GLR May-June 2025

The First Homosexuals GLR k May–June 2025 Jonathan D. Katz, Guest Editor

P AVEL G OLUBEV Russia: Queer Modernism

P ATRICK C ARLAND -E CHAVARRIA Japan: ‘Homosexuality’ Arrives D OUGLAS P RETSELL In the Beginning Was the Word

J OHNNY W ILLIS Canada: Lesbian Art Reclaimed

N IHARIKA D INKAR India: Crossing Worlds

T IRZA T RUE L ATIMER Paris: The Image-Makers

J OSEPH S HAIKEWITZ Argentina: Men in Uniform

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The Gay & Lesbian Review May–June 2025 • VOLUME XXXII, NUMBER 3 WORLDWIDE

Editor-in-Chief and Founder R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . Managing Editor J EREMY F OX WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review ® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118

C ONTENTS

The First Homosexuals

F EATURES

“It will be seen as a political exhibition.” 12 J ONATHAN D. K ATZ In the Beginning Was the Word 14 D OUGLAS P RETSELL The First Lesbian Image-Makers 17 T IRZA T RUE L ATIMER Amrita Sher-Gil’s Crossing Worlds 23 N IHARIKA D INKAR

Literary Editor M ARTHA E. S TONE Poetry Editor D AVID B ERGMAN Associate Editors S AM D APANAS P AUL F ALLON M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ Contributing Writers R OSEMARY B OOTH D ANIEL A. B URR C OLIN C ARMAN A NNE C HARLES A LFRED C ORN A LLEN E LLENZWEIG C HRIS F REEMAN P HILIP G AMBONE M ATTHEW H AYS H ILARY H OLLADAY A NDREW H OLLERAN I RENE J AVORS J OHN R. K ILLACKY C ASSANDRA L ANGER

John R. Killacky interviews the curator of The First Homosexuals The word was “homosexual,” born in late 19th-century Germany In Paris, they turned to portraiture to encode their hidden desires Trained in Europe, she became a window on Indian women’s lives Promoted by Diaghilev, it reveled in artifice and erotic ambiguity How a Western concept played havoc with traditional institutions A 1942 raid exposed a secret subculture of same-sex art and activity A reluctance to name their sexuality has allowed critics to ignore it

Queer Modernism in Russia 26 P AVEL G OLUBEV

When “Homosexuality” Came to Japan 29 P ATRICK C ARLAND -E CHAVARRIA

Buenos Aires’ Men in Uniform 32 J OSEPH S HAIKEWITZ Reclaiming Canadian Lesbian Art 36 J OHNNY W ILLIS

R EVIEWS

Indra B. Tamang — My Curious Years with Charles Henri Ford 39 F ELICE P ICANO Michael Sappol — Queer Anatomies 40 V ERNON R OSARIO Alexis Pauline Gumbs – Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde 42 R EGINALD H ARRIS Marilee Lindemann and Ann Romines, eds. — Unsettling Cather 43 B RUCE S PANG Carol Verburg — The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey 45 M ICHAEL Q UINN Jyotsna Vaid & Amy Hoffman, eds. – The Dream of a Common Movement 46 HNH IRSCH Edmund White — The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir 47 A LAN C ONTRERAS Zorian Clayton — Calling the Shots: A Queer History of Photography 48 M ATTHEW H AYS Pirrkko Saisio — Lowest Common Denominator 49 L ORI O’D EA Keetje Kuipers — Lonely Women Make Good Lovers 49 D AVID B ERGMAN Philip Gambone — Zigzag 50 H ANK T ROUT Emma Copley Eisenberg — Housemates: A Novel 51 J EAN R OBERTA Schwartzwald & Simon, eds. – Worldwise: Édouard Roditi’s Twentieth Century 52 C HARLES G REEN Phillip M. Ayoub & Kristina Stoeckl – The Global Fight against LGBTI Rights 53 D ENNIS A LTMAN David Meischen — Nopalito, Texas 53 D ALE B OYER Black Doves and Prime Target (TV miniseries) 58 C OLIN C ARMAN

A NDREW L EAR J AMES P OLCHIN J EAN R OBERTA V ERNON R OSARIO Contributing Artist C HARLES H EFLING Publisher S TEPHEN H EMRICK Webmaster B OSTON W EB G ROUP WebEditor A LLISON A RMIJO ______________________________ Board of Directors

A RT C OHEN ( CHAIR ) R OBERT H ARDMAN S TEPHEN H EMRICK H ILARY H OLLADAY D AVID L A F ONTAINE J IM J ACOBS A NDREW L EAR

P OEMS & D EPARTMENTS

G UEST O PINION — Lessons for Today from the “Lavender Scare” 5 R ONALD V ALDISERRI C ORRESPONDENCE 6 I N M EMORIAM — Felice Picano: Writer and Publishing Impresario 8 W ALTER H OLLAND BTW 10 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . P OEM — “The Missionaries” 41 M ORRIS M C L ENNAN P OEM — “The Last Days” 44 D IEM O KOYE H ISTORY M EMO — Transgender Journeys as a Way to Sainthood 55 M AGALI M ERMET C ULTURAL C ALENDAR 56

R ICHARD S CHNEIDER , J R . ( PRESIDENT ) T HOMAS Y OUNGREN ( TREASURER ) S TEWART C LIFFORD ( CHAIR EMER .) W ARREN G OLDFARB ( SR . ADVISOR EMER .)

The Gay & Lesbian Review/ WORLDWIDE ® (formerly The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1994-1999) is published bimonthly (six times per year) by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational corporation located in Boston, Mass. Subscription rates : U.S.: $41.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $51.70(US). All other countries: $61.70(US). All non-U.S. copies are sent via air mail. Back issues available for $12 each. All correspondence is sent in a plain envelope marked “G&LR.” ISSN: 1077: 6591 © 2025 by Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. W EBSITE : www.GLReview.org • S UBSCRIPTIONS : 847-504-8893 • A DVERTISING : 617-421-0082 • S UBMISSIONS : Editor@GLReview.org

May–June 2025

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Pride Issue: ‘The First Homosexuals’ FROM THE GUEST EDITOR

T HIS ISSUE of TheG&LR , of which I am the guest edi tor, spotlights an art exhibition that I co-curated (with Johnny Willis) titled The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939 (open May 2–July 26, 2025, across three floors of the Wrightwood 659 museum in Chicago). Before the word “homosexual” first appeared in 1869, it can be said that “sexuality” did not exist. Sex, of course, did, and desire as well. But sexuality, that collective identification rooted in desire and sex, had not yet emerged—indeed could not emerge until its alternative form was named, defined, and natu ralized. “Homosexuality” was the outside agitator that enabled “heterosexuality” to cohere, thus facilitating the emergence of sexuality as a field of study. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, one of the first queer activists, is partly responsible for this development, and due to his efforts and those of other mostly German intel lectuals in the 1860s, the idea coalesced that there existed a class of people who were born different by virtue of sex and desire, but were otherwise equal in every respect. These were “the first homosexuals” to which this issue’s title refers. The First Homosexuals , I hasten to add, is an art exhibition. Since art can communicate historical nuances and subtleties that escape the terminology of sexual difference, it can show things without telling the viewer what they are, enabling art to speak out of both sides of its mouth. Thus, queer viewers could note things that eluded the majority. This exhibition is thus premised

on the idea that the history of art is both the world’s largest archive of the history of sexuality and its least tapped. Fully global in scope, The First Homosexuals was a massive, seven-year endeavor to gather some of the world’s greatest mas terpieces and read them for their often explicit, if unacknowl edged, queer significances. An international scholarly advisory board of some 22 scholars met regularly over the years to define the scope of the project and select possibilities for exhibition. The exhibit includes more than 350 works of art—paintings, films, photographs, drawings, prints, and sculptures from the late 18th century to the beginning of World War II. Borrowed from the world’s leading museums, including the Tate, the Musée d’ Orsay, the Met, and a number of important private collections and foundations, this is a masterpiece show that will introduce a number of figures considered national treasures in their home lands but never before shown in the U.S. The Monacelli division of Phaidon will be publishing the scholarly catalog of the exhibition, and some of the contributors to this volume were invited to contribute to this issue. The sole venue for The First Homosexuals is Chicago’s Wrightwood 659, though not for want of trying to find other institutions. Appar ently, queer art shows remain something of a third rail in the American museum world, a situation that that threatens to be come even more dire under the current administration. J ONATHAN D.K ATZ ,G UEST E DITOR

QueerLens A History of Photography Edited by Paul Martineau and Ryan Linkof, with contributions by Jordan Bear, Ken Gonzales Day, Alexis Bard Johnson, Derek Conrad Murray, and Catherine Opie Featuring lively essays and copious illustrations, this book explores the transformative role of photography in LGBTQ+ communities from the nineteenth century to the present day.

© 2025 J. Paul Getty Trust

Getty Publications getty.edu/publications

TheG & LR

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GUEST OPINION Lessons for Today from the ‘Lavender Scare’

appearance becomes more congruent with their gender iden tity, the order callously refers to gender-affirming hormone care as “chemical mutilation.” Other White House actions, such as the ban on federal funds being used to support awareness of and training for di versity, equity, and inclusion, bespeak antipathy toward un derstanding and responding to the unique health and social needs of minority populations, including sexual and gender mi norities—not to mention communities of color. While many of the actions referred to here have been temporarily blocked by court orders, their intended outcome—and the erosion of tol erance that they portend—cannot be ignored. Will government continue to discriminate against people whose gender identities do not match their sex at birth? It’s worth remembering that in response to the governmental op pression of the lavender scare, same-sex loving men and women learned how to organize and challenge discrimination, laying the groundwork for the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. One hopes that the current moral panic over gender identity and transgender rights might follow a similar, albeit much more rapid, trajectory. Ronald Valdiserri, MD, is a professor of epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University.

R ONALD V ALDISERRI I N A SPEECH given to the Ohio County Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy asserted that the U.S. State Department was crawling with traitors—205 members of the Communist Party, to be exact. Three years earlier, the House Un-Ameri can Activities Committee (HUAC) held widely publicized hearings on the spread of Communism within the motion pic ture industry, leading to the blacklisting of a number of well known Hollywood figures. McCarthy’s public comments, which made national headlines, led to Congressional and Ex ecutive actions that eventually resulted in a nearly quarter-cen tury ban on gay men and women serving in federal government and upwards of 10,000 men and women losing their jobs. In his 2004 book, historian David K. Johnson refers to this system atic federal persecution of gay men and lesbians as the “Laven der Scare.” The Lavender Scare is an example of what sociologists refer to as a “moral panic,” which happens when a perceived social threat is singled out and exaggerated until the public comes to regard it as a serious danger to physical safety and to society’s core values. The response to a moral panic typically involves the enactment of laws and policies designed to “root out” the source of the perceived threat. Recent anti-LGBT leg islation and policy directives coming from U.S. federal and state governments provide a more recent example of a moral panic, only this time the threat is gender—specifically trans gender—identity. A series of Executive Orders (EO’s) coming from the new Administration target transgender and non-binary people in ways that are sure to threaten their health and well-being. The first EO, issued on Inauguration Day, explains that the federal government recognizes only two sexes, male and female, which are established at birth and “are not changeable.” To comply with the order, federal websites removed all references to transgender people and their unique healthcare needs. After judicial action, some of this information was restored, but with the prominently posted caveat that “This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this De partment rejects it.” In a move that can only be described as Orwellian, the National Park Service, in response to the EO, re moved all references to transgender people from the Stonewall Inn National Monument website, even though the facts clearly indicate that Marsha Johnson and other gender nonconform ing people were actively involved in the uprising. Then, on January 27th, the White House issued an EO bar ring transgender men and women from serving in the armed forces, stating that “expressing a false gender identity diver gent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous stan dards necessary for military service.” This was followed, one day later, by an executive order banning federal funds from being used to support gender affirming care for minors. Ignor ing scientific evidence showing improved mental health out comes for children and young adults when their external

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May–June 2025

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Correspondence

sembled protest, and several archival ac counts at the USC-ONE LGBTQ Archives. Four demonstrations—on the Sunset Strip, and in the Valley, South L.A., and Sil verlake—were called to protest LAPD vio lence against young counterculture hippies on the Sunset Strip and, secondarily, Black and Latino communities. Only the Sunset Strip and Silverlake events materialized. In the Silverlake protest, organizers forbade the use of the words “homosexual,” “ho mophile,” or “gay.” Look at the photo of demonstrators’ protest signs with the article. None use those forbidden words or refer to the Black Cat violence. In Kepner’s speech that day, whenever he wanted to use one of the forbidden words, he said instead “the word I am forbidden to speak” in defiance. About the actual Black Cat protest, Kep ner shared the following narrative: “A hand ful of demonstrators (whom I respect and honor) very briefly protested outside the Black Cat and then moved across Sunset to very briefly protest at the second gay bar that was secondarily raided. When a police car parked nearby on Sunset, the Black Cat protesters rapidly disappeared into people

Alliance. It was a multi-pronged move ment early on. Felice Picano, Los Angeles How the Black Cat Protests Went Down To the Editor, Eve Goldberg’s article in the Origins issue [March-April 2025] was correct about the brutality of the Black Cat raid but woe fully distorted about the protest later. Her description of the cruel and unprovoked LAPD attacks on the Black Cat and a sec ond gay bar across the street at midnight of a New Year’s celebration is factually correct. The approximately 200 demonstrators on February 11, 1967, were not there to protest the Black Cat raids, however. A handful of Black Cat protesters correctly and adroitly latched onto the larger demonstration as protective cover. My sources are printed ac counts of the raids in LA-based homophile publications, detailed conversations with Jim Kepner who was a speaker at the as

Another Take on Stonewall’s A ft ermath To the Editor: A small gloss on the final paragraph of David Carter’s “What Made Stonewall Dif ferent” [March-April 2025]: Carter gives much of the credit to Craig Rodwell’s idea of an annual parade to give it “staying power.” A good idea, but those of us who were there remember twice as many ob servers as marchers. More to the point was the four days of protests right after the riot at the six Greenwich Village subway stations. Gay or straight, you could not come or go from 4 pm to 8 pm without encountering gay and lesbian marchers with signs, chanting, and being egged on by people like Vito Russo with megaphones. Those, in turn, had sign-up lists, and people did show up a half a block away, upstairs, for the first meeting (and subsequent meetings) of the Gay Liberation Front. That group became the larger, more effective Gay Activists

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assembled for the real rally.” LAPD raids, like the Black Cat event, were happening all over L.A. and through out the country wherever gay people pub licly congregated. The Black Cat was important because it was part of the awak ening of LGBT resistance. Don Kilhefner, PhD, Los Angeles Explaining Sexuality—and Dexterity To the Editor: As usual I learned much again from the information in a recent issue [Jan.-Feb. 2025]—thank you. I want to comment on Andrew Holleran’s review of Josh L. Davis’ book A Little Queer Natural History . The book details homosexual behavior in the an imal kingdom. Holleran ends his review by stating: “One finishes this book no nearer to

an ‘explanation’ for homosexuality.” A number of years ago I wrote a paper that addresses this question titled “Dexterity and Sexuality: Is There a Relationship?” ( Journal of Homosexuality , v. 28, 1995). As far as I know, all the information I present is still correct and relevant. I used the word “dexterity” to mean which hand is domi nant, the left or the right. It turns out this difference has much in common with sexual orientation. As I point out in the article, both left-handedness and homosexual ten dencies seem to hover around ten percent of the population, and of course there are both ambidextrous and bisexual people. Handed ness and sexuality are traits that may not be obvious to observers and may be deliber ately concealed (as left-handedness once was), as both have historically been subject

to negative social perceptions. And there are other curious parallels: for instance, women statistically seem to be both more bisexual and more ambidextrous than men. And yet, to this day there is still no real explanation for the origin of either dexterity or sexuality. While there is no obvious con nection between them—though there is evi dence that gay people are more likely to be lefthanded—as a social and scientific anal ogy it does give one pause. John Hamill, San Francisco Correc ti on In the March-April 2025 issue, in a review of Love Is a Dangerous Word: The Selected Poems of Essex Hemphill , the two co-edi tors should have been listed as John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr.

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IN MEMORIAM

Felice Picano: GayWriter, Publishing Impresario W ALTER H OLLAND

with an unforgettable personality, a fighter for himself as well as for the work of so many others. But he left New York in 1995, having lost a growing list of fellow literary intimates during the AIDS years—Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, and George Whitmore, among many others—choos ing to start a new life in Los Angeles. Ever bold and curious, and never shy, in time he became a gay cultural figure at the West Hollywood Library and in the LGBT community. Nevertheless, he sometimes returned to Manhattan like some prodigal son, falling instantly back into his old habits. And yet, he pressed on, writing another chapter, celebrating a friend’s success or advertising on their behalf, speaking at meetings to discuss future projects, or announcing with a quick laugh that he was still surprised to be alive.

E DITOR ’ S N OTE : The passing of Felice Pi cano (1944–2025) occurred as we were going to press with this issue. Walter Hol land offered to share a few personal im pressions on short notice. A longer obit is planned for the following issue. F ELICE PICANO has passed away at age 81. A friend and mentor, he was a writer and an activist who saw it all and lived it all from the early days of Gay Liberation through the infancy of the gay and lesbian literary movement to well beyond. His memoirs will be read for years to come as witty and moving accounts of adolescence, gay sexual awakening, travel, romance, gay society, and LGBT history. His style of picaresque roman-à-clef novels culminated in 1995 with Like People in History . But it was an earlier novel, The Lure (1979), that made him a bestselling author.

Graduating from Queens College in 1964, he marched against the Vietnam War in the ’60s and became a celebrant in the heady days of New York’s gay world in the ’70s, no stranger to the piers, the Meat Market, the clubs, and Fire Is land. While working at the Rizzoli Bookstore, he got to know the famous intellectuals and artists of the day, including the gay and lesbian movers and shakers—the literary stars, stage actors, Hollywood performers, et al.—some openly gay, others hiding in plain sight. Starting in the 1990s, walks with Felice in the city were al ways a guided tour of New York society, with frequent sight ings of celebs and notable writers. A participant in every book festival, OutWrite conference, A Different Light reading, New Orleans’ Saints & Sinners Festival, Felice went where the lit erary action was. He could gossip about anyone from W. H. Auden or John Cheever to Michel Foucault, Edmund White, Susan Sontag, or Anthony Perkins. You may have had qualms about his persistent braggado cio and intense self-promotion, but to know him was to know a man of infinite heart and courage, always helping his com munity. His copious output included reviews, plays, novels, articles, poems, short stories, essays, mysteries, and specula tive fiction. A member of the informal Violet Quill club and the venerable Publishing Triangle, he founded Sea Horse Press in 1977 and published dozens of gay and lesbian poets and writers over the next two decades. Whether dishing a Hollywood star, reminiscing about Christopher Street, revis ing The Joy of Gay Sex , or recalling anecdotes with his amaz ing memory, he was quintessentially a writer of life, love, and gay liberation. Walter Holland is the author of four books of poetry and a novel titled TheMarch .

Felice seemingly knew and met everyone in New York’s gay literary world back in the day. He was a powerful intellect

TheG & LR

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Publishing the latest in DUKEUNIVE

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The Trans* Ecologies Issue An issueof TSQ: Transgender St di Q t l ( ) Stu erl udies Quart ly 11 : 4 Durban and Megan Moore, issue editors ErinL.

Unaccountably Queer An issueof differences: A Journal of Feminist C lt l St di ( )

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tudies 35 : 3 way, issue editor

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Is Nothing Sacred? This column admittedly relies mostly on secondary sources for material, but every so often your roving reporter makes a shocking discovery with his own eyes and ears, as happened at the gym the other day. Earbuds are ubiq uitous at gyms these days, but a few of us still prefer to hear what’s going on in the world, including the music they pipe in. Then it happened: a song came on with the main lyric “I’m going out,” sung to the tune of the 1980 hit single “I’m Com ing Out,” which was first recorded by Diana Ross and soon be came the unofficial anthem of the LGBT rights movement. There have been other songs called “I’m Going Out,” but this new hit version (recorded by Steve Aoki, Sam Feldt, and XAN DRA ) follows the exact melody of “I’m Coming Out” and al most seems to parody its lyrics, which famously declare: “I’m coming out/ I want the world to know/ Got to let it show. ... There’s a new me coming out.” The new song describes a bad breakup, but the singer won’t let that keep her down (or at home): “So I’m going out/ I’m gonna dance along/ Till I let you go/ I’m going out/ to get you off my mind/ love myself tonight.” So instead of reaching out to the world to tell one’s truth, the singer is plotting her passive-aggressive revenge in the form of good times at the club? Times really have changed. BTW

Deconstruc ti ng People From its first day in office, this Ad ministration has been on a crusade to deny the existence of transpeople by erasing any reference to transgender issues from official government documents and historical records. The im pulse seems to be of a piece with the Nazis’ policy of eradica tion of Jews and homosexuals, culminating in their physical extermination in the camps. But what if they could have ac complished the same result with the simple stroke of a pen? Why not a bureaucratic solution that eradicates a people’s identity by wiping them off the books, as it were, much as Stalin “vaporized” his enemies by erasing any trace of them, rendering them as “unpersons”? In modern lingo we might say that a personal identity is deconstructed thereby, proof that so cial roles like male and female are cultural creations rather than eternal truths. As an ideology, social constructionism tends to be associated with lefty politics and postmodernism and Queer Theory. As a vision of the future, it’s a hopeful one if indeed we live in a world where the arc of history bends toward justice. But what if we do not? Everything Must Go! Speaking of bureaucracy, which sociol ogist Max Weber understood so well, the propensity to apply uniform standards across the board is bound to produce catch 22’s and other absurdities. In its frenzy to purge any reference to transgender issues and a broad range of “gay” topics, the regime seems to have gone after it with a pretty crude knife, searching for individual words à la Google 1.0. Thus, for ex ample, they became a laughingstock when it was noticed that

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suddenly references to the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, were disappearing from De partment of Defense websites (along with photos of the bomber itself)! Anyone named “Gay” was also fair game, and biolo gists reported that information about certain fish had been ex punged due to references to gender. The complete list of bad words has not been released, but apparently anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is on the hit list. The DOD alone is reported to have earmarked 26,000 historical im ages and online posts for deletion, but that number could go much higher. Soon enough, the Algorithm will discover that the U.S. Constitution contains all kinds of suspiciously DEI sounding words, and off it will go. Reality Bites Back Flying in the face of these attempts at erasure comes a large study of 14,000 Americans with the finding that almost ten percent now identify as LGBTQ +, a record high. The Gallup survey was first conducted in 2012, when that total was just 3.5 percent, and it has been rising steadily by the year—to 9.3 percent in 2024. The best news is that the proportions vary greatly by age cohort, with Gen Z adults—born from 1997 to 2006—coming in at over twenty percent LGBTQ +, compared to the Silent Generation (born before 1946) at under two percent. Back to the overall survey, the fact that the “straight” slice is down to 86 percent is another way to look at it. And lest there be any doubt that this has “political” implications, the party affili ations of “the ten percent” vary greatly, with LGBTQ + respon dents accounting for fourteen percent of all Democrats, eleven

percent of Independents, and just three percent of Republicans. Of course, it may be that Republicans are more reluctant to come out on a survey, but clearly there’s a lot of self-sorting as people gravitate to the party perceived as better reflecting their inter ests. That being the case, the growing proportion of adults who identify as LGBT can only be good news for those hoping for a democratic resolution to the current crisis. Vo ti ng with One’s Feet Self-sorting by party is what voter pref erence is all about, but a more recent trend adds a geographic di mension to the shuffle. We’ve known for decades that LGBT people tend to be disproportionately concentrated in large cities, and the reason is simple: they moved there from small towns and suburbs to enjoy the benefits of urban life. But now LGBT people are moving from “red ” to “blue” states expressly to flee the draconian anti-gay laws in the former in search of a more tolerant environment. A study published by the Trevor Project and the Movement Advancement Project focused on young adults (under age 24) and estimates that some 266,000 have re located to a more inclusive state for this reason. Transgender and nonbinary youths were especially likely to have moved, with many more saying that they’ve considered doing so. In deed a similar trend has been observed for other groups as peo ple on the move increasingly choose their state of residence according to its “redness” or “blueness.” It has been said that America’s “cultural civil war” could never become an actual civil war because there are no geographic divisions analogous to the North and South. But never say never.

May–June 2025

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INTERVIEW

John R. Killacky interviews the curator of The First Homosexuals

‘It will be seen as a political exhibition.’

J ONATHAN D. KATZ is a pioneering curator and his torian of queer æsthetics and scholarship. Currently a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he has taught at Yale University, Smith College, and City Col lege of San Francisco, among others. He was the founding president of New York’s Leslie-Lohman Mu seum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Katz has mounted queer-themed exhibitions in Europe, South America, and the U.S. In 2010, his groundbreaking exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture opened at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, featuring paintings, drawings, photography, in stallations, and media images of lesbian and gay identities in the 20th century. It was a first for a national American museum. Last July, I reviewed in these pages Katz’catalogue for About

J ONATHAN D. K ATZ

we had three or four checklists. If we got rejected for a loan, we went down the list and got another work. Sometimes we got our first choices, sometimes we got our fourth or fifth choices. Even tually we were able to have a good indicator of what the early homosexual looked like. We have some holes. We ran into a lot of problems with India, former Soviet states, and of course with Russia itself. The exhibition came out of a desire to do something that had n’t been done before. I want to mention my assistant curator, Johnny Willis. They are nonbinary and have been absolutely es sential in managing the exhibition and also in helping to frame the dynamic of the relationship between queer and trans identities. JRK: Will the exhibition tour? JDK: We are in current negotiations with two institutions in Eu rope. It is telling that no other institution in the U.S. is doing it. I want to underscore that sponsorship for the exhibition extended to these other museums; they would have had it for free. Lest we think we are beyond the politics here, we’re not. JRK: The catalogue essays are revelatory and erudite: 22 schol ars contextualizing works from Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Americas. The articles are a primer in international queer and gender studies. How did you put this team together? JDK: I started researching who were the best people in different areas, and I think we got most of them. One of the things that was absolutely critical was making sure we had people who were re ally developed scholars in each of these geographic areas, and they needed to write in English. JRK: In the catalogue, I particularly loved the last section of the exhibition, Beyond the Binary . Can you talk about this? JDK: We felt it was really important at the moment that we were reinforcing the idea of homosexuality to underscore that it was never only about same-sex desire. We wanted to make clear that in many respects, trans and queer have always been with us. You can’t talk about same-sex desire without interrogating what sex you are talking about. JRK: In 2022, you curated an earlier iteration of The First Ho mosexuals at Wrightwood 659 featuring 125 works by forty artists. Why did you decide to expand the exhibition? JDK: What happened was Covid. Many museums all over the world went into loan moratorium, not only in the peak Covid pe riod, but for another year. So, we literally couldn’t do the exhi bition that we had planned. We had already had some loan letters go out, so we thought, what the hell, now we have an opportunity to test-market the theme.

Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art , an exhibition at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 fea turing over 350 artworks by 38 international LGBT artists. Katz has a long history with Wright wood, a contemporary museum designed by Pritzker Prize-win ning architect Tadao Ando. His latest collaboration with Wright wood, his most ambitious to date, is a show titled The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939 . Itwas in 1869 that the term “homosex

Jonathan D. Katz

ual” was first coined. The exhibition examines how this new con cept impacted societal perceptions and artistic representations in the ensuing decades. It also explores the lives of these artists whose works have been overlooked or “straightwashed” by art critics and curators to date. I spoke with Katz via Zoom about his latest exhibition and past projects. — John R. Killacky John R. Killacky: The scope of your exhibition is exhilarating: 300 works by over 125 LGBT artists from forty countries on loan from over a hundred museums and collections. How long did you work on this, and how did you ever convince so many institu tions to loan work? Jonathan D. Katz: Almost seven years. In many respects, this is only the tip of the iceberg. When putting together the exhibition John R. Killacky, a longtime contributor to TheG&LR , is the author of Because Art: Commentary, critique, and conversation.

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JRK: In your work in museums and academia, you challenge the prevailing tendency to erase queerness as part of an artist’s identity, particularly those from the 19th and 20th centuries. Your work makes this case persuasively, yet museums still resist. Why is that? JDK: I think it goes all the way back to the 1980s and the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition The Perfect Moment , when the combi nation of queerness and museums proved to be a third rail. In the museum world, innovation is in short supply, and yet they are very worried about what will be perceived as political. What they fail to see is that by not addressing questions of gender and sex uality, they are being equally political. And they are not wrong; ours will be perceived as a political exhibition. Our enemies use this in their fundraising. But this does not excuse the cowardice of institutions. And let’s be clear that in this country, private money controls most public museums. And that money skews right. I am a longtime stalwart in this field and can tell you it hasn’t changed very much in the thirty years that I have been doing this. JRK: In 2010, the director of the Smithsonian pulled a David Wojnarowicz video, A Fire in My Belly, from your exhibition Hide/Seek . What happened? JDK: This was a kind of classic bureaucratic stupidity. The di rector of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and the cu ratorial team had worked out every kind of possibility of what would happen and had an ascending series of moves that we had calculated in advance. We had all these plans. Then the head of the Smithsonian panicked because they threatened to cut the budget by $60 million or something like that. He summarily ig nored our plans and snatched defeat for the institution out of the jaws of victory. JRK: For those who don’t know, the video shows a crucifix on the ground with ants crawling over it to the music of Diamanda Galás. JDK: The funny thing about that image, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to use it because it was so damn Catholic. It was the most religious work in the entire exhibition. JRK: You’ve been doing a lot of lecturing in France and Ger many. Why is that? JDK: Germany is a fertile ground for us. There are lots of con ferences on sexuality. I am working on several exhibitions that will be happening in a couple of years there. In France we contributed to an exhibition on the work of Gus tave Caillebotte, an early French Impressionist who was the sub ject of a one-person show at the Musée d’Orsay called Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men . Seventy percent of the work features male subjects, and many of the subjects are nude or partially so. My husband André Dombrowski and I wrote a chapter in the exhibition catalog about it that got picked up in French newspa pers as an example of the colonization of the French Academy by American identity politics. In response, the d’Orsay did some thing wonderful and hosted a symposium to bring out all the scholarship. Unfortunately, none of the people who attacked us came to the symposium. JRK: What other shows are you working on? JDK: There will be an exhibition also at Wrightwood in the

spring of 2026, Dispossession in the Americas, featuring con temporary Latin American work including a lot of work by queer and trans artists. JRK: I know you are planning a book on Jasper Johns... JDK: I have three books in advance of that. The books before are the catalogue for the current exhibition and then books on two queer artists: photographer Arthur Tress and land artist Jim McGee, not to mention the catalog for the Dispossession in the Americas exhibition. JRK: Getting back to Jasper Johns, he and all his contemporaries were never out. They were not necessarily closeted, but the press remained completely silent about their queerness. JDK: I always loved his work. I think he’s one of the greatest artists of our time. I am also looking to underscore the degree to which many of the most celebrated American paintings by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly not only have queerness at their center but also are coy missives sent back and forth to each other referencing each other’s painting, each other’s personalities. Essentially there is a gay love story at the very epi center of postwar American art. One of the things that makes this particularly charged is that the generation that proceeded these artists were the Abstract Ex pressionists, who were completely heterosexual. This next gen eration of Johns, Rauschenberg, Twombly, Cage, Cunningham, and Warhol were queer. So, obviously sexuality had something to dowith it.

May–June 2025

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ESSAY In the Beginning Was the Word D OUGLAS P RETSELL

S AME-SEX ATTRACTION is evident throughout history, but the way we live now—the identities, sensibilities, and cultural accretions that make up the modern homosexual—has a much shorter his tory. The terminology and parameters of a modern sexual orientation were first articulated in the 1860s. The notion of a fixed and innate sexual identity that was centered around sexual object choice drew on the ideas and ac tivism of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the place we know as Ger many. It was also there that the term “homosexual” was coined by Karl Maria Kertbeny. This article will outline the events and ideas that coalesced in Germany over the concluding decades of the 19th century to give us the modern homosexual. Germany as a sovereign nation did not yet exist in the 1860s. Instead, a patchwork of principalities, kingdoms, bishoprics, and free cities—the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire—was held together in a loose confederation dominated by the regional

personality. Ulrichs described the urning identity as fixed, in nate, and natural. If you were born an urning, you would be that way for life, whether or not you ever practiced any sexual act. Ulrichs crafted the urning identity as part of his argument for tolerance and reform, but it would also transform the way his readers saw themselves. Soon after publishing, Ulrichs received a letter from a Hun garian German journalist, Karl Maria Kertbeny. Born in Vienna and brought up in Pest, Kertbeny had spent short periods as a book seller, an Austrian soldier and spy, a literary publisher, and a wine importer before settling on a career as a literary- and celebrity-focused freelance journalist. Kertbeny’s work meant that he could live where he wanted, and he used the opportunity to move from city to city with stays of only a few months in each. When he wrote to Ulrichs, he was living and writing from Brussels. Kertbeny referenced Ulrichs’ pamphlets in his own writing and included a clipping of the article in his letter. Ulrichs gleefully reported on it, his first citation, in his next pamphlet. Ulrichs’ readers wrote to him by the

powers Prussia and Austria. Each state had its own legal system. Some had harsh penalties for sodomy, while others had re formed their legal systems to remove the anti-sodomy law. In a climate of conser vative prejudice and inconsistent legal jeopardy, a brisk trade in blackmail made life intolerable for some unlucky same sex-attracted men. In his hometown of Burgdorf in the Kingdom of Hanover, former judge and freelance journalist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was poised to challenge the prejudice against same-sex sexuality. Discovery of his sexual assignations with soldiers had already deprived him of his career as a judge, and by the early 1860s he had de cided to do something about it. Using the pseudonym Numa Numantius , he pub

hundreds. This positive response led him to write and publish three more pamphlets in 1865 where he used the responses he had received to give greater insight and nuance to the urning identity. For exam ple, he acknowledged the existence of in dividuals attracted to both sexes, whom hecalled Uranodioning (bisexual), and he recognized that there was a spectrum of gendered types of urning from the effem inate Weibling through the masculine Mannling . Ulrichs also reproduced some of the correspondence, and these letters reveal that already there were German speaking same-sex-attracted men who were calling themselves “urning” and

Portrait photo of Karl Maria Kertbeny, ca. 1865.

lished two pamphlets in 1864. Prior to Ulrichs’ writings, sexu ality was thought of and described entirely in terms of sexual acts, and there were no words that accurately described indi viduals attracted to their own sex. Ulrichs addressed that by in troducing his own neologisms: “urning” for same-sex-attracted men and “dioning” for men attracted to the opposite sex. The urning identity centered on the orientation of desire (men’s de sire for other men). Ulrichs proposed the urning as a third gen der, positioned between men and women. The urning’s feminine desire for men was accompanied by a characteristic effeminate Douglas Pretsell, a historian at Keele University in the UK, is the au thorof Urning: Queer Identity in the German Nineteenth Century (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2024).

adopting Ulrichs’ formulation as a personal sexual identity. Between 1864 and late 1866, Kertbeny and Ulrichs had a sustained correspondence, which has mostly not survived. It is likely that they used the opportunity to discuss sexuality and activism. Kertbeny was a sexually active same-sex-attracted man but kept that side of his life closely under wraps. Ulrichs may have been one of the few people that he confided in. The epistolary friendship between the two men may have been be hind Kertbeny’s decision in 1866 to leave Brussels and move to Hanover. Unfortunately, he could not have chosen a worse time to do so. Simmering tensions between Prussia and Austria erupted into war in June, and Prussia invaded and annexed Hanover. Kertbeny suddenly found himself mired in geopoliti cal jeopardy, a former Austrian spy traveling with a falsified

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