Long before queerness had a name, it had an image—and at the Kunstmuseum Basel, those images return not as marginal curiosities, but as quiet, insistent evidence that modern art was shaped as much by forbidden desires and improvised identities as by any manifesto or movement.
David Paynter: L’après-midi, oil on canvas, 99 x 122 cm, 1935. Image: Brighton & Hove MuseumsYou can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
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In the long, cautious history of European museums, exhibitions that attempt to historicise queerness have often arrived apologetically, hedged by euphemism or quarantined in side galleries. The First Homosexuals – The Emergence of New Identities 1869–1939 does something more ambitious and more unsettling: it treats queer identity not as a marginal footnote to modernity, but as one of its constitutive conditions.
The exhibition takes as its chronological anchor the year 1869, when the term “homosexual” first entered public discourse—coined not by artists or lovers, but by legal and medical reformers attempting to categorise, regulate, and ultimately contain desire. The show’s conceptual wager is that art, in these decades before self-identification hardened into identity, functioned as a parallel archive: one in which same-sex desire and gender variance were not yet named, but were insistently pictured, staged, and rehearsed.
Gathering around one hundred works—paintings, photographs, drawings, and sculptures—the exhibition unfolds less as a linear history than as a network of glances, intimacies, and codes. Portraits of friends double as love letters; domestic scenes quietly contradict the public insistence on heterosexual normalcy; bodies are rendered with a tenderness that refuses caricature. What emerges is not a single “first homosexual,” but a constellation of lives lived experimentally, often at considerable risk.
One of the exhibition’s strengths lies in its refusal to retrofit contemporary labels onto the past. Instead, it dwells in the instability of early sexological thought, when homosexuality was variously understood as a universal potential, a pathological deviation, or a manifestation of a so-called “third sex.” These theories hovered uneasily over the works on display, shaping how bodies were seen without fully determining how they were lived. The curatorial approach is notably disciplined: explanatory wall texts illuminate without over-determining, allowing ambiguity to remain part of the historical record.
David Paynter’s L’après-midi (1935), on loan from Brighton & Hove Museums, exemplifies this tension. Two male figures recline in a pastoral setting, their bodies arranged in a composition long associated with heterosexual leisure. Nothing overtly “happens” in the painting; its queerness resides in its calm insistence that such proximity is neither illicit nor tragic. In an era when visibility itself could be dangerous, understatement becomes a form of defiance.
Photography, too, plays a crucial role. Intimate snapshots of couples at home or on holiday quietly dismantle the notion that queer life before Stonewall was necessarily clandestine or miserable. These images do not deny persecution—legal, medical, and social—but they complicate it, showing affection persisting not in spite of history, but within it. The domestic sphere, so often invoked as the moral foundation of the nation-state, appears here as a site of quiet subversion.
The exhibition is also alert to the colonial dimensions of early homosexual discourse. Several works expose how European artists and thinkers projected fantasies of sexual freedom onto colonised bodies, framing non-Western gender systems as exotic, permissive, or dangerously primitive. These images are uncomfortable, and deliberately so: they remind the viewer that queer modernity was never innocent, and that its freedoms were often imagined against racialised others.
What distinguishes The First Homosexuals from earlier museum treatments of LGBTQ+ history is its resistance to triumphalism. There is no simple narrative of progress from invisibility to pride. Instead, the exhibition ends on the brink of catastrophe: 1939, the year when fascism, war, and intensified repression would shatter many of the fragile networks it documents. Some artists went into exile; others were silenced, institutionalised, or killed. The final rooms feel less like a conclusion than an interruption.
In this sense, the exhibition speaks powerfully to the present. At a moment when queer rights are again being contested, pathologised, and rolled back in various parts of the world, The First Homosexuals insists on historical depth. It reminds us that queer existence did not begin with legislation or liberation movements, but with people finding ways—often small, often beautiful—to recognise themselves and one another before the language existed to make that recognition safe.
Kunstmuseum Basel deserves credit not only for the scale of the undertaking, but for its curatorial restraint. The exhibition does not shout its relevance; it allows the works to do the slower, riskier work of implication. By situating queer identity at the heart of modern art’s emergence, it quietly reframes the canon itself. Modernism, the show suggests, was never straight.
★★★★★
The First Homosexuals – The Emergence of New Identities 1869–1939
On view at Kunstmuseum Basel, 7 March – 8 august, 2026.
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