Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, La Blanchisseuse (The Laundress), 1879; graphite, ink and ink wash on paper. Private collection, California. Courtesy of Schiller & Bodo European Paintings

“The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” an exhibit at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, is enormous and overwhelming, very much in contrast to the museum, which, nestled on a residential street, looks modest and unassuming. Inside, though, it is spacious with three full exhibition floors positively crammed with paintings, sculpture, photographs, prints and a novel’s worth of explanatory text chronicling the development of, regimentation of and gaps within homosexual, lesbian and queer identities. The show is stunning, energizing and exhausting.

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That was the intent, according to Johnny Willis, associate curator of the exhibit along with Jonathan David Katz. “It’s what we were going for: an overwhelming experience,” Willis told Observer. The curators wanted visitors to be “overwhelmed with the sheer scale of the contributions of queer and trans artists, and also how that’s been overlooked in art history and in museums.”

Searching outside the Western canon widens the scope of that contribution considerably. Europe in the 19th Century, which is when the terminology of “homosexuality” developed, was in most respects more homophobic and more censorious than other cultures, and the exhibit provides images demonstrating the range and diversity of gender and sexual identity and practice across the world.

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