Among the persistent mysteries of the 2024 election is the roots of the modern political gender gap, particularly among young people. Though their final vote choices were a bit more nuanced than some pre-election polls suggested, young men and women, aged 18 to 29, had the largest divergence in their vote among the age groups. Gen Z men supported Donald Trump by 14 percentage points; Gen Z women supported Kamala Harris by 17 points, per one post-election analysis.Those dynamics, particularly the aggressive rightward shift of young men, have raised some interesting questions: What was driving this divide? Was something in particular moving young men to the right while pushing young women to the left? Could it be the manosphere, economics, or old-school sexism?Or could it be something else, like the apparent resurgence of organized religion?As I’ve reported, the rapid decline of religiosity within the United States has been slowing down over recent years. Particularly since the pandemic, data shows Gen Z is no longer continuing the rapid decline in religious affiliation, particularly Christianity, that started with previous generations. If anything, religious belief has seen a small revival with that youngest cohort.That shift suggests a curious dynamic at play among America’s youth. As Gen Z has been getting more politically polarized along gendered lines, so too has their religious affiliation. Those trends suggest that modern politics and religious beliefs may be having a bit of self-reinforcing effect on each other: As young men find faith and religious belonging, their politics are drifting to the right too, in turn reinforcing their existing beliefs.The opposite seems to be true with young women: Religious customs are not jibing with their political and social beliefs, pushing them out of churches, and reinforcing that drift away from some organized religions.Those religious trends matter. As religious and political beliefs of young men and women move away from each other, it stands to complicate not just electoral choices, but the future of family life, dating, and social belonging.The religious gender gap is changing The last 10 years have seen American Christianity bottom out. After a steady decline in Christian religiosity since the 1990s, Christian belief began to stabilize at around 60 percent of the American adult population — still a historic low point — sometime around the turn of the 2020s.A key contributor to this slow-down appears to be Gen Z. After years of successive generations losing their religion, Gen Z seemed to get as irreligious as it could be. Now, what we’ve seen since 2020 is a kind of dead cat bounce: a slightly higher level of Christian religious affiliation among the youngest adults. Among the youngest cohort of Gen Z, those born between 2000 and 2006, the share who identify as Christian has increased since 2023, from 45 percent to 51, per the Pew Research Center. And overall, Gen Z seems to be more Christian than past trend lines predicted they should be: at 46 percent compared to a projected 41 percent. At the heart of that halt and slight reversal is a dual dynamic: Young women are leaving religious congregations, while young men’s religious identification and practice rises. These changes come across in a few ways. First, the gender gap in religious participation has not just evaporated in recent years, but reversed. The religious researcher and data scientist Ryan Burge has found in his analysis of survey data from the Cooperative Election Study that while women used to attend religious services more regularly than men, the reverse is now happening. Among the cohort born in the 1990s and 2000, it’s men who are now outpacing women in weekly attendance.Looking at other reference points suggests something similar. Young women are more likely than young men to say they are religiously unaffiliated, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life research. Young women are now as likely as young men to say religion is “not that important” to them — a significant development since women have traditionally been more fervent believers. And the religious gender gap among the youngest cohort appears to be narrowing in other ways, too: Regardless of which religion they identify with, young women and young men report about the same rates of daily prayer. For older generations, women greatly outpace men in praying daily.Is religion making men more conservative? We could still stand to get better data about what is happening. It could be that young men simply remain as religious as older generations of men are, or that men are getting more religious in general, or that men are particularly loyal to organized religion. Some data suggest young women remain religious or spiritual but just don’t identify with organized churches in the same way men do. But the religious gender gap still appears to be changing among Gen Z.But is politics driving these changes in religious behavior and belief? Or is religion driving stronger political beliefs? The data is a little less definitive here, but two things seem to bear out: According to AEI’s Survey Center, young women who are leaving churches report doing so because their congregations’ beliefs are more conservative than the beliefs they hold. Churches are out of step with where most young women are. Additionally, young Christian women who remain in their churches are still more likely to be liberal and hold progressive beliefs than young Christian men. Even as they remain Christians, they are becoming more politically liberal.Underlying all of this is the fact that Gen Z women are more likely to identify as feminists, as LGBTQ, and as supportive of abortion rights. According to the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, young Christian women are 13 points more likely than young men to say that abortion should be legal. They are 18 points more likely to support gay marriage and 26 points more likely to accept LGBTQ people.As the researcher Daniel A. Cox of the AEI’s Survey Center points out, these are all shifts from what young Christians believed 10 years ago. “The gender gap in views of abortion has since quadrupled,” he notes in a recent analysis, but when it comes to views on homosexuality and gay marriage, it seems like young men have moved right. “Young Christian women have hardly changed their views over the last decade, while young men have become less supportive.”On a range of other views of government, political parties, and ideology in general, what’s happening with non-religious young people is also happening among believers. Young Christian women are much more liberal, and more likely to be Democrats, than young Christian men. Cox notes that it might not be religion making these political views so different but the degree to which young Christian women have more connections and exposure to diverse communities and are consuming different kinds of media. Religious young men seem to be stuck in more homogenous environments, both in the digital and in the real world, he suggests.Still, while we can confidently say young women are becoming more liberal and less religious in that process, we can’t say the same for men. Religion may or may not be making young men more conservative, but it does seem likely that their conservative religious and political beliefs are at least keeping young men in churches. It appears to be slowing down their drift away from organized religion.All of which stands to complicate the future of not just Gen Z’s social and cultural bonds to each other but also those of future generations. It’s the youngest cohort of Gen Z, those born between 2000 and 2006, that is narrowing religious gender gaps while widening political ones. That poses issues for their social, romantic, and familial futures. Gen Z already reports struggles with socializing, dating, maintaining healthy relationships, and combating loneliness. Marriage rates continue to fall. So as young men and women drift away from each other, it’s hard to see how prospective partners breach these divides. And these dynamics may very well end up having electoral effects.See More:
#gen #men #are #becoming #more

Rejected by Museums Around the World, This New Art Exhibition Explores the Historical Roots of the Term ‘Homosexual’
“The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” is a sprawling collection of more than 300 works at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 gallery

An 1890 photo by Alice Austen titled The Darned Club
Collection of Historic Richmond Town / Wrightwood 659

In 1868, the Hungarian writer and activist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in a letter to his friend, the pioneering sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.
Kertbeny was arguing against a German anti-sodomy law that made sexual contact between members of the same gender punishable by up to four years in prison. He reasoned that humans had innate desires—some homosexual, some heterosexual—that could not be regulated by the state.
Although Kertbeny had just used the terms for what scholars believe is the first time, the language was already charged with the same imprecision that exists today. An expansive label like “homosexual” could describe actions; desires; and, crucially, an entire identity.
The artistic and social “sea change” that accompanied the birth of the term “homosexual” is the subject of “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” a sprawling, ambitious exhibition at the Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. It is on view until July 26.The scale and scope of the exhibition is staggering. It gathers more than 300 works by 125-plus artists from 40 countries, on loan from private collections and major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay.
“It is the kind of exhibition that a massive institution like the Met regularly pulls off,” curator Jonathan D. Katz, an art historian at the University of Pennsylvania, tells the Chicago Sun-Times’ Courtney Kueppers. “But for a small, fairly new institution like Wrightwood 659 to pull off,is kind of extraordinary.”
“Before the Binary,” the first of eight sections in the exhibition, begins decades before Kertbeny’s letter. Its focus is on longstanding cultural, sexual and romantic practices that modern language occludes.
Dance to the Berdash is an 1835-1837 oil painting by George Catlin, a 19th-century artist known for his paintings of Indigenous life and the American frontier. It depicts a real feast Catlin witnessed in which members of the Sac and Fox tribe paid tribute to a Two-Spirit leader, a person who was born male but who dressed, performed and lived as a woman. Non-Indigenous observers applied the term “berdache,” now considered derogatory, to identities and practices they considered foreign. Catlin’s painting depicts what language could not capture.

Dance to the Berdash, George Catlin, 1835-1837

Smithsonian American Art Museum

“Art can tell this story uniquely well,” Katz says in a statement. “While written narratives must necessarily use specialized words to describe ideas, visual imagery is more elastic, allowing for coincident layers of meaning.”
More modern works by well-known artists like Jean Cocteau, the Lumière Brothers, Gustave Moreau, John Singer Sargent, Egon Schiele and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec also convey those nuances with tact across the seven other sections of the exhibition.
In “Portraits,” Katz and associate curator Johnny Willis assemble a 1907 portrait of Gertrude Stein, the only full-size portrait of Oscar Wilde painted in his lifetime and Thomas Eakins’ celebrated oil portrait of Walt Whitman.
Some portraits explore sexuality more overtly than others, but all can be read in the spirit of the exhibition. Where do actions become identity? Do modern audiences have the right to retroactively apply labels to celebrated past figures who may have never embraced them?
Another section of the show explores relationships through the photography of Alice Austen, a Victorian-era photographer in New York City who trained her lens on women’s lives. Still others examine how nude portraits have shifted with changing understandings of sexuality and how same-sex desire converged with colonialism and resistance.

Gertrude Stein, Félix Vallotton, 1907

The Baltimore Museum of Art / Mitro Hood / Wrightwood 569

Wrightwood 659’s ability to land an exhibition like “The First Homosexuals” is in part due to its controversial subject matter. “Queer art is the third rail of the art realm,” Katz tells Block Club Chicago’s Web Behrens. “One very highly placed museum director told me, ‘This is exactly the exhibition I want to show, and therefore exactly the exhibition I can’t.’”
Katz estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of the museums and art collectors he asked to contribute art to the exhibition rejected his requests, per Fast Company’s Grace Snelling. Later, nearly all of the museums Katz approached to host the multimillion dollar exhibition declined, even when he offered it to them for free, the Sun-Times reports. Besides Wrightwood 659, the only museum to express interest was the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, which is in talks to bring part of the show to Art Basel 2026.
Despite enduring prejudice toward queer art, the exhibition at Wrightwood 659 has been a roaring success, with the gallery selling more advance tickets to it than any other show in its seven-year history.
The final piece in the exhibition is an archway full of photographs of the Nazis burning thousands of books at Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, the first sexology research center in the world, in 1933.
“The idea that everything that flowers over the course of the exhibition can so quickly be destroyed, is, of course, a metaphor for where we are now,” Katz tells Fast Company.
While Kertbeny’s terms became twisted into means of isolating “homosexuals” from the rest of the population, as the persecution and mass murder of queer people during World War II exemplifies on a horrific scale, the exhibition strikes a unified note about belonging, even in the midst of confusion and fear.
“We wanted to show how art offered numerous positions along that spectrum, positions that literally had no words to describe them,” Katz tells Block Club. “Art could figure what language could not.”
“The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” is on view at the Wrightwood 659 in Chicago through July 26.

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A new art exhibition in Chicago uses more than 300 works of art to trace the historical origins of the word “homosexual,” mapping how it’s shaped our modern perception of queer identity.
According to its lead curator, museums around the world have refused to show the exhibition due to the current political climate—even when it’s offered to them for free.
The exhibition, titled The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939, is currently on view at the Wrightwood 659 museum in Chicago through July 26.
It’s the first time that the exhibition—a passion project of over eight years for lead curator Jonathan D.
Katz—has been shown in its entirety.

Installation view of The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939, at Wrightwood 659, 2025.
[Photo:Daniel Eggert/@DesigningDan]
Through sculptures, paintings, prints, and other media from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it explores early, oft-overlooked expressions of queer culture.
Further, it examines how the coining of the term “homosexual” created a binary understanding of sexuality that we’re still grappling with today.
The First Homosexuals sold more advance tickets than any other show since the Wrightwood 659 opened in 2018.
But Katz says that after pitching the exhibition to many other museums, he’s been faced with one rejection after another. 
Marie Laurencin, Le bal élégant or La danse à la campagne (The Elegant Ball, or The Country Dance), 1913, Oil on canvas, 112 x 144 cm, Musée Marie Laurencin, Tokyo.
[Image: courtesy Wrightwood 659]
A career in queer studies 
Katz, who is a professor of queer art history at the University of Pennsylvania, began his career in queer studies during the Reagan administration.
“When I started, my field was just being born,” Katz wrote in a biography for Northwestern University, where he received his PhD.
“Reagan was in office, AIDS was being instrumentalized by the Right to justify the most odious forms of discrimination, and I had been kicked out of the University of Chicago (among other universities) for pursuing the relationship between art and sexuality.”
In the decades since, Katz has gone on to teach queer studies at several different universities, including Yale, and cocurated a queer exhibition called Hide/Seek Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Katz’s new exhibition is inspired by a question that’s followed him throughout his years of research. 
“The minute you go outside of Europe and its colonies, questions of sexual difference assume a completely different meaning—which is to say that, very often, there’s absolutely no issue associated with same-sex sexuality, and it’s often understood as part of a continuum of sexualities,” Katz says.
“I was interested, therefore, in trying to decenter the assumptions that we have about sexuality by reference to other cultural norms.
That’s what motivated this exhibition, as well as a careful investigation of what, literally, the earliest representations look like.”
The first use of the word “homosexual”
Katz’s curiosity led him back to what’s believed to be the first-ever use of the word “homosexual,” found in a letter exchange between two queer activists, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kertbeny, in 1868.

1868 Letter.
National Széchényi Library, Manuscript Collection.
[Image: courtesy Wrightwood 659]
In the letters, Kertbeny takes issue with Ulrichs’s relegation of queer individuals to its own class of people (or a “third sex.”).
Instead, Kertbeny argued, everyone has the capacity for both “homosexual” and “heterosexual” desire.
“What’s striking is that we use Kertbeny’s language [today], but we have unfortunately held fast to Ulrichs’ deeply minoritizing identity category,” Katz says.
Andreas Andersen, Interior with Hendrik Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence,, 1894, Oil on canvas, 128.5 x 160 cm.
Under licence from MiC – Direzione Musei Statali della Città di Roma – Photographic Archive; by kind permission of the National Museums Directorate of the City of Rome – Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum.
[Image: courtesy Wrightwood 659]
Both before and after Kertbeny and Ulrichs’s debate, queer sexuality existed on a spectrum—and it was captured by countless artists.
The First Homosexuals includes works by 125 of them, from well-known artists like Jean Cocteau and the Lumière Brothers to lesser-known creatives like Jacques-Émile Blanche.
They were pulled from an extensive list of sources, including both private collectors and institutions like MOMA. 
Works include an 1820s depiction of men dressed as women on the streets of Lima, Peru; a series of scrolls from Japan in 1850 exploring the sexual education of a young man, who’s shown sleeping with both men and women in a variety of positions; and an 1891 photograph showing four women in a romantic embrace.
The exhibition is divided into eight sections, each dedicated to peeling back a layer of a story that’s largely gone untold in the mainstream. 
Alice Austen, The Darned Club, 1891, Original glass plate negative, 4 x 5 in, Collection of Historic Richmond Town.
[Image: courtesy Wrightwood 659]
The final portion of the exhibition is an archway wallpapered with photos of Nazis burning books at the Institute for Sexual Research, the world’s first queer rights organization.
It’s a dark closing note that reminds viewers of the many archives of queer history that have been purposefully and violently hidden.
“The idea that everything that flowers over the course of the exhibition can so quickly be destroyed, is, of course, a metaphor for where we are now,” Katz says.
Since the exhibition opened on May 2, audience reactions have been striking.
“It’s been profound,” Katz says.
“Lots of emotion, tears, real delight, and a sense of a robbed history that’s being restored.”
Elisàr von Kupffer, La danza, 1918, Oil on canvas with painted frame, 197 x 99 cm (framed).
[Image: © Municipality of Minusio/Centro Elisarion, Claudio Berger (photo)/courtesy Wrightwood 659]
A “terrible sign” for museums
For now, though, that history might only be available to a select few. 
When Katz first began outreach for collecting the art to be included in The First Homosexuals six years ago, he says 80 to 90% of his requests to museums and collectors were rejected—the highest rate of rejection he’s ever encountered.
“There were a number of pieces that didn’t come because when you mount an exhibition about the first homosexuals, you know right going in that there are going to be places that just will not want to play with you,” Katz says.
“And that was indeed the case.”
Ida Matton, La Confidence (The Secret), 1902, Plaster, 65 x 56 cm, Photo: Joel Bergroth/Hälsinglands Museum.
[Image: courtesy Wrightwood 659]
Since then, rejections have continued to plague the exhibition.
Katz has been pitching the finished show to museums around the world for nearly four years, in some cases even offering the exhibition for free despite its multimillion-dollar valuation, he told the Chicago Sun-Times.
So far, he’s received near-universal rejections, with the exception of the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, which is currently in talks with Katz to display part of the exhibition at Art Basel 2026.
Time and time again, Katz has received the same standard rejection notices from over 100 museums, including the Tate Britain.
(The Tate did not respond to a request for comment by publication)
Saturnino Herrán, Nuestros dioses antiguos, 1916, Oil on canvas, 101 x 112 cm, Colección Andrés Blaisten, México.
[Image: courtesy Wrightwood 659]
“I wish I knew more—I just get the rejection letters,” Katz says.
“What I hear is, generally, ‘It doesn’t fit our programming,’ or ‘We’re fully scheduled,’ or some typical excuse.” But one director of a major museum, whose name Katz declined to share, did choose to elaborate further.
“They said to me, ‘It’s exactly the kind of exhibition I want to show, and therefore it’s the exhibition I can’t show.” In several cases, Katz adds, the initial reception of the proposal was very promising, but it was ultimately turned down, leading him to wonder whether the museums’ boards were issuing the final “no.”
In part, Katz attributes this reaction to a “hangover” from photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1988 exhibition The Perfect Moment, which was cancelled by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., after conservative leaders heavily criticized the exhibition for containing homoerotic content.
In the midst of the Reagan presidency, federal funding for the arts had become a hot-button issue, especially as it pertained to work that right-wing pundits labeled indecent. 
It’s a period in history that feels like an uneasy echo of the arts scene today, as the Trump administration has moved to dismantle funding for local museums and libraries, canceled National Endowment for the Humanities grants, and blocked federal arts funding from going to artists who promote so-called “gender ideology,” a vague term that the government appears to be using as a dog whistle for any kind of gender expression outside of the binary.

While Katz sent out most of his art loan requests and exhibition pitches before Trump’s election, he says this pattern of rejection is a familiar narrative that’s plagued the museum world for years.

Tomioka Eisen, kuchi-e (frontispiece) with artist’s seal Shisen, c.
1906, Woodblock print, 23.2 x 31.6 cm, Tirey-van Lohuizen Collection.
[Image: courtesy Wrightwood 659]
“It may not be Trump’s horrific politics, but it is still horrific politics,” Katz says.
“It’s the age old prejudicial politics that animates the museum world.”
More generally, as a queer studies expert who faced repeated instances of institutional homophobia during the Reagan years, Katz feels that the current political attitude toward the queer community is “worse than a regression.”
Tamara de Lempicka, Nu assis de profil, 1923, Oil on canvas, 81.2 x 54 cm, Döpfner Collection, Germany.
[Image: Sotheby’s/courtesy Wrightwood 659]
“Homophobia was actually bizarrely less naked under Reagan than it is under Trump,” Katz says.
“They still hated us, but they talked about the idea of an inclusive culture.
There’s no discourse of an inclusive culture now.
There are clearly drawn borders and boundary lines in every sense of the word, and a profound sense of us against them.”
For museums that are brave enough to speak out, Katz believes there could be an opportunity to build trust with new audiences by choosing to platform queer stories instead of silencing them.
“I think that museums actually have a remarkable opportunity to build their audience and relevance if they seize it,” Katz says.
“There is a large population that is not a veteran museum-going population that can become a veteran museum-going population by speaking to the social and political issues that haunt this country.
That many museums try to avoid that desperately is a terrible sign.
What museums need to do is frankly engage with it.”
Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/91332097/this-exhibition-explores-the-history-of-the-term-homosexual-museums-are-afraid-to-show-it">https://www.fastcompany.com/91332097/this-exhibition-explores-the-history-of-the-term-homosexual-museums-are-afraid-to-show-it">https://www.fastcompany.com/91332097/this-exhibition-explores-the-history-of-the-term-homosexual-museums-are-afraid-to-show-it
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