Gabriel Morcillo, “Slaves,” 1926, Oil on canvas, 174 x 135 cm, Casa Ajsaris Collection, Granada, Spain
One room over, I could hear my sisters (the lot of us crowded in our too-small travel lodgings) fighting and laughing over a single bathroom mirror, routinely removing the invasion of overnight chin hair. I sat waiting for a callback from the trailblazing queer art historian, Jonathan D. Katz, delayed longer than the two minutes he frantically promised over text from his grocery store checkout. No bother, we both ran according to the same queer clock. My phone trilled. On the line, I could hear the soft babbles and cries as the curator of “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” opening May 2 at Wrightwood 659, comforted his young child. Fear and isolation at the edge of our consciousness—our community is already here: built between the toothpaste we share, in cradles under spinning mobiles, across miles of fiber-optic cables.
Congratulations on this exhibition, it seems like a homecoming for you.
Thank you, it is! I was very much involved in Chicago in the gay and lesbian civil rights movement and the founding of the Gay Living Town Meeting, which was the organization that pioneered equal rights in Chicago. During the Reagan era at the University of Chicago, I declared my thesis topic to be the relationship between two artists, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, but I was told by the chair of the department that if I continued to pursue this topic, my fellowship would be rescinded. Unwilling to be silenced by a university known for free speech, I said fuck off and left Chicago.
To this day, there’s an unfortunate legacy of these institutions silencing marginalized voices.
At my first teaching post in San Francisco, I came to realize that our minoritizing sense of self—when we march under our own banner—was being horrifically used by the Christian right during the plague to allow us to die out. The very fact that we said we are a separate people had turned on us and, under AIDS, allowed a dominant culture to say, “Great. You’re all killing yourselves. That’s good. Go away.” I sought to refute the idea that there is a kind of essential identity and instead make the argument that what queerness is is a refusal to endorse the ideas of heteronormativity or superiority. That it doesn’t necessarily reflect your sexual practice, it reflects your ideology.
Tomioka Eisen, kuchi-e (frontispiece) with artist’s seal Shisen, c. 1906, Woodblock print, 23.2 x 31.6 cm, Tirey-van Lohuizen Collection
I’m curious why you chose to use the phrase “First Homosexuals” when there is more gender-inclusive language.
One of the things that show exposed from the very beginning is that queer and trans have been joined at the hip forever. The very first definition of sort of a separate sexuality was by [Karl Heinrich] Ulrichs, who said that same-sex-inclined people were a third sex, neither fully male nor fully female. On the other hand, you had [Karl Maria] Kertbeny saying it’s not a question of gender but one of behavior.
Fights we still have to this day!
“Homosexuals” here means the first people who were either deemed by others or deemed themselves to be a minority sexuality, which only happened in 1869. Before this, people had straight sex, they had not-straight sex, but they didn’t think of themselves accordingly, there wasn’t the idea of a binary between queer and straight. Transness has been hardwired right into the very definition from homosexuality’s emergence.
Modern heteronormativity is a very Western concept so how do you incorporate a global perspective?
We felt it imperative to do a global show in part because of how the prevalence of the European term “homosexual” can be attributed to colonialism. We wanted to show that conquest carried this foreign concept across the world and, in some ways, in many countries erased indigenous forms of sexuality that were far more progressive than the West at the time with a great irony that some of the countries that today are the most homophobic were once countries of incredible openness.
George Catlin, “Dance to the Berdash,” 1835-1837, Oil on canvas, 49.6 x 70 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison,Jr., 1985.66.442
This makes me think of indigenous identities such as Two-Spirit. How do you hold space for these pre-colonial identities?
Many identities were paved over by the Western model. For example, we borrowed George Catlin’s “Dance to the Berdashe” from the Smithsonian, probably the first queer image made in America. We also look at Southeast Asia, where, for example, in Thailand, Burma and other countries, the notion of gender as distinction was inoperative. Men and women had the same haircuts or the same clothes.
So what makes queer art?
I think that what makes queer art is always situational and social-historical, but in many respects, constituted in opposition to dominant culture and some of its blind spots and exclusions. And those will change. It’s an ever-expanding notion. It’s not about setting limits. It’s about opening up new horizons.
Do you worry about inscribing a modernist point of view into the archive?
What we haven’t had is an art history that was attentive to queer representations. That’s what I’m trying to change. We have an archive that already exists in dusty institutions and on the walls of major museums of the world, we just need to reveal it for what it’s been all along.
For example, Eugene Janssen, a homosexual painter from Sweden. painted the forest around the naval barracks in Stockholm. It looks like just any old landscape, but it was in fact, a forest that men would cruise in to pick up naval cadets. It’s this completely queer scene that, of course, doesn’t look like a queer scene at first glance. I’m trying to work on rewriting the labels so they will eventually say, “this was the forest where people like Janssen met potential sexual partners.”
Alice Austen, “The Darned Club, 1891,” Original glass plate negative, 4 x 5 in, Collection of Historic Richmond Town
It’s as if queer art always existed but now you are queering art history.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. People who took risks that you and I can’t imagine, but who did it anyway. This show has taught me how many unsung heroes there are in our history, like a woman, out of Buenos Aires but born in Spain, who went by the name of La Bella Otero. She walked the streets as a woman and was constantly harassed by the police who, in prison, forced her to strip, revealing her genitals. When she was interviewed by this sensible expert on gender and sexuality, instead of agreeing with his incredibly narrow and, needless to say, prejudicial views on this matter, she completely disagrees and says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have a pussy behind all this stuff.” And this is 1901.
One-hundred-and-twenty years later, my friends and I pull the same gag. It’s still resistance.
Unfortunately, resistance works both ways. I feel resistance from museums, both in terms of a refusal to lend to a show called “The First Homosexuals” or a refusal to take an exhibition like “The First Homosexuals.” We offered this show to almost every major museum around the country, and nobody bit. And we’ve offered it to them for free. We even offered to subsidize it if they took it, and nobody took it.
What a tragedy to hear institutions still won’t stand behind a queer platform.
I think it’s also fair to say that, especially in a climate like the one we’re now finding ourselves in, it’s imperative to stand up and speak out, to create a space institutionally, which Wrightwood 659 is trying to do, of dissidents. Where like-minded people can find themselves reflected back, because there are so many hostilities we face now. This country is slipping into fascism, and there need to be dissidents. There needs to be resistance. I hope my exhibition can help to catalyze some of those dissidents. I think that in many respects, to move forward, we have to move back. We have to see how sexuality has always existed throughout history. The truth of history is that history changes. And so sexuality has changed its face numerous times. But what hasn’t changed is a desire for freedom, and that’s what this exhibition, in part, wants to reinforce, especially in this moment. It ends, for example, with the most horrific event, the destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sex Research in Berlin by the Nazis and the famous burning of its library. Because we want a direct and deliberate parallel to today. Because let’s face it, if Trump had the power, he would destroy places like ours.
Keep at it.
I can promise that all my work from now until the day I step into my grave is going to be a kind of resistance to oppression and discrimination. This is not my first rodeo. I was making exhibitions during the Reagan administration. It’s tiring, but I know how to put my shoulder to the wheel.
“The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” on view at Wrightwood 659, 659 West Wrightwood, May 2-July 26, wrightwood659.org.
