GLR May-June 2025

ESSAY Reclaiming Canadian Lesbian Art J OHNNY W ILLIS

“W HEN IT COMES to les bians, many people have trouble seeing what’s in front of them,” in the words of lesbian literary scholar Terry Castle. This statement rings especially true for historians, who infamously tend to gloss over already marginal lesbian relationships, reifying the Victo rian belief in “proper” women’s asexuality. That belief had dis astrous consequences for pre-Stonewall lesbian art history—a field which, in many contexts, remains in the stage of first-gen eration scholarship. As a graduate student in Canada, I served as associate cura tor of The First Homosexuals with Jonathan D. Katz. I thus em barked on a quest to discover Canada’s “first homosexual” artists, only to find a glaring absence of research on this topic. I was troubled to learn that little to nothing had been written on queer art history in Canada before Stonewall—especially for such an ostensibly progressive country and academy. Conversations with scholars turned up a handful of leads. It soon became evident that prevailing historical methodologies were to blame. The writers of early Cana dian art histories tended to advance a genital-centric logic of lesbian identification, which is to say, they demanded explicit evidence of sexual activity between two women in order to qualify them as lovers or lesbians—a standard that is not equally applied for heterosexual couples. This logic neglects the reality of lesbian existence. As the pi oneering Canadian historian Cameron Duder explains: “Lesbian relationships existed in a context of silence and fear and were balanced against the need for familial con nection, financial security, maintenance of respectability, and physical safety. ... Their relationships were hidden from many but were there to be seen by those who knew when and how to see and hear.” Most art historians had failed to consider this context of silence and fear, and thus the strategies that Canadian women employed to subvert the dominant pathologizing discourse around lesbianism. Indeed, lesbianism was widely conceived of as both a congenital and a contagious illness in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as fa mously expounded by the English sexologist Havelock Ellis in his study Sexual Inversion (firrst volume, 1897). Ellis posited that sexual deviants embodied a male soul in a female body, or vice versa, identifying gender trans gression as the defining characteristic of lesbianism. Johnny Willis, a nonbinary art historian, began working on The First Homosexuals as a curatorial assistant and is now serving as curatorial fellow at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago.

Thus, according to predominant late-19th-century sexology, les bians were but perverse men stuck in women’s bodies. It should thus come as no surprise that most women chose not to name their sexualities. Not naming was to expressly evade the pathological baggage of a name, and hence of an iden tity category. As early modern scholar Harriette Andreadis has pointed out: “The effect of naming—and the more public the naming the more profound the effect—was to bring to the con sciousness of individuals the connections between their behav iors and named transgressions. In this way to name may be to inhibit and constrain.” My point is that “an erotics of unnam ing,” to use Andreadis’ term, was a strategy that was success fully employed by Canadian lesbian artists around the turn of the century. Artists had access to a privileged medium of ex pression, one that could eschew linguistic and thus punitive and disciplinary dogma. That their identities were unspoken, how ever, does not mean these artists did not lead complex and rich psychic lives, and they certainly expressed their identifications

Fig. 1: Florence Carlyle. The Threshold , 1912.

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