The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869-1939 is a major international loan exhibition of over 350 works that illustrates how the invention of the concept “homosexual” forever changed world culture. In this talk, Katz addresses some of the most important works in that exhibition, as well as recent discoveries that turned up in the research process. We’ll see that as language became restricted to the two opposing sexualities of homo and hetero, art picked up the slack and offered a vastly more expansive vision of sexuality for which there was often as yet no language. The exhibition further consider how the imposition of a European taxonomy of sexuality—following the trajectory of other lines of colonial domination—rewrote indigenous sexual acceptance with the end result that some of the cultures that were once most accepting of sexual and gender differences, are now among the most homo and transphobic.
Jonathan D. Katz is an art historian, curator and queer activist. Professor of Practice in Art History and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Katz is a pioneering figure in the development of queer art history, and author of a number of books and articles, often writing the first queer accounts of numerous artists. He has curated many exhibitions, including the first major museum queer exhibition in the US at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which won multiple awards. The first full-time American academic to be tenured Queer Studies, Katz also founded Yale University’s queer studies program, the first in the Ivy League. An activist academic, he also founded the Queer Caucus for Art, co-founded Queer Nation and the GLBT Town Meeting, which won queer anti-discrimination statutes in Chicago. Katz is President Emeritus of the world’s only queer art museum, New York’s Leslie Lohman Museum of Queer Art and curated the exhibition of The First Homosexuals, which opened in Chicago last summer and will open in Basel in March.
