The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869

"There's both power and peril in claiming an identity," said in The New Yorker . That's one of the lessons of a "monumental" exhibition in Chicago that traces the emergence of modern ideas about sexuality and gender through art that was created between 1869 and 1939. The show's lead curator, art historian Jonathan D. Katz, titled the survey "The First Homosexuals" because its focus is on the decades after Karl Maria Kertbeny, an Austro-Hungarian journalist, coined the terms heterosexual and homosexual and inadvertently transformed same-sex desire into the defining trait of a new identity. As the show illustrates, "'homosexual' quickly became a pathological diagnosis" even as the word "opened a space for collective self-consciousness." The exhibit ends with the rise of Germany's Naz