Is heterosexuality natural? In his 1995 book The Invention of Heterosexuality, sexuality scholar Jonathan Ned Katz established the idea of “heterosexual” as a historically recent concept. First entered into the lexicon in the late 19th century, “heterosexual” served a very specific social and political function: “Heterosexuality is not identical to the reproductive intercourse of the sexes,” he writes. “Heterosexuality does not equal the eroticism of women and men.”

Rather, it formed the basis for a legal and medical hierarchy of sexual behavior and gender expression that rigidly privileged heterosexual conformity—and posed dangers to everyone who didn’t comply. In “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939,” on view at Wrightwood 659 through July 26, over 300 work

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