A new art exhibition in Chicago uses more than 300 works of art to trace the historical origins of the word “homosexual,” mapping how it’s shaped our modern perception of queer identity. According to its lead curator, museums around the world have refused to show the exhibition—even when it’s offered to them for free.

The exhibition, titled The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939, is currently on view at the Wrightwood 659 museum in Chicago through July 26. It’s the first time that the exhibition—a passion project of over eight years for lead curator Jonathan D. Katz—has been shown in its entirety.

Through sculptures, paintings, prints, and other media from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it explores early, oft-overlooked expressions of queer culture. Further, it examines how the coining of the term “homosexual” created a binary understanding of sexuality that we’re still grappling with today.

The First Homosexuals sold more advance tickets than any other show since the Wrightwood 659 opened in 2018. But Katz says that after pitching the exhibition to many other museums, he’s been faced with one rejection after another. 

Katz, who is a professor of queer art history at the University of Pennsylvania, began his career in queer studies during the Reagan administration.

“When I started, my field was just being born,” Katz wrote in a biography for Northwestern University, where he received his PhD. “Reagan was in office, AIDS was being instrumentalized by the Right to justify the most odious forms of discrimination, and I had been kicked out of the University of Chicago (among other universities) for pursuing the relationship between art and sexuality.”

In the decades since, Katz has gone on to teach queer studies at several different universities, including Yale, and cocurated a queer exhibition called Hide/Seek Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Katz’s new exhibition is inspired by a question that’s followed him throughout his years of research. 

“The minute you go outside of Europe and its colonies, questions of sexual difference assume a completely different meaning—which is to say that, very often, there’s absolutely no issue associated with same-sex sexuality, and it’s often understood as part of a........

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