The exhibition The First Homosexuals: The Birth of New Identities 1869–1939, which started its journey at Wrightwood 659, Chicago, has now opened at the Kunstmuseum in Basel. Actually, the term “homosexual” first came into use in the German-speaking world in 1869 and underwent a substantial shift over the following decades. The debate over what the word designated ranged from a universal capacity for same-sex desire to the conception of a “third sex.”
As early as the 1860s, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs described the “Urning,” an individual with an innate same-sex desire, a product of their gender variance as they understood themselves to be a third sex, neither male nor female, but both.
The Kunstmuseum Exhibit turns the spotlight on the early visibility of same-sex desire and gender diversity in the arts. Through around eighty paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and photographs, it illuminates how new visions of sexuality, gender, and identity took shape from 1869, the year the word “homosexual” first appeared in print. The multifaceted presentation frames perspectives on queer communities, intimate portraits, bold life choices, coded desires, and colonial entanglements.
The First Homosexuals reconstructs both the cultural and creative output and the early history of the LGBTQIA+ community. The exhibition and the accompanying publication illustrate how homosexual and trans identities informed each other and retrace the emergence of a distinctive trans identity as given form by modern artists since the introduction of the term “trans” in 1910.
In six sections, it introduces visitors to artists and writers who openly grappled with homosexual and trans identities and in some cases also lived them. The presentation retraces the evolution of the nude in connection with changing ideas about sexuality and shows how friendship and familiar motifs from the history of art served as discreet (and sometimes not so discreet) codes for same-sex desire. The show also looks beyond Europe to explore how some European artists attributed same-sex desire to colonial peoples as an inherent flaw—and how, in response, artists around the world challenged and defied this colonial hegemony.
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The First Homosexuals The Birth of New Identities 1869–1939 https://kunstmuseumbasel.ch/en/exhibitions/2026/the-first-homosexuals NEUBAU / 07.03.–02.08.2026 |
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