Born out of the editors’ desire to “redress a long history of disinterest, ignorance, and/or active censorship around questions of gender and sexuality in art history and museum culture,” this lavish book by queer art historians Katz and Willis accompanies an exhibition at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago. It’s a project composed of a wide array of educative, informative, and opinionated essays alongside visually striking artwork illuminating the origin of queer identity evolving in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The representation of queer culture by a variety of talented artists and writers is on exquisite display; the book captures a period immersed in the struggle for greater queer visibility through the art of its era. Among the book’s more than 300 images—including paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs—are works by Berenice Abbott, Jean Cocteau, Thomas Eakins, and John Singer Sargent. A series of intellectually astute essays examines the origins of the word “homosexuality,” lesbian visibility in the arts, and the emergence of gender nonconformity in both the East and the West in the second half of the 19th century. The essays, many by culture experts, additionally analyze how the earliest artistic articulations of gender, sexuality, transgender identity, and same-sex desire and relationships would bloom into an emerging queer revolution of visibility, representation, and change. Organized geographically, provocative (frequently explicit) drawings, oil paintings, sculptures, and accompanying text vibrantly tell the story of a forgotten age in emerging queer history and how art became an escape and a method of survival for burgeoning homosexual populations across the globe.
