Take a look at how The First Homosexuals were represented in art

Pioneering figures, rarely seen ephemera, in depth essays, and a teapot in the shape of Oscar Wilde - our new book is a revelation.

You may not be aware, but the word 'homosexual' was first used by the Austrian-born Hungarian journalist, translator, and human rights campaigner Karl Maria Kertbeny, back in 1869. As the term spread outwards from Europe, it brought with it an increasingly binary conception of gender and sexuality that, almost immediately, began to be challenged through visual media.

Our new book The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869-1939, is an unprecedented survey of the art made between 1869 and 1939 that illuminates how artists challenged and defied that narrowing vision of sexuality and gender.

Published to accompany a groundbreaking exhibition at the Wrightwood 659 museum in Chicago, the book features more than 300 paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, photographs, and film stills from across the world - many of which are presented in a queer context for the first time.

There are works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Thomas Eakins, portraits of the pioneering queer figures Gertrude Stein and James Baldwin, as well as rarely seen ephemera such as a “permission to cross-dress” form issued by the Parisian police to Rosa Bonheur. Oh, and there's also a teapot in the shape of Oscar Wilde. Accompanying the works are twenty-two original, in depth and insightful essays by leading experts in art and queer history.

Below, we’ve pulled out a handful of the images from the book and abridged some of the book's text by Jonathan D. Katz. When you’ve read the entries take a closer look at The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869-1939, here.

Félix Vallotton, Gertrude Stein, 1907, Oil on canvas, 108.6 x 91.4 cm (framed), The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland, BMA 1950.300. Photography by: Mitro Hood.

The salon hosted by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris is a reference point within histories of modern art. The couple received guests from all over the world, anxious to view Stein’s unique collection of modernist paintings - which was enriched by gifts from the artists who benefited from the exposure Stein offered them.

Stein presided over the salon and the painting collection like a monarch, with Toklas as her lady-in-waiting. The many portraits of Stein by modern painters, sculptors, and photographers record the phases of her public image creation. Although their mediums and aesthetics vary, these portraits all have one thing in common: they evoke a powerful presence, and an “unfeminine” one according to the norms of the times.

Félix Vallotton’s 1907 portrait presents Stein as monumental and self-contained. Her facial expression, as if set in stone, reveals no emotion, no impulse to connect with or impress the viewer. Her pudgy hands, unceremoniously at rest in her lap, and her magisterial face are the only parts of Stein’s body exposed.

For Vallotton’s portrait sittings, women clients typically dressed for the occasion very differently, in feminine finery that exposed their upper chests and left their arms, sometimes even their shoulders, partially bare. Stein’s bearing and lack of exposure conform more closely to the era’s conventions of masculine portraiture, although her enveloping robe sets her outside the bounds of conventional masculinity in dress as well.

Tamara de Lempicka, Nu assis de profil, 1923, Oil on canvas, 81.2 x 54 cm, Döpfner Collection, Germany. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.

The most famous Polish portrait painter of the first half of the twentieth century, Tamara de Lempicka, specialised in images of glamorous and androgynous women like herself, merging Decadent and Art Deco aesthetics toward creating a pansexual femininity. She was well known in Paris for both her paintings and her libertine lifestyle.

Following her move to France in 1918 she had affairs with both men and women and fell into a circle of socialite bisexual women including Vita Sackville-West and Colette, whose milieu she portrayed. Her art was essential for the creation of the glamorous image of the modern and stylish queer woman, and in her paintings lesbianism found a chic expression and affirmation.

Alice Austen, The Darned Club, 1891, Original glass plate negative, 4 x 5 in, Collection of Historic Richmond Town.

In 1891, Alice Austen photographed a scene she labeled The Darned Club, consisting of two female couples, each pair in an intimate embrace. For the couple on the left—and it is Austen herself at far left—the glances that graze each other’s cheek are ratified in the intimate gesture of their feet touching.

The photograph’s title is apparently a reference to the name some boys in the neighbourhood, the Rosebank section of Long Island, coined after feeling excluded from such scenes of fond mutual understanding. A self-portrait with her partner taken on Austen’s personal property, the photograph seems almost wilfully incriminating, evidence that Austen not only wanted to practice same-sex affection but to document it, too.

Austen, one of the earliest female photographers in the United States, inherited considerable family wealth, and was thus of independent means. She was involved with her partner, Gertrude Tate, for fifty-six years. In refusing a residual, gendered understanding of same-sex relations, they broke with a familiar model, as indeed they did all their lives. Sadly, after the stock market crash of 1929, most of her wealth evaporated and poverty forced the women apart. Austen’s dying wish, to be buried next to Tate, was denied by both their families.

Glyn Philpot, Profile of a Man with Hibiscus Flower (Félix), 1932, Oil on canvas, 44.5 x 34.3 cm, Private collection. Photo: Daniel Katz Gallery, London.

This painting portrays Félix, a French Caribbean model who posed for Philpot several times in 1932. The exoticising composition references Paul Gauguin’s canvas Jeune Homme à la Fleur. Philpot’s oeuvre is nonetheless notable for its often heroic, sensitive depictions of Black subjects.

Andreas Andersen, Interior with Hendrik Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence, 1894, Oil on canvas, 128.5 x 160 cm. Under licence from MiC - Direzione Musei Statali della Città di Roma - Photographic Archive; by kind permission of the National Museums Directorate of the City of Rome - Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum.

Andreas Andersen’s Interior with Hendrik Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence, from 1894, is frankly biographical. Andersen depicts his younger brother, at age twenty-two, languidly petting a cat gussied up with a bow, still in bed as his presumptive bedmate, the American artist John Briggs Potter, is getting up and dressed.

The scene is so intimate, so immediately relatable and so unabashed, that it’s as surprising as the Austen photographs. Hendrik’s blond, boyish good looks; languorous odalisque pose; smooth skin; and youthful build stand in contrast to the thirty-year-old Potter’s dark hair, bearded face, and closed-in posture.

The younger Andersen, like his brother born in Norway, would eventually move to Rome and sculpt massive male nudes for his planned utopian city that never materialised. Potter would eventually work for Isabella Stewart Gardner in her new museum.

But, and this is the point, the effect of the two of them together is so unforced and familiar that they read as intimates. And the fact that they are painted this way in a large-scale painting by Hendrick’s brother insinuates that there was no hesitation about such a potentially public suggestion of their tender closeness.

Romaine Brooks, Self-Portrait, 1923, Oil on canvas, 46 1/4 x 26 7/8 in. (117.5 x 68.3 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist, 1966.49.1.

There is a substantive distinction between Romaine Brooks's early Le Trajet (The Journey), with its almost androgynous subject, modeled on her then-lover, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein, and her subsequent self-portraits as an adult, which depict a distinctly masculine-appearing woman.

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.

As far back as 1835–37, George Catlin, a painter of the lives and customs of Indigenous Americans, chronicled a ceremony honouring someone he called a berdache, using the term French colonisers applied to a native individual we would today likely call trans - in this instance, someone born male who lived as a woman and performed female-associated work. But Catlin’s journal is filled with incandescent dismissals of this ceremony designed to honour her, which he saw as evidence of the superiority of his own culture and the degraded quality of Indigenous culture.

These blatantly racist images highlight the violence and ridicule faced by Indigenous peoples who did not conform to gender and sexual norms imposed by European settlers in the Americas. Two-Spirit or third-gender individuals were targeted by colonists from the onset. De Bry’s engraving depicts the conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s dogs gruesomely attacking Cueva “men dressed as women” in 1513.

Take a closer look at The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869-1939, here.