not to say the word “gay.” Health care for trans youth is under attack. And the rights we thought were settled, like marriage, adoption, and access to care, are being contested once again. The old playbook of fear and scapegoating has been dusted off. The pendulum is swinging. But history has a lesson here, and that’s that the attempted erasure of queer lives is not new. And neither is the resistance.
The difference is that this time we know better. We have the tools to fight back and history on our side, not just the recent history but the deeper, older history captured in this exhibition. It’s a history of people who loved without permission, who created without language, and who thrived under scrutiny.
Queer history offers an invaluable map for navigating transformation and building resilience during disruption. LGBTQ+ people have always had to adapt, hide, reveal, and invent new ways of being. We’ve always been writing the new rules for living in uncertain times.
That’s the lesson of The First Homosexuals. That visibility is not a given, but a choice. That identity is not static, but evolving. And that queerness, far from being a threat to tradition, is often the most honest expression of what it means to be human.
This Pride Month, amid the noise and the threats and the setbacks, let’s remember where we came from. And let’s hold fast to where we’re going.
Because the first homosexuals weren’t just subjects of history. They were architects of the future.
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