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For Jonathan David Katz, the Story of American Art Is a Queer One

Institutional change is important, the scholar and curator tells Observer, because without acknowledging or understanding queerness, we'll never understand much of our art.

In 1995, art historian and critic Jonathan David Katz was commissioned by the Village Voice to attend a lecture by Robert Rauschenberg at the Guggenheim; he showed up early to get a front-row seat. But Katz had written on the homosexual relationship between Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and the Guggenheim did not want there to be any public discussion of that topic. “The head curator, whom I knew, identified me to security and threw me out,” Katz told Observer. “I was often in those days tossed out of things,” he added, laughing.

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Katz today at 68 has a winning smile, stylish glasses and a shock of white hair; sitting in his office with bookshelves behind him, he doesn’t look like a dangerous threat to the art establishment. But his pioneering scholarly work on the history and ongoing relevance of homosexuality in art led to repeated efforts to censor him. That has extended to this day, as gallery after gallery has resisted hosting traveling versions of his stunning exhibition “The First Homosexuals,” which showed the formation of homosexual identity in visual art from prehistory to the 1930s spread across three floors of Wrightwood 659 in Chicago.

Born in 1958, Katz cut his teeth on street activism; he jokes that his arrest record was longer than his publication record until he was 40. As to why he made the move to scholarship, “I felt like one of the most powerful but uncredited bases of cultural norms was academia,” he says. “And it had not yet allowed for the existence of queer people. And homophobia was rife.”

That........

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