Poem from the May-June 2025 Issue
The Missionaries I’m splattered in ink, sweatpants, Four Roses T-shirt. A couple of children in their Sunday best knock on my door. They haven’t practiced their introductions very much…More
Browsing: May-June 2025
May-June 2025
Blog Posts
Pride Issue: ‘The First Homosexuals’
THIS ISSUE of The G&LR, of which I am the guest editor, spotlights an art exhibition that I co-curated (with Johnny Willis) titled The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939 (open May 2–July 26, 2025, across three floors of the Wrightwood 659 museum in Chicago).
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‘It will be seen as a political exhibition.’
John R. Killacky interviews the curator of The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939, Jonathan D. Katz.
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Queer Modernism in Russia
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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The First Lesbian Image-Makers
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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In the Beginning Was the Word
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.
MoreAmrita Sher-Gil’s Crossing Worlds
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.
MoreBuenos Aires’ Men in Uniform
Inspired by Demaría’s research into this erased history, in 2019 the photographer Claudio Larrea produced a series that speculatively recreated Ballvé Piñero’s homoerotic snapshots of the early 1940s (Figure 2). Los cuerpos del delito, a double entendre referring to “bodies of the crime” and “bodies of evidence,” insists on the ways that masculine subjects and a desiring gaze, here filtered through the camera’s lens, have been bound up in processes of surveillance and persecution.
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A ‘Quantum Biography’ of Audre Lorde
A photograph of Lorde in front of a blackboard on which is written “Women are powerful and dangerous” has become a familiar, widely shared image. In response to attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and women’s and LGBT rights, the words of the self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” have lately gone viral, turning her into an online superstar.
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If They Could See Me Now
When Ford picked up stakes and went to New York or Paris for months at a time, he brought Indra with him. When he moved into another house in Chania, Crete, he brought Indra, who again took over as houseman and companion—though never as lover. This was in the mid-1970s, and both Paris and Manhattan were enjoying what may have been the last artistic flowering of bohemia.
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