‘The First Homosexuals’ at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago

The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939, a major international loan exhibition which has been six years in the making, will be presented by Alphawood Exhibitions at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, from Friday, May 2, to Saturday, July 26, 2025.

The exhibition features more than 300 paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, photographs, and films, many presented for the first time within the context of global queer and colonial inquiry. These range from well-known masterpieces to unexpected works by little-known or anonymous artists. Drawn from over 100 museums and private collections around the world, the exhibition takes as its starting point the year 1869—when the term “homosexual” is first coined and proceeds through the subsequent seven decades, amplified by a selection of earlier art, as context.

An international team of 22 scholars led by art historian and curator Jonathan D. Katz and associate curator Johnny Willis organized The First Homosexuals project. Katz is Professor of Practice in the History of Art and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a founding figure in Queer Studies in Art History. Willis is Curatorial Fellow at Wrightwood 659.

“Alphawood has been committed to this project since its very conception. We are proud to have supported it at the scale it required through more than six years of global research, and are even more proud to support it now amidst a global wave of anti-LGBTQ actions,” Chirag G. Badlani, Executive Director, Alphawood Foundation, said. “A little over two years ago, in the midst of the global pandemic, Wrightwood 659 offered a taste of The First Homosexuals’ approach and scope in a small presentation of the same name. The upcoming showing is the long-awaited and full version of The First Homosexuals and comes at a pivotal time.”

According to Professor Katz, “Before the coinage of the word ‘homosexual,’ same-sex desire marked something you did, not necessarily who you were. The First Homosexuals examines how, after this watershed moment, for the first time homosexuals were cleaved from the rest of the population and given an identity which turned on their sexuality.”

Featured Artists   

One hundred and twenty-five artists are represented in The First Homosexuals including such well-known artists as George Bellows, Rosa Bonheur,, Jean Cocteau, Honoré Daumier, Beauford Delaney, Marsden Hartley, Gustave Moreau, John Singer Sargent, Egon Schiele, and Henri de Toulouse-Laurec.

Museum Lenders

Among the international museums which contributed to the exhibition are: Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tate, London; The Courtauld Institute of Art, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London; among others.