10 Key Works in “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939”

On a trip to England to visit her family, Florence Carlyle, a celebrated Canadian figurative painter, met Judith Hastings, 10 years her junior. The two became domestic partners, and Hastings a frequently featured model in Carlyle’s paintings. The year after they met, Carlyle painted The Threshold (1913), depicting Hastings in a bridal gown and veil. The artist extended the domestic portrait a few years later with High Noon, depicting Hastings contentedly surveying the newly cleaned cottage she and Carlyle shared in East Sussex. (In a humorous touch, a black cat in the background regards the dwelling’s yard with an equivalent sense of ownership.) Hastings seems to radiate pride not just in her hard work, but in the life she and Carlyle have built together against all odds. The slightly hazy, sun-dappled ambience lends the scene extra tenderness.

This painting is one of several selections in the exhibition tied to the Harlem Renaissance, in many ways a watershed queer movement itself. Baldwin, barely 20 at the time this portrait was made, considered Beauford Delaney a “spiritual father” who guided him in matters of art, intellect, and identity. “He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw,” Baldwin said of Delaney. The artist, more than 20 years older, had no such north star. He was tormented by his sexuality, rarely out to his straight Black contemporaries and held at arm’s length in white gay bohemian circles. When alcoholism, then Alzheimer’s,overtook Delaney in the final years of his life, Baldwin helped care for him.

This regally framed painting, one of eight restored specially for display at “The First Homosexuals,” may be the first artwork ever to depict a same-sex wedding. It was painted by Baltic-born, German-speaking, polymathic eccentric Elisàr von Kupffer (alias “Elisarion”). Along with his partner, Eduard von Mayer, Von Kupffer established a temple dedicated to a religion he called Klarismus (Clarism), which asserted that the division of human life into binary gender was a perversion of God’s will. Similarly androgynous figures dominate his artworks, most of them modeled after his own body. “He was very fond of pulling ropes around his chest to give himself breasts and emphasizing his large buttocks and wide hips,” Katz says.

Kupffer may have been openminded about gender, but he was notably regressive on race. His painted utopias are all white, despite his adoption of orientalist tropes and motifs. Before his death in 1942, he actively courted the Nazi Party’s favor and financial support, even penning fawning fan mail to Hitler.

In 1914 SaturninoHerrán was commissioned to create a three-panel mural for the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. That commission would never reach completion: Herrán died after finishing this oil study for the project’s first panel, meant to depict pre-Colombian Mexico. In this striking work, Herrán rejects Western iconography altogether in favor of an indigenous pantheon—a realignment of national pride and identity that would be elaborated on by subsequent Mexican artists. The figures in question are both sensual and effete; Herrán apparently based them on a real-life models living near the Xochicalco ruins, south of Mexico City.

Born Levon Alexander Boyadjian, Leo fled the Armenian genocide with his parents to Cairo in 1924 and became one of the city’s leading studio photographers. His portraits combined Hollywood glamour with an artist’s eye for the avant-garde, though his most experimental shots were of himself. This alluring, gender-bending photo is one of his four self-portraits in the exhibition. In it, he smiles demurely at the camera with clip-on earrings, a jeweled necklace, and a black dress slipping teasingly past his nipples.

“We think Cindy Sherman invented [transforming oneself for the camera], and here’s Van Leo, doing it long before.” Katz says. “He represents the queer subjectivity of the period, the idea of fractured identity or multiplicity of selves. Being queer may mean being different people in different contexts.”

Sargent’s likely queerness isn’t a tightly kept secret in the annals of art history. His fixation with a young man named Thomas McKeller, however, is less well known. Sargent met McKeller, an elevator operator at his hotel, in 1916, while developing a series of murals for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Sargent enlisted him as a model, beginning an association that lasted about a decade.

Despite that long affiliation, none of Sargent’s finished projects left any hint of McKeller’s identity. McKeller was literally whitewashed in many of the works: Sargent refashioned sketches of him, like this one, into marble-skinned deities for the Museum of Fine Arts’ rotunda. McKeller was even the body model for Sargent’s portrait of then–Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who broke with decades of precedent when he attempted to bar Black students from living in the university’s freshman dormitories. One notable exception was Sargent’s monumental—and monumentally erotic—portrait of McKeller now owned by the MFA. It was never exhibited in Sargent’s lifetime, but the painter kept it displayed in his studio.

Katz and his colleagues believe this is the earliest depiction of a committed homosexual couple in Western art. But its details require some decoding for a modern audience. Gustave Courtois and Carl Ernst von Stetten, a real Parisian couple, walk arm-in-arm near the Seine. The “laundress” in the foreground is not really a laundress at all but a sex worker; in 19th-century Paris, the two professions were closely associated. Here, instead of looking meaningfully at Courtois and Von Stetten as potential clients, the subject looks forlornly at the viewer, as though she knows she’ll have no luck with these particular men.

Colombian photographer Benjamín de la Calle may have been the first in the country to document subjects whom we would today consider trans. These two studio portraits depict Rosa Emilia Restrepo, a trans woman in Medellín. who was accused of stealing from the homes where she served as a maid; de la Calle apparently photographed her shortly after her arrest. This is not the only example of de la Calle’s interest in individuals with unconventional gender expressions; a later portrait titled El excluido (Álvaro Echavarría) (The Excluded [Álvaro Echavarría]) (1927), also on view in “The First Homosexuals,” depicts a well-known cross-dresser in Cúcuta.

This painting depicts something vanishingly rare in pre–gay rights movement art: a multigenerational queer family. Artist Emilie Mundt features her partner, Marie Luplau, also a painter, smiling at their adopted child, Carla Mundt-Luplau, in the foreground. Luplau’s father, Daniel, moved in with his daughter and daughter-in-law after the death of Luplau’s mother; he practices piano in the background.

Mundt and Luplau met at a school for women painters in Copenhagen in the 1870s. Luplau became a landscape artist, while Mundt was drawn to figurative work, and particularly depictions of children like this one of Carla.