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Diaghilev’s closest collaborators came from his intimate circle. Dmitry Filosofov (1872–1940), later an influential critic, and Konstantin Somov (1869–1939), the son of a Hermitage Museum curator, were among the most prominent. Their artistic and intellectual influences were diverse. Somov was drawn to the sentimentalism of the 18th century—the world of Antoine Watteau and Jean Louis Prévost—while Filosofov engaged with contemporary Symbolist literature and the mystical philosophical ideas that were circulating in Russian intellectual circles.

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AMRITA SHER-GIL’S striking beauty and moody self-portraits have linked her to Frida Kahlo in the popular imagination. Both are examples of flamboyant painters who were fearlessly bisexual and exploited the medium of self-portraiture to tell the story of their turbulent lives in the male-dominated art world of the prewar years.

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THE EMERGENCE of both the lesbian and the woman artist as recognizable demographics in 19th-century Europe and the United States was the product of revolutionary developments in the realms of civil rights and image-making. The ascent of the first feminist movements, the opening of art academies to women, and the democratization of photography converged to create new conditions of possibility.

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Between 1864 and late 1866, Karl Maria Kertbeny and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had a sustained correspondence, which has mostly not survived. It is likely that they used the opportunity to discuss sexuality and activism.

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The Impressionist painter Florence Carlyle (1864–1923) is the first homosexual artist on record in Canadian history. Her œuvre reveals an unrelenting interest in the erotic and emotional lives of women, especially of her lover Judith Hastings. Take, for instance, The Threshold of 1912 (Figure 1), a chef-d’œuvre of Canadian Impressionism.

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Queer artists and writers of period like Yoshiya, Kashō, Otake, and Tadaoto sought to make sense of the enormous changes wrought by the Meiji Restoration and its consequences. In the decades preceding them, Japan had gone from a culture with multiple traditions of male-male love to a deeply heteronormative society.

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            In the 3rd century, Saint Eugene, also known as Eugenia of Rome, lived as a man in a monastery—traces of his cult and the sepulture of one of his eunuch companions have been discovered in the catacombs of Rome—before having to reveal his birth gender by exposing his breasts to prove his innocence in a rape accusation. Eugene was martyred in 257 with two eunuchs.

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The Black Cat Bar
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The Black Cat is one of about a dozen gay bars lining Sunset Boulevard in Silverlake, the heart of L.A.’s gay community in the 1960’s. Many are beer bars with jukeboxes, pool tables, and pinball machines, inhabiting rundown buildings where the rents were cheap.

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Staging back-alley drag balls was one thing; performing for Astors and Vanderbilts was quite another. What’s more, slummers didn’t just indulge in voyeuristic pleasures; they sampled the seafood, so to speak—a metaphor on full display in periodicals like Broadway Brevities, one of several mainstream publications covering the Pansy Craze.

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Louis XIV did indeed have a younger brother named Philippe, but the king was never at risk of being supplanted. Philippe I, Duc d’Orléans, known as Monsieur, is one of history’s most notorious effeminates, whose affections and fortune were lavished on male favorites, from courtiers to opera dancers.

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