Queer & Global: How a 20th-Century Social Network Is Becoming Cultural Heritage

Who is with whom and in what way are they all intertwined? A signature feature of the TV series “The L-Word” is the diagram “The Chart,” a web of names and connection lines that fans have long treated as iconic. At first glance it looks like a deconstructed family tree, a digital visualization of the intricate relationship web within Los Angeles’s lesbian scene — and it also hints at the subversive energy that such a community can generate.

It’s quite possible that the show’s creative team found inspiration in a Truman Capote anecdote he shared in his final fragmentary novel, “Answered Prayers.” Capote recounts entering the studio of painter Romaine Brooks in Paris after World War II and, confronted by the monumental portraits of queer women, he freezes in reverent awe: “It was the ultimate gallery of all famous lesbians from 1880 to 1935, like an international reel of people who were having affairs.” He adds that this moment, this space, this phalanx of dashing figures—”this array of butch-babes”—has stayed with him as unforgettable.

At least one biographer, Diana Souhami, who has devoted her work to the history of lesbian artists in the 20th century, took Capote’s rapture to heart. In her piece “Lesbians and Modernity” from the freshly issued catalog for the Düsseldorf exhibition “Queer Modernism” (Amazon affiliate link), she picks up the quote and reconstructs, on the basis of substantial research, a panorama of a Parisian community whose members supported and fertilized one another in life and in art. All this happened at a moment when queerness in the comparatively liberal French metropolis was by no means self-evident.

Lesbian Women From All Over the World Are Drawn to Paris

Crystallization points of this “Queer Modern” include the literary and art salons of poets Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein, as well as the legendary bookshop “Shakespeare and Company” run by Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach. While the women’s activities focus mainly on interwar Paris, the networks they formed extended far beyond the city in time, space, and culture—well beyond the model later imagined in the fiction of “The L-Word” more than half a century later.

According to Souhami, before World War II numerous lesbian women from around the world were drawn to Paris, many of them from the United States—women like Gertrude Stein and her later partner Alice B. Toklas—who organized themselves within Paris’s creative milieu and became central figures in a “Queer Modern” movement. Even then, these subcultures displayed remarkably progressive and diverse ideas about gender, language, and identity. Claude Cahun, born into a Jewish–French family in Nantes, concluded that the neuter was “the only gender that suits me.” And Ethel Walker, born in Scotland, did not want to be called an “artist,” arguing that there were no true female artists: “There are only two kinds of artists—bad and good.”

The Broad Reach of the “Queer Modern”

Where Souhami foregrounds the networks of creative lesbians, art historian Tirza True Latimer broadens the lens in her essay “Excentric Studies” by including a circle of gay male artists who gathered around Gertrude Stein and regarded her as a chosen family. This created a genealogical network, sealed through portraiture. These figures, viewed by society as eccentric, were linked not only socially but artistically, and Latimer argues they contributed significantly to the development of avant-garde art and culture in Europe and across the Atlantic.

At the dawn of the 20th century, transnational—indeed transatlantic—linkages began to emerge between Berlin, London, New York, and Paris. Yet the influence of the “Queer Modern” reached even further east. Sergei Eisenstein’s homoerotic drawings and film motifs, for instance, were likely inspired by a meeting with Jean Cocteau, whom the Russian artist encountered during a trip to Paris. Cocteau, together with Stein, stands as a pivotal figure of the early 20th century. Both Stein and her partner Toklas, and Cocteau and his partner Jean Marais, lived their daily lives and their same-sex partnerships as performative components of their art — for Stein and Toklas, private life became a crafted dialogue; for Cocteau and Marais, life, love, and the stage formed a staged symbiosis.

In the “Queer Modern,” same-sex desire remained coded due to social taboos—often encoded through mythological motifs, symbolic imagery, and aesthetic codes. Jean Cocteau, however, in his sailor drawings dared to depict explicit sex between men who met on equal footing—an uncharacteristic departure from ancient depictions, where sexuality often mirrored power dynamics.

Thomas Mann and the Naked Youths

Among the Düsseldorf exhibition’s central works—also reproduced in the catalog—is Ludwig von Hoffmann’s painting, inspired by antiquity, of three nude youths. It was acquired shortly after its creation in 1913 by Thomas Mann and, as noted briefly, belonged to the furnishings of Mann’s study, occupying a key place in the salon or workspace with each move.

In this context it would be intriguing to probe more closely the painting’s significance for Mann as a viewer — as a homosexual man who outwardly denied his own desire while simultaneously being enthralled by naked youths and caught between idealization and self-mastery. The art historian Jonathan D. Katz sketches in his essay “The Repressed Affinities” a complicated portrait of same-sex sexuality. He begins by describing the common ground between artistic modernism and homosexuality as the expression of a “deliberate break with tradition” and a “self-chosen belonging to a subculture” with an “elitist aesthetic.” This interpretation is likely contentious—even in the historical context he himself later cites. He also reminds us of the emancipation movement led by Karl-Heinz Ulrichs, who understood homosexual desire as innate and rejected the notion of a conscious choice. Even today Katz’s claim remains provocative—perhaps what he means by “deliberate choice” is the decision to express one’s same-sex desire in coded, artistic milieus rather than a literal, frontal depiction.

A New Perspective on Modernity Opens

A further tension surfaces in another part of the catalog: Katz argues that questions of defining homosexuality are “primarily meaningful within the European and North American cultural context,” while “in many other parts of the world, same-sex desire has been an accepted, even celebrated, aspect of human sexuality.” He points to traditions in Muslim countries where “wealthy men” formed relationships with “boys trained in the feminine arts of singing, dancing, and seduction” — a “rich tradition” he says, which he ultimately tones down in terms of its implications for homosexual emancipation: by local standards these were not considered same-sex relationships, not to mention the power imbalance inherent in the arrangement. Beyond such irritations, however, the catalog entries—covering Surrealism, abstraction, and resistance to Nazism—underscore the central role of networked connections within the “Queer Modern.”

Thus a genealogy emerges that not only offers an alternative view of modernity but also lays the groundwork for a living, intangible cultural heritage—and with it, a starting point for further scholarship.