Is heterosexuality natural? In his 1995 book The Invention of Heterosexuality, sexuality scholar Jonathan Ned Katz established the idea of “heterosexual” as a historically recent concept. First entered into the lexicon in the late 19th century, “heterosexual” served a very specific social and political function: “Heterosexuality is not identical to the reproductive intercourse of the sexes,” he writes. “Heterosexuality does not equal the eroticism of women and men.” 

“The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939”
Through 7/26: Thu–Fri noon–7 PM, Sat 10 AM–5 PM, Wrightwood 659, 659 W. Wrightwood, wrightwood659.org/exhibitions/the-first-homosexuals-the-birth-of-a-new-identity-1869-1939, $15, advance purchase required

Rather, it formed the basis for a legal and medical hierarchy of sexual behavior and gender expression that rigidly privileged heterosexual conformity—and posed dangers to everyone who didn’t comply. In “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939,” on view at Wrightwood 659 through July 26, over 300 works of art explore homosexuality, most of them made in the first 70 years after the term “homosexual” was coined and popularized. 

The exhibition is being rightly celebrated for its ambition. Over seven years in the making, occupying all four floors of the museum, and showing art from around the world (including some making its U.S. debut), “The First Homosexuals” is no small feat. It was organized by Wrightwood curatorial fellow Johnny Willis and their mentor, Jonathan D. Katz, who began establishing the field of queer art history in the 90s and has devoted his life’s work to expanding scholarship on “the homosexual” in 20th-century Western art. But the exhibition’s real strength lies not in how it explores its premise—an idea so profound that it defined the academic careers of not one but two Jonathan Katzes. What makes the show worthwhile is its timing.

“The First Homosexuals” is not a very meaningful look at how same-sex desire or gender expansiveness in art changed as a result of these categorical distinctions. In 2022, the Wrightwood mounted a smaller version called “The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869–1930.” Writing for Art in America, critic Jeremy Lybarger described it as having “the tone of a sociology textbook.” “It is not as if 1869 were a eureka moment that launched queer artists, en masse, into careers of self-representation,” he concluded. “Increasing secularism, urbanization, and mass media did more to define homosexual identity than did the invention of the word itself, yet those realities remain either unexplored or oblique here.” The current show elides similar questions on a larger scale, but with one caveat: it places a greater emphasis on homosexuals’ nuanced relationship to white supremacy and fascism.

Through all kinds of art, viewers are reminded that there’s nothing “natural” or “inevitable” about racism or homophobia—these are structural choices. And when the Nazis rose to power over the course of the 1930s—a context that defines all nine years of additional material in this version, plus much of the 1920s art—racial and class privileges only offered queer artists or subjects so much protection from white supremacy’s heterosexist death cult. What starts as an interesting, albeit very scattered, telling of modern queer history through art objects closes as a timely cautionary tale.

Floor one is a section called Before the Binary. Viewers are introduced to the etymology of “homosexual”—a word that German judicial scholar and gay liberationist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs began using in 1869 in pamphlets designed to push back against the growing influence of the 1851 Prussian penal code, which criminalized same-sex erotic activity in a way other governing bodies didn’t. In context, the term was meant to emphasize the naturalness of same-sex desire, but it ended up emphasizing the biological sexual characteristics of the people expressing the desire, rather than the acts they performed, which had previously been criminalized or pathologized. 

This distinction is unpacked at length in The First Homosexuals’s catalogue but is more jumbled in the show itself, which rushes to demonstrate various ways homosexuality was—or wasn’t—acknowledged throughout the world before now-Germans became uniquely fixated on the idea and collapsed it into a colonialist thirst to subjugate “the other.” Same-sex desire and gender expansiveness are seen in everything from neoclassical Greek drawings to early 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints, as well as paintings and watercolors of Indigenous communities throughout the Americas. The show argues that gender and sexual variance have manifested similarly across times and places, but Western empires have used it to suggest a weakness or decadence that justified cruelty and dominance. 

Then the show jumps around with sections such as Portraits, Relationships, Colonialism and Resistance, and Performance. With so much material, it has a range of moments spanning from boring to profound. How could it not? It’s almost too much to contend with, except that it’s fun to revel in how much really fucking gay art is out there. The show is organized less chronologically and more thematically, which makes its takeaways a bit vague beyond that queerness is timeless and enduring. 

Its premise shouldn’t feel radical or even especially compelling (gay art: who knew!). Yet, as Web Behrens reported for Block Club, the Wrightwood, a museum that relies solely on private rather than state funding, was the only institution in the Americas or Europe willing to host it. While most of the show was finalized by the end of 2024, when Trump became elected, D. Katz pushed to conclude the exhibition with the Nazi burning of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, a robust archive of sexuality scholarship and the first acknowledged clinic to provide gender-affirming medical care to the trans community. Sensationalized in newsreels projected throughout Germany, that fire was one of the first book burnings; it destroyed over 20,000 titles, including many rare manuscripts and countless health-care resources. It sent a profound message about Hitler’s priorities and what he was willing to do to achieve them.

Some of the show’s most fascinating moments are when it reveals queer people lacking a unified sense of political consciousness. In Romaine Brooks’s Self-Portrait (1923), the artist shows herself in her signature chilly gray scale, the only hints of warmth on her lips and a buttonhole, her eyes barely visible beneath a black brimmed hat, and her hands hidden in gray gloves. The background is austere and industrial-seeming, and the text emphasizes that Brooks, a trust-fund lesbian who rooted her identity in some idea of eccentric genius that exempted her from rules more often applied to commoners, had fascist sympathies. 

In a series of elegiac photographs and paintings by Elisàr von Kupffer, viewers are introduced to an artist who sees transness and homosexuality as an expression of God’s infinite imagination—provided one is white and able-bodied. Kupffer’s works hold a tender reverence for Eastern influences on Christian art, and they are excitedly androgynous, meditating less on scientific essentialism and more on gender and sexual transcendence. Kupffer was a vegetarian and, along with his live-in partner Eduard von Mayer, cofounded a spiritual community in the Weimar called the Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion (the faith is referred to as “Clarism”). Over the years, he wrote a lot of texts about man-on-man love, and also a lot of fan letters to Hitler. Ben Miller, cohost of the Bad Gays podcast, calls the subjects of Kupffer’s paintings—which all bear the faces of him, his lover, or a sexy local named “Gino” Luigi Taricco—his “fascist femboys.” One could easily see his body of work as a nonsecular antecedent to Twinks4Trump and its corollary photography trend.

One of the undercurrents of the exhibition is that giving new language to qualify certain types of people was both liberatory and oppressive, but it’s less explicit about in what ways. And while “The First Homosexuals” makes it implicit that gay rights have always umbrellaed trans rights—that these things are historically one and the same—it sidesteps the history of “transsexual,” a term Hirschfeld began using in 1923 to describe patients looking for gender-affirming medical care like hormones and surgery. It wasn’t used in English until 1949, just two decades before the gay liberation movement began. Right as the preferred terminology switched from “transsexual” to “transgender”—a linguistic nuance that shifted the emphasis away from medical transition to something more abstract—the gay liberation movement began to separate trans rights (like gender-affirming medical care) from its larger emancipatory goals.

Despite its challenges finding a home, “The First Homosexuals” has already sold more tickets than any Wrightwood show in the museum’s seven-year history. It follows a broader curatorial trend in art museums: catering to viewers’ desires to see themselves represented through the work rather than challenging them. At the same time, the museum has taken extra security precautions against potential backlash, including subjecting guests to a metal detector upon arrival. As a queer person, it feels tedious to have to prove you’re safe to experience your own history—but then why is a textbook-style approach to gay art even controversial?

Conservatives have long eyed gutting the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), in part as a way to throttle gay artists. At its height in 1992, the NEA awarded over $175 million in arts funding, which would be over $400 million today. When Trump began his second term, the NEA budget had been reduced to $207 million per year (0.003 percent of the federal budget). In March, Trump added provisions that made applicants attest funding would not be used in any way that can be construed “to promote gender ideology,” and by May, he announced his intention to eliminate the program completely. 

But even before Trump was reelected, institutions were getting increasingly skittish about queer art—just look at the Felix Gonzalez-Torres controversy at the Art Institute in 2022. Mentions of Gonzalez-Torres’s partner Ross Laycock and his HIV diagnosis were removed from the wall text for Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991), a piece where candy equivalent to Laycock’s ideal healthy weight is laid out, and as viewers take pieces over time, the pile slowly disappears, similar to how Ross’s body was ravaged by complications from the virus. 

Part of what makes “The First Homosexuals” a little frustrating is that it feels like it’s trying to do too much, almost like it’s attempting to make up for other institutions’ failures. But given the stakes—how the political and institutional winds have been blowing in recent years—it’s easy to see why. Despite ending by emphasizing how homosexuals were treated by fascists, the exhibition does not mention that not all gay people sent to concentration camps during the Holocaust were liberated afterward. Many remained incarcerated through the 60s, and anti-homosexual violence was not acknowledged as part of the Nazis’ reign of terror until 1970. “The First Homosexuals” is not a cultural revelation; it’s a desperate shriek to carry the lessons of those generations’ experiences forward.