The first homosexuals: the birth of a new identity 1869-1939

Abstract

A global survey of more than 300 artworks made following the introduction of the term "homosexual" in 1869. Featuring 500 illustrations and 22 original essays by leading experts in art and queer history, each focusing on one geographical region - from Japan to Australia to the Indigenous populations of South America.

Contents

Art. Before the binary -- Portraits -- Relationships -- Changing bodies, changing definitions -- History -- Colonialism & resistance -- Performance -- Beyond the binary. Essays: The crucible of sexual orientation: sexual theories and identities in nineteenth-century Germany / Douglas Pretsell -- When the "Urning" paints: German Art and the birth of the homosexual / André Dombrowski -- Unbecoming women: becoming lesbians in the arts 1850s-1920s France / Catherine Gonnard and Tirza True Latimer -- "The ravenous hunger of inexplicable, untranslatable looks:" the first French homosexuals and their art / André Dombrowski -- Design for living: art and the first homosexuals in Britain / Michael Hatt -- Artists' lives, emotions and intimate relationships: a queer perspective on the advent of modernity in Nordic art / Patrik Steorn -- Between discretion and daring: art as escape and homosexual survival in early-twentieth-century Spain / Juan Vicente Aliaga -- Paradise of vice: southern Italy in the homosexual imagination from the fin de siècle to fascism / Ara H. Merjian -- Queer jewels of Central Eastern Europe / Paweł Leszkowicz and Tomasz Kitlinski -- Between twilight and dawn: homosexual art from the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union / Pavel Golubev -- Gendering and degendering: the homosexual image in American art / Jonathan D. Katz -- Not naming: lesbian Canadian art and its erasure / Johnny Willis -- Liberation and injury: an inverted visual history of "homosexualism" in Mexico / Esther Gabara -- Inversions: errancy and abundance in Brazil and the Southern Cone / Joseph Shaikewitz -- Art, gender, and colonial legacies: queer histories and temporalities in Abya Yala / Eduardo Carrera -- From male colors to same-sex love: the creation of homosexuality in modern Japanese art / Patrick Carland-Echavarria -- Male favorites and fragrant companions: graphic depictions of same-sex intimacy in China / Wenqing Kang -- Playgrounds of empire: homosexuality and art in south and southeast Asia / Niharika Dinkar -- The problems of recognition: queer politics in southeast Asia / Brian Curtin -- A mosaic with missing parts: art & "homosexuality" in the modern Middle East & North Africa / Thadeus Dowad -- Not to know the unknowable: queer Australian art, 1880-1940 / Peter McNeil -- Highlights from The First Homosexuals, 2022.