How “The First Homosexuals” Shaped an Identity

About those faraway realms: Can we really credit two white Victorians, and their peculiarly German fetish for classification, with the invention of homosexuality? Anticipating this question, the exhibition opens with a global survey of same-sex desire before it had been named. A Japanese woodblock print shows two women preparing to have sex using a strap-on dildo. In a watercolor street scene from post-independence Lima—per the catalogue, the San Francisco of its era—we see a queer brown figure in lace appearing to flirt with a soldier, who wears an enormous cockade in his feathered bicorne. There are nearly as many representations of diversity, including a George Catlin painting of Native men celebrating a two-spirit person, and a portrait of La Chevalière d’Éon, a trans woman who spied for Louis XVI. The ensemble evokes a world full of sexual variety, though far from utopian. One grisly engraving depicts Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s conquistadors and their dogs massacring Native Panamanians for practicing sodomy. It’s a prelude to a later exploration of the colonial influence on sexuality worldwide.

“Homosexuality” was born at the zenith of Western empire, and, much like an empire, it both appropriated from and reshaped the cultures under its sway. Aubrey Beardsley cribbed the oversized phalluses of his erotic drawings from Japanese shunga prints. Orientalist painters found alibis for their homoeroticism in the high-handed scrutiny of “effeminate,” and thus backward, societies. “Slaves,” for instance, by the Spanish painter Gabriel Morcillo, a favorite artist of Francisco Franco’s, depicts a trio of young white men wearing turbans, chains, flowers, and little else. (They are, presumably, Christians, in thrall to a lascivious Moor.) A selection of propaganda images condemning male pederasty in the Islamic world—as horny as they are jingoistic—reminded me of the former Navy SEAL Robert J. O’Neill, who allegedly killed Osama bin Laden. O’Neill went viral on X, last year, for replying to a group selfie posted by young Kamala Harris volunteers with this: “You’re not men. You’re boys. If there was no social media, you would be my concubines.”

Some non-Western cultures responded to the new sexual regime with self-repression. Japan’s Meiji-era government proscribed homosexuality so as to be taken seriously as an empire. Similar backlashes took place in China, South Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. (Some of these regions are absent from the exhibition, because contemporary homophobia impeded loans.) Yet the modernist embrace of “primitivism” could also provide cover for homosexual expression, especially in settler-colonial societies with mixed roots. “Our Ancient Gods” (1916), by the Mexican painter Saturnino Herrán, depicts a group of flamboyantly posed pre-Columbian deities in loincloths and feather headdresses. Around the same time, Black American artists were leveraging a racialized reputation for hypersexuality into the riotous queerness of the Harlem Renaissance, expressed, for instance, in Richmond Barthé’s sinuously swaying sculpture “Feral Benga, Senegalese dancer” (1935), or the singer Ma Rainey’s “Prove It On Me Blues” (1928), written after her arrest for organizing a lesbian orgy. Despite the title, she makes no claim of innocence: “It’s true, I wear a collar and a tie,” Rainey sings, boasting that she can womanize “just like any old man.”

In the early days, homosexuality was considered a form of “gender inversion.” Its ideal object, for many artists, was the androgynous youth, whose incomplete sexual development was seen as analogous to the invert’s blend of masculine and feminine traits. Naked ephebes gambolled through the works of painters such as Gustave Courtois, whose “Narcissus” (1872), a rosy-cheeked boy with a daisy tucked into his headband seems to have fainted at the sight of his own reflection in a stream. Then, as the century turned, the boys were pushed aside by rough young men. Across the room, but painted thirty-five years later, is the same artist’s portrait of the bodybuilder Maurice Dériaz. Homosexuals were embracing the binary, Katz argues, and moving closer to our contemporary separation of gender from sexuality.

The shift helped make transness and gender fluidity visible on their own terms. The show’s last section features works by photographers including Claude Cahun and Van Leo, who embodied a range of masculine, feminine, and neuter personae in their playful self-portraits. The Danish artist Gerda Wegener’s adoring paintings of her partner Lili Elbe were, in part, a collaborative fantasy about what Elbe might look like after her medical transition, which Elbe also discusses in “The Mystery of Gender” (1933), an interwar Austrian film. Yet, even as some crossed the binary, others dreamed of its abolition. Elisàr von Kupffer, a German-Estonian painter and aristocrat, considered gender divisions to be a perversion of god’s will. Christening himself Elisarion, he built a “temple” in Switzerland to propagate his doctrine, filling it with kitschy, “Midsommar”-esque idylls set in a so-called “clear world” of genderless Aryan youths. Von Kupffer was also a fascist, who wrote letters to Hitler. The Führer never replied.

Today, for better and worse, we’re living in Elisarion’s world. Young people are less and less inclined to define themselves in dichotomous terms, with “queer,” “bisexual,” and “nonbinary” gaining on the old labels. Fascism, too, is on the rise, and some have chosen to blame one for the other. The writer Andrew Sullivan recently opined that queer and trans radicals have hijacked a once respectable movement for gay and lesbian equality. The usual retort to such cavilling is to say that a trans woman threw the first brick at Stonewall. Arguably, though, Sullivan’s allegation of coattail-riding has it even more backward: if so many of the first homosexuals defined themselves as having a “soul” of the opposite sex, wasn’t it because, at the time, that was the more legible bid for acceptance than the bare fact of same-sex desire? (La Chevalière d’Éon was celebrated for living on both sides of the gender binary in a France where “sodomy” was punishable by death.) “The First Homosexuals” reminds us that, while labels may come and go, the need for solidarity remains. On the way out, I passed Beauford Delaney’s portrait, executed in a rainbow of pastels, of a young James Baldwin, who once wrote, “We must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is.” ♦