The First Homosexuals

Before homosexuality had even been given a name, homoerotic depictions found their way into art. In the early modern era, however, from around 1500 until around 1800, negative attitudes toward same-sex love prevailed in Europe. That is why the representation of same-sex desire was in many ways shaped by neoclassicism, a movement in the late eighteenth century that embraced Greco-Roman antiquity and its body ideals. Under the cover of ancient mythology, artists were able to explore homoerotic motifs without having to name them explicitly.

Outside Europe, homosexuality was socially accepted in many places. In Japan, erotic images called shunga (spring pictures) entered wide currency in the seventeenth century; many featured both homosexual and heterosexual love scenes, sometimes even on the same sheet. This openness ended with the Meiji Restoration in 1868: profound political changes and the pursuit of imperial power went hand in hand with the growing suppression of depictions of homosexual relationships. Like Japan before the Meiji period, Lima, the capital of Peru, had a reputation for uncommon tolerance in the nineteenth century. Especially after independence from Spain in 1826, gender and sexual diversity was lived more openly.

As the idea of homosexuality became established in society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new identity took shape. Homosexuality was no longer understood as merely a sexual act or private preference. At the same time, it became discernible in the works of artists; consider what is perhaps the earliest European depiction of a male couple in the drawing La Blanchisseuse (The Laundress, 1879) by French painter Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929).

Works from the late nineteenth century often revealed same-sex desire only to the more attentive eye—through details such as gazes, gestures, clothes, or postures. These compositions operated with allusions and required careful study and familiarity with visual references, as in the queer Danish artist Emilie Mundt’s (1842–1922) Malerinde og Barn i Atelieret (Painter and Child in the Studio, 1893), a portrait of her partner and adopted daughter.

In the early twentieth century, by contrast, queer self-expression could already be quite explicit. The American-French painter Romaine Brooks’ (1874–1970) Portrait of the Marchesa Casati (1920), a bold portrait of her naked, blue-blooded Italian lover, exemplifies this new self-assurance.

Around 1900, the depiction of male bodies in homoerotic art undergoes a transformation. Until the end of the nineteenth century, bodies have been shown as slim, androgynous, and youthful, but at the dawn of the twentieth century, the body shapes being rendered are increasingly muscular and emphatically masculine.

It was a time when European body ideals were changing. Various movements promoted the health and strength of the male body, whether in service to the nation, to increase performance in early capitalism, or to build strength in the class struggle. While political movements focused on a natural athletic body, homoerotic works foregrounded the artificial quality of muscular men, reflecting a changing conception of homosexuality.

Homosexuality was understood at the time not as a sexual orientation but as a “third gender.” The prevailing theory was that homosexuals were born in the body of one sex but with the “soul” of the other. Since adolescents combined physical aspects of both sexes, homosexuals were thought to be naturally androgynous and youthful in appearance. As the term “homosexual” increasingly came to be used to define same-sex relationships, normative gender identity in the molds of masculinity and femininity took on added importance. This also changed the visual representation of male bodies, which became more mature and more distinctly masculine.

No concurrent shift is unambiguously evident in female artists’ depictions of women’s bodies: there is no discernible trend toward more feminine body shapes. Rather, these artists, too, show a growing interest in muscular bodies.

While the definition of homosexuality was still being debated, artists employed specific codes to make same-sex desire visible. Many drew on established traditions in visual art: motifs from mythology, religion, and the canon of art history opened up ranges of interpretation in which homoerotic themes could be negotiated.

The German painter Ludwig von Hofmann’s (1861–1945) painting Nackte Fischer und Knaben am grünen Gestade (Naked Fishermen and Boys on the Green Shore, ca. 1900), for instance, reprises the motif of the bathers, which has been popular since antiquity. The homoerotic desire of the work remains implicit: there is no straightforward eroticism or physical contact. Around thirty years later, the Swiss painter and architect Paul Camenisch’s (1893–1970) painting Badende in der Breggia-Schlucht (Bathers in the Breggia Gorge, 1927) is more frank about the motif’s homosexual connotations.

As for female homosexuality, the term “friends” appears in the titles of works with striking frequency. The term “romantic friendship” was in currency as early as the eighteenth century; the nineteenth century sometimes also spoke of “sentimental friends.” Works from the early twentieth century reveal that the concept of friendship had a twofold function at the time: it served both as a cover for and as a clue to homosexuality. The sometimes explicitly erotic depictions of so-called friends demonstrate that the intimate nature of such relationships was by no means always a secret.

Around forty years after the term “homosexual” was coined, the first specific designations were proposed for trans people—individuals whose gender identities did not match the sex assigned to them at birth. During this period, new ways of naming and understanding identity emerged. Sexuality and gender were increasingly thought of as separate dimensions.

This shift toward a diversity of genders came to an abrupt halt in the 1930s. Nazi rule in Germany and the Second World War had a profound impact on queer people in general and more particularly on many of the artists whose work is featured in the exhibition.

The pioneering Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) founded by physician and researcher Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) in Berlin was destroyed in 1933. Toyen (1902–1980), a member of the Czech and French surrealist movements, was forced to go underground during the occupation of Prague, while Estonian artist Karl Pärsimägi (1902–1942) was murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp. The French artist couple Claude Cahun (1894–1954) and Marcel Moore (1892–1972) were active in the resistance on the occupied British island of Jersey.

Beginning in the fifteenth century, European nations’ colonial expansion imposed their ideas of value and legal conceptions in regions such as North and South America. In places where same-sex desire and diverse understandings of gender had long been an integral part of local cultures, the colonialists now deliberately encouraged hostility toward them. For a haunting illustration, consider Theodor de Bry’s (1528–1598) depiction of the Spaniard Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s (1475–1519) massacre of members of a “third sex” in Panama around 1513.

A rejection of homosexuality was also harnessed for political purposes: The Ottoman Empire was depicted as weak and decadent in the nineteenth century because it condoned the ancient practice of pederasty, or men having sex with male youths. Such representations served to justify colonial claims by Europeans to power over areas where the decline of Ottoman rule was recognizably imminent. Meanwhile, some Western artists also disseminated a homoerotic Orientalism and catered to the erotic fantasies of European audiences.

Numerous artists rejected such colonial instrumentalization and outlined counter-images. The Mexican painter Saturnino Herrán (1887–1918) emphasized that same-sex desire was a part of precolonial Aztec culture. The photographer Lionel Wendt (1900–1944) showed the male body in his native Sri Lanka between the poles of colonial modernity and local tradition. And Harlem, New York, was the birthplace of a thriving Black cultural scene, the Harlem Renaissance. The movement, many of whose leading exponents were queer, forged a new African American self-conception and a distinctive aesthetic that defied the dominant settler colonialism and racism in the United States.