The twinned character of homosexuality and gender inversion achieves its clearest form in this section, Between Genders. In addition to masculinized women and feminized men, this section includes one of the very first self-consciously trans images, Gerda Wegener’s portrait of her spouse as she understood herself to be—the woman Lili Elbe. Equally, this section contains evidence of the long history of gender queerness that persisted even after homosexuality won the day. While the term “homosexual” implies a union of people of the same gender, it obscures the difference between one’s sex and one’s gender identity, two terms we are today coming to better understand and embrace as part of the trans revolution unfolding around us. Homosexuality’s conceptual murkiness in relation to its cardinal directions of gender on the one hand and sex on the other helped to propel the notion of queer into prominence—for queer wasn’t rooted on any essentialized category of either gender or sex.

     Extended Labels

Unknown
Untitled
[Sichuan Opera Dan Actors]
Photograph
Glimpse of Old China by Chen Yong (Book)
LN200.166

Until the early 1950s, male dan actors played female roles in Chinese opera. Some also engaged in same-sex relations, for money or  pleasure. After the concept of “homosexuality” entered China in the early 1900s, crossdressing dan actors became associated with this new  idea. Chinese elites, determined to modernize their culture to forestall threats from expansionist Western and Japanese powers, deemed  the dan actors backward and sought to eliminate the practice. This reinforced Chinese culture as the province of masculine heteronormativity alone—a politically useful image for a nation struggling to rid itself of imperial overlords—while also prohibiting male prostitution.

Konstantin Somov
Russia, lived and worked in France,
1869-1939
Pierrot and Lady (The Fireworks)
1910
Watercolors and whitewash on paper
Odesa Fine Arts Museum, Ukraine
LN200.111

Somov was one of the artists who introduced commedia dell’arte characters into Russian art in the early 20th century. He used archetypal characters such as Pierrot to depict an everlasting game of love, the defining theme in his art. Somov depicted Pierrot as a feeble and  decadent lover, with homosexual overtones. The masked lady could be the artist’s alter ego. He once said, “The women in my paintings  manifest longing for love, their faces express sadness or lustfulness—a reflection of myself, of my soul, my attraction to men… Their broken  poses, their deliberate ugliness is actually a mockery of myself.”

Konstantin Somov
Russia, lived and worked in France,
1869-1939
Portrait of Cécile de Volanges
1917
Pencils on paper
Odesa Fine Arts Museum, Ukraine
LN200.112

In Somov’s handwritten catalog, he changed this drawing’s title several times, from Portrait of a Marquise in a Powdered Wig to Portrait  of Manon Lescaut (the heroine of Prévost’s novel) to Portrait of Cécile de Volages. It bears considerable resemblance to Somov’s own  features. He wrote of women in his art, “It is a protest of aggravation, a lament, that in many ways I am like them.” The luxurious dresses,  wigs, jewels, fans, and other accessories in Somov’s art have another side for him: “The rags, the feathers—all these things do attract me,  and not only as a painter—[but] self-pity also comes through here.”

Konstantin Somov
Russia, lived and worked in France,
1869-1939
A Shepherd and a Dog
1898
Exhibition print
Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
LN200.168

This is the first publication of Somov’s A Shepherd and a Dog in World of Art magazine, a project of Sergei Diaghilev from 1899 to 1904,  preceding the eponymous artistic association. He modeled the elegant World of Art on the British magazine The Studio, which was known  for contributions from British artist Aubrey Beardsley. Somov’s drawing refers to a 1894 work by Beardsley called Hermaphrodite Among  Roses. Somov borrowed extensively from Beardsley during the 1890s, and critics even called Somov “the Russian Beardsley.” The cane and  wig of the androgynous shepherd are Somov’s much loved 18th century accessories. The original drawing has been missing since the 1920s.

Jan Zrzavý
Czech Republic, 1890-1977
St. John, Disciple whom Jesus Loved
1913
Oil on canvas
National Gallery, Prague

Zrzavý combined Expressionism with the charged iconography of the Symbolists. To provoke the burghers of Habsburg-era Prague, he  developed a sophisticated, unconventional self-image. In the self-portrait Wild Woman (1908) (National Gallery, Prague), he poses as a  trans woman. In Self-Portrait I (1907), his lips and cheeks are red, his face obscured by a veil cascading from a hat. In St. John the Disciple  whom Jesus Loved (1913), both figures are androgynous, even feminine. The painting exceeds the confines of Christian iconography,  exemplifying a psychic symbolism, while referencing the homoerotic implications of Christ’s love for St. John, their tender closeness and  isolation.

Unknown
Spain
Illustration from Muchas gracias, nº 149
1926
Magazine illustration
Biblioteca Nacional de España
LN200.153

This popular humor magazine was published in Madrid between 1924 and 1932. It was founded by the Republican writer Artemio Precioso, who was forced to emigrate to Paris in 1927 during the regime of dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera. The magazine was tailored to a young  male readership and contained texts, drawings and photographs that cast women as whimsical creatures not to be taken too seriously, only  interested in makeup and fashion. In Spain, this kind of culture was called sicalíptica (erotic). This drawing shows two well-dressed, effeminate men in tuxedos about to kiss. A mischievous dog pulls the tablecloth, showing one of the individuals in trousers and the other in  women’s shoes and apparently a skirt, mimicking a straight couple in dress and pose. The caption reads: “Do not think ill of them or Toby  the dog´s warning.” This homophobic warning appeared, despite ubiquitous censorship, in a cultural context rife with sexual and gender  ambiguity in cabaret, literature and the illustrated press.

Frances Mary Hodgkins
New Zealand, lived and worked in England, 1869-1947
Friends (Double Portrait) [Hannah Ritchie and Jane Saunders]
1922-25
Oil on canvas
Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago, Ōtepoti Dunedin,
Aotearoa New Zealand. 73/169. Bequeathed by Charles Brasch in 1973.
LN200.81

Frances Hodgkins lived with this lesbian couple, Hannah Ritchie and Jane Saunders, in the 1920s in the United Kingdom. New Zealand  expats, they studied under Hodgkins. She depicts them as impassive rather than amorous, and titles the work after their friendship.  Lesbian relationships had long been considered “romantic friendships.” This allowed for same-sex intimacy within the parameters of  normative female sociality. Patriarchal culture allowed female same-sex couples to exist publicly in heteronormative society. She wrote to them in 1923, “To a large extent I have lost my terror—thanks to you…” Hodgkins also nurtured friendships with other lesbians in her life.

Gerda Wegener
Denmark, lived and worked in Denmark and France, 1885-1940
Reclining Nude (Lili Elbe)
1929
Watercolor
The Shin Collection, New York
LN200.140

This is one the first transgender women after “trans” as a distinct identity catalyzed at the beginning of the 20th century. Lili Elbe, born in 1882, began to understand herself as Lili as early as 1904. Here, she appears a year before beginning a series of surgeries  in Germany, making her one of the first trans people to seek gender affirming operations. The term transsexual, coined by Magnus Hirschfield in 1923, demarcated it into its own category. Wegener’s portraits of Lili cast her fully actualized in her womanhood. She poses  as an odalisque, a trope of a lounging woman from the Orientalist tradition, with a cigarette emblematic of women’s liberation in the 1920s.

Lili Elbe (Einar Wegener)
Denmark, lived and worked in Denmark and France, 1882-1931
An Autumn Day at Bassin de Flore at Versailles
1917
Oil on canvas
The Shin Collection, New York
LN200.56

While Gerda Wegener became more famous, Lili Elbe was an accomplished landscape painter, working under her birth name. Lili was born in 1882. In 1904, she married Gerda, whom she had met at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She began modeling for  Gerda and soon became her favorite model and muse. Through her art, the supportive Gerda nurtured Lili’s growing self-conception. Lili  never rendered a self-portrait; it was as if she fully realized her identity via Gerda. Lili died of complications from gender affirming surgery in 1931, after an attempted uterus transplant.

Unknown artist
France
Le cake-walk. Dansé au Nouveau Cirque. Les nègres [Two black actors, Charles Gregory and Jack Brown, one in drag, dancing the Cake-Walk in Paris]
1903
Exhibition print
Wellcome Collection
LN200.172

This is the earliest-known film of a drag performer. It depicts Jack Brown, an American from Virginia, dancing the cakewalk in Paris with  his partner, Charles Gregory. They were part of a sensational spectacle at the Nouveau-Cirque. In the dance, originally from southern slave  plantations, enslaved people would imitate and satirize the mannerisms of white slaveholders. Ironically, it became a central fixture of vaudeville’s racist blackface performances. Recently, attention has turned to William Dorsey Swann (c. 1858–1925), America’s first professional drag  queen, who was formerly enslaved. No known images of Swann exist.

Henri Legludic
France, 1840-1917
Notes et observations de medicine legale: Attentats aux moeurs
1896
Book
Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
LN200.117

In his 1896 book, Notes et observations de medicine legale, Henri Legludic published the autobiographical account of Arthur W., who  preferred to be called the Countess. Initially penned in 1874, following a stint in prison, The Countess also illustrated her tale. It described  how she, a poor boy, was picked up by a wealthy aristocrat at the age of 13, cossetted as his mistress, and cast out as she aged. She then described streetwalking, picking up men in cafés, and the legal travails that followed sex work. Legludic’s book is the sole surviving source  of this beautiful memoir.

František Drtikol
Bohemia (Czech Republic), 1883-1961
Untitled
1927
Gelatin silver print
Michael Sodomick Queer Art Collection
LN200.91

František Drtikol was a heterosexual Bohemian modernist photographer noted for nudes. Most were female, but this rare example of a  male nude exhibits the carving with light that is the defining characteristic of his photographs, creating expressive distortions that seem  almost painterly. Here Drtikol uses light and shadow to feminize the youth, emphasizing curves, the chest, and curly hair as the image  seemingly flickers between genders. Drtikol was so pleased with this image that it was one of the few of his own photographs he hung in his  office, as photographs circa 1927 testify.

Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob) and Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe)
France
1894-1954 (Claude Cahun)
1892-1972 (Marcel Moore)
Untitled [Self portrait in profile, sitting cross legged]
1920
Exhibition print
Jersey Heritage Trust Collection
LN200.160

This illustration from an early text by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore traffics in gender queerness with a hint of campy classicism in the  laurel wreath, ideas that animated their better-known photographic practice. Claude and Moore were childhood friends and stepsisters, as  their parents later married. Artistic and life partners, they adopted gender neutral pseudonyms. They started out doing avantgarde books,  but soon developed their photographic practice, and eventually became active in the resistance against German occupation of the Isle of Jersey during World War II. They were sentenced to death but spared when the island was liberated shortly thereafter.

Auguste and Louis Lumière
France
1862-1954 (Auguste Lumière)
1864-1948 (Louis Lumière)
Danse Serpentine [I]
1897
Digital reproduction of film
Institut Lumière, Lyon, France
LN200.149

Loïe Fuller was a Chicago-born dancer and actress. After a short marriage, her relationships were with women, including 23 years with her  student Gabrielle Bloch, until Fuller’s death in 1928. An early practitioner of improvisational dance, she used flowing fabric reflecting  colored lights of her own design. She became a leading light of the French avant-garde, memorialized by artists including Toulouse-Lautrec  and Rodin. Here is a colorized film of Fuller doing her famous Serpentine Dance, along with a drag version, by the Italian actor and stage  star Leopolo Fregoli, a famous quick-change artist known for rapid-fire impersonations of leading figures.