GLR May-June 2025

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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