How ‘Gay’ Became an Identity in Art

 

Andreas Andersen, “Interior with Hendrik Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence,” 1894, from
“The First Homosexuals:The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” at Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago.Credit...

 

Two groundbreaking exhibitions in Chicago explore the shift in portrayals of same-sex attraction. They are being staged at a fraught moment. Arthur Lubow reports. 

The New York Times, July 12, 2025

When did homosexuality change from a description of what people do to a definition of who they are? How was an act transformed into an identity? In this precarious moment, as White House pronouncements, court decisions and public polling indicate backsliding support for gay rights in this country, such questions, long chewed over by scholars of sociology, philosophy and gender studies, are addressed in two impressive art exhibitions in Chicago.

Six years in the making, “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” at Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago, through Aug. 2, is an eye-opening global survey of same-sex-oriented art. With roughly 300 works on view, venturing beyond Europe and North America to include Latin America and Asia, it is a huge show. Yet the curator Jonathan D. Katz, who was assisted by Johnny Willis, said that procuring loans from international museums for an exhibition with this title and focus was a struggle, and more often than not, the requests were refused. Indeed, at the last moment, two promised paintings from Slovakia, which is governed by a socially conservative populist party, were withdrawn; a large black-and-white reproduction of one is hanging on a wall.

Coincidentally, a superlative exhibition nearby, “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World” at the Art Institute of Chicago until Oct. 5, explores how the Impressionist master concentrated on the portrayal of men, at a time when turning the male gaze on another man was almost unthinkable. Most of his depictions are not overtly homoerotic. However, in a large painting, scandalous in its day and startling even now, he viewed from behind a naked man drying himself. It’s the sort of boudoir picture that his friend Edgar Degas frequently made of female bathers. Caillebotte, who died at 45 in 1894, lived with a woman and never identified as gay. An important lesson drawn from both shows is that categories like gay and straight are markers of our time, not his.

Gustave Caillebotte, “Man at His Bath,” 1884, from “Caillebotte: Painting His World”
at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Impressionist master turned the male gaze on another
man, an almost unthinkable perspective at the time.Credit...via Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

As documented in the erudite and sumptuous “First Homosexuals” catalog, the term “homosexual” (and “heterosexual”) came into being in the 1860s, along with “urning,” a newly coined word that has not lasted so well. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, divided humanity into those who are innately attracted to the opposite sex, and the “urnings” who are enamored of their own. A few years later, the writer Karl Maria Kertbeny came up with “homosexual.” Unlike Ulrichs, he viewed sexual choice as a changeable taste, not a binary division, akin to deciding what dish to cook for dinner. Yet in the years that followed, Ulrichs’s hard-and-fast split between gay and straight came to be popularized with Kertbeny’s terminology.

Katz argues that at about the turn of the 20th century, in light of behavioral and psychological research, same-sex attraction shifted. Instead of something that could turn like a weather vane, it came to be regarded as an immutable orientation, and the objects of erotic fascination for gay and lesbian artists changed, too. Earlier gay artists embraced indeterminacy and represented bodies that blurred the line between masculine and feminine. But once homosexuality was no longer viewed as a momentary preference, androgynous adolescents gave way to muscular men and buxom women.

Gustave Courtois, “Narcissus,” 1872, from “The First Homosexuals,” at Wrightwood 659.
Courtois in his early works elided the distinction between male and female.Credit...
Marseille, musée des Beaux-Arts/Claude Almodovar-Michel Vialle; via Wrightwood 659

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, “La Blanchisseuse (The Laundress),” 1879. Graphite, ink and ink
wash on paper, Wrightwood 659.Credit...via Schiller & Bodo European Paintings and Wrightwood 659

Two paintings in the show by the academic French painter Gustave Courtois illustrate this transformation. In 1872, Courtois limned the nude body of a young model who posed as the self-adoring Narcissus. With his sex discreetly hidden by a ribbon, Narcissus elides the distinction between male and female. But over the next 35 years, Courtois rechanneled his energies. Painting a portrait of Maurice Dériaz, a professional bodybuilder, in 1907, Courtois clearly relished Dériaz’s dark mustache and bulging biceps as emblems of virility.

Courtois is believed to have been the life partner of another painter, Carl Ernst von Stetten. The exhibition includes a polished drawing of them walking arm in arm, which the art historian André Dombrowski asserts in an essay is the first known depiction of a modern gay male couple in European art. Women more frequently paired off as loving friends; the show features many depictions of lesbian domesticity, including the photos that Alice Austen made on Staten Island at the end of the 19th century, of herself and her friends, holding each other tenderly or frolicking in drag.

Alice Austen, “The Darned Club,” 1891, a depiction of lesbian domesticity. Austen
made a tender image on Staten Island of herself and her friends.Credit...via Wrightwood 659

Many of the gay male encounters portrayed in Western art are fleeting or transactional. In early 20th-century America, George Bellows, who was not gay, made a print of a public bathhouse that centers on a naked effeminate youth flirting outrageously with a stout older chap; and Charles Demuth, who was gay, depicted himself in conversation with two sailors on a street outside the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Same-sex relations between men were thought to be driven by lust, not affection.

But in other cultures, same-sex relations and gender nonconformity were accepted. The exhibition includes fascinating depictions of cross-dressers in the early 19th century on the street in Lima, Peru; the erotic adventures of a young man engaged with male and female lovers in a Japanese scroll from the mid-19th century; and the tender intimacies in the early 20th century of Uzbek men with youths who worked traditionally as singers and dancers.

Francisco Fierro, “Hombres vestidos de mujer,” circa 1834-41, depicts a cross-dresser
on the street in Lima, Peru.Credit...Museo de Arte de Lima, via Wrightwood 659; Photo by Daniel Giannoni

Charles Demuth, “On ‘That’ Street,” 1932. Watercolor over graphite.Credit...via Wrightwood 659

And even in the West, by the end of the 19th century, one can find affectionate scenes of domesticity, such as a painting from 1893 by the Danish artist Emilie Mundt of her female partner, their adopted daughter, and the partner’s elderly father at the piano; and a remarkable portrayal the next year by Andreas Andersen of his sculptor brother Hendrik lying under a duvet and stroking a pink-ribboned kitten, as the artist John Briggs Potter, naked at the foot of the bed, pulls on a sock.

For sheer eccentricity, it would be hard to outdo Elisàr von Kupffer, who called himself Elisarion. With his partner, Eduard von Mayer, also an artist, he lived in a mansion in southern Switzerland that he deemed a temple dedicated to a self-styled religion that denied gender differences. His endearingly campy 1915-16 oil painting of two youths in a chapel being joined in union by another young man, all of them nude, is said to be the first artistic depiction of a same-sex wedding.

Elisàr von Kupffer, “La Nuova lega (The New Union),” 1915-1916, an early depiction
of a same-sex wedding.Credit...Municipality of Minusio — Centro Elisarion, via Wrightwood 659

Unlike these gay fantasies, in the art of Caillebotte there is no certain tip-off to sexual orientation. A wide-ranging talent who energetically pursued boating, boat design, philately and gardening, along with painting, the independently wealthy artist was for many years remembered primarily as a patron of his fellow Impressionists, bequeathing his collection of their work to France. When his own art was rediscovered, it was hailed for its radical use of perspective and cropped framing, which he derived from photography. The more recent curiosity about Caillebotte’s interest in masculine subjects raises questions that can’t be answered, and the curators are careful to avoid making any claims about his sexuality.

But naysayers who argue that finding traces of homoeroticism in Caillebotte’s work is an unsupported anachronism are mistaken. His first major painting, “Floor Scrapers,” depicted bare-chested muscular men stripping the wood parquet in the apartment of his parents. Its rejection by the establishment Salon of 1875 led Caillebotte to ally himself with the Impressionists and exhibit with them the following year. When he took up boating at his country estate outside Paris, his paintings of the sporting activity, unlike those of his colleagues Manet, Monet and Renoir, depicted only lithe men at the oars, rather than fashionable male-female couples. Most of the men he portrayed were not engaged in war, hunting or business, but within domestic settings thought to constitute the feminine domain.

Caillebotte, “Floor Scrapers,” 1875. The Art Institute of Chicago focuses on his subjects,
often lithe men, but the curators are careful to avoid making any claims about his sexuality.Credit...
via of Musée d’Orsay, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Franck Raux

These musings are not merely the product of our own day. The almost life-size “Man at His Bath,” with its subject prosaically naked rather than heroically or classically nude, provoked embarrassment and hostility when Caillebotte tried to exhibit it in 1884. It would have held pride of place at Wrightwood 659; none of the artists in that show, gifted and intriguing as many of them are, approaches Caillebotte in achievement. He painted the towel with white and gray slashes of pigment, but stippled the skin lovingly in flesh tones, with rosy highlights on the buttocks. Eventually, the canvas was accepted for an exhibition by the progressive Brussels artists society, Les XX, in 1888, but the organizers hid it in a back room to avoid attention. The following year, the leading Impressionist dealer in Paris, Paul Durand-Ruel, declined to show it, and Caillebotte, who didn’t need to sell his paintings, withdrew from exhibiting for the remainder of his life.

Caillebotte’s reputation hardly rests on his predilection for male subjects. His vertiginous depictions of the street as viewed from his balcony, which are included in the exhibition, are justifiably acclaimed. His most famous painting, “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” a treasure of the Art Institute, with its exaggerated perspective, bold cropping and a choreography that softens the bustle of urban life into a gentle ballet, doesn’t gain anything from scrutinizing in what direction the male protagonist is looking.

“Paris Street; Rainy Day,” 1877. Caillebotte’s masterwork at the Art Institute, with its exaggerated perspective and bold cropping, softens the bustle of urban life into a gentle ballet.Credit...via The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. Worcester Collection

Indeed, the hunt for telltale signs of his sexual orientation turns ludicrous at times. The notion that the working-class fellow looking out over the Pont de l’Europe, in Caillebotte’s painting of that name, could be a sex worker eyed by the well-dressed bourgeois who is the artist’s double — as suggested in an essay by a feminist art historian, Norma Broude, that is cited in the catalog — strikes me as absurd. Yet refusing to acknowledge the homosocial, and in some instances homoerotic, elements in Caillebotte’s work is also a distortion of the record.

At this politically charged moment, American arts institutions seem anxious to avoid controversy. Wrightwood 659 offered to send its monumental exhibition to a major museum, without a fee and even covering the costs. It received no acceptances (although an abbreviated version, one-fifth the size, will be shown at the Kunstmuseum Basel next year). And the Art Institute chose a banal and anodyne title for its Caillebotte exhibition, “Painting His World,” forgoing the title of the Musée d’Orsay and the J. Paul Getty Museum shows: “Painting Men.” Asked why, the Chicago curator Gloria Groom said the new title was more “inclusive”: the show displays the artist’s sole female nude and a few other nonconforming works. But in practice, the rebranding obscures the originality of this take on Caillebotte’s oeuvre. Maybe the art world has not come so far as we might think from the days when “Man at His Bath” was hidden in a virtual closet.

The very gay life of writer Edmund White

 By Aaron Hicklin

The New York Times, June 7-8, 2025

Edmund white might have invented the unapologetic queer on the page. At least, he did for me. Nothing coded gay, vaguely tragic; nothing furtive or metaphorical or obscure behind the billowing curtains of literary flounciness.

I can still recall the thrill of spotting the cover of his 1983 novel "A Boy's Own Story" in a rotating rack of paperbacks in a bookstore in my dull, conservative hometown, Marlborough, England. I must have been about 15. It was the mid-1980s, the thick of the AIDS plague, and gay men were being cast as vectors of their own destruction.

It was a complicated time to be thinking about coming out. But here was a novel with a boy on the cover who looked close to my age, his thick glossy hair gently ruffled by the wind, his lips plump, his jaw strong. His tank top revealed the slope of his shoulders, the contours of his biceps.

I'd never seen a cover or read a book that spoke to me like that. The fact that a gay teenager could exist in fiction blew my mind. The fact that one, like me, could exist in the world did, too. "A Boy's Own Story" was daring not just because it placed a queer adolescent at its center, but also because it did so with sophistication, introspection and horniness. The narrator --clearly, as with all of his narrators, based on him-- is vividly real.

Ed White and I were later to become friends, when I had  moved to New York and was editing Out magazine. This was not a surprise: Ed, who died on Tuesday [June 3] at 85, was always very open to meeting young literary men. He was a raconteur and had stories for miles. I lapped them up. We all did.

Talking frankly about sex was a hallmark of his writing. (Among his many nonfiction works was "The Joy of Gay Sex," a sex manual he co-wrote [with Dr. Charles Silverstein] in 1997.) He always saw himself as a gay writer for gay readers, the distinction he drew between his generation of queer writes and those who came earlier, like Gore Vidal and James Baldwin. They might write gay characters, but they never seemed to be writing for gay readers. Ed was.

The Stonewall riots of 1969, which he took part in, had reshaped him. Before Stonewall, "we had always thought of ourselves as a diagnosis, as a malady," he once told me, echoing the medical establishment's view of homosexuality. "Suddenly, it was all switched, and we were a minority. I saw myself as a freedom fighter. It mobilized my anger. I just think anger towards other people is better than self-hatred."

His most recent book, "The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir," published in January, continued that fight to just tell his story, both his own and also, though the details might vary, all queer people's. Ed had no patience for prudes, and he loved to talk about young lovers who were "gerontophiles," a word he clearly relished. He didn't care for respectability. "Gay men have seldom been candid about their sex lives and are even less so now they are getting married and fathering offsprings," he wrote in a rather salty forward to "The Loves of My Life."

Off the page, he was just as defiant. The British writer and playwright Neil Bartlett recalls attending a lavish soiree in Paris in 1984, hosted by Marie-Claude Brunhoff, a society fixture. Mr. Bartlett was Ed's companion for the night, and was, at Ed's insistence, seated next to the host despite his wearing eyeliner, a chain around his neck, and jeans peppered with so many holes you could see right through them. "I have never been prouder to be someone's piece of rough trade," Mr. Bartlett said.

One virtue of being a pioneer of autofiction: Everything is already out there. Ed never felt the need to censor himself. "From the beginning of his writing career, White enjoyed shocking readers in the spirit of Jean Genet. on whom White wrote a wonderful biography," said the writer and academic Blake Smith. "You can find basically every sexual scenario from incest to cuckoldry to hustling in his novels --and a lot of it in his memoirs as well!"

The last time I saw Ed was on April 7, in what would be the final on-camera interview for a documentary Brian Montopoli and I are making. Ed was eager to plumb his memories, even if the names sometimes took a little longer to surface. Sitting in his small apartment in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, I felt that I had stepped into a vanished New York, one where books spilled from the shelves and the walls crowded with art from friends --including a portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe of Ed with Truman Capote.

Whenever I visited, I'd bring a cake or cookies, and we'd sit at the cluttered dining table, while Ed brought me up to speed on what he'd read, who had visited, and what he was working on. He was always working on something. That never changed. A new novel was underway, he told us; another had just been sent to his agent.

We talked a lot about the legacy of the Violet Quill, a group of seven gay writers that met irregularly in New York in 1980 and 1981 and that included Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grimley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Georgee Whitmore and Ed. Four died during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Mr. Picano died in March. Only Mr. Holleran now remains.

On that last visit, we landed on our documentary's working title: "The Winter of Edmund White," a nod to his age, but not to his spirit, which remained impish, magnetic and razor sharp. When the subject of death arose, he was characteristically unflinching. "The dying part I don't look forward to, but being dead is OK. It's like being asleep," he said. Then, with that sly, knowing smile of his, he added, "I guess I think if I keep writing, I won't die."

On that score, he was right. Through his books, Ed endures. He embraced the role of gay elder, guiding generations who came to him for direction and support. No one was better read or more willing to share what he had read. His apartment was a kind of salon, where he and his partner, the writer Michael Carroll, hosted a rotating cast of artists, writers and thinkers. He was so generous with his time, and endlessly curious.

So many younger writers owe their careers to his encouragement and support (he was prolific at writing blurbs for debut authors' books), and in a sense they could be called his progeny. "He was like my N.Y.C. parent," the writer Christopher Bollen replied when I texted him to commiserate. "I'm so heartbroken. But also so lucky."

A revelation from that last interview was that Ed still met weekly with a boyfriend from his teenage years. For someone who had lost so many friends and lovers, this struck me as profoundly poignant, but it also exemplified Ed's idea of queer or chosen family, long before the term became hackneyed. He had gone through AIDS, and contracted HIV in 1984. He understood that queer family was all he had.

Writing for Ed was a confessional. In more that 30 novels and memoirs he revisited much of the same territory, even when his books were set in the future, like his 2022 novel "A Previous Life," in which he explored a devastating affair with a young Italian aristocrat by imagining his former lover as a ridiculous old man looking back on a forgotten gay novelist called Edmund White. What an audacious move for an octogenarian novelist. He was also a stylist, one who cared about sentences, but he also liked to "roughen up beautiful surfaces," to quote the writer Garth Greenwell, another White protégé.

"If gays have gone from invisibility to ubiquity and from self-hatred to self-acceptance, we should recognize we are still being pushed off cliffs in Yemen --and from the top fronds of Florida palms, for all I know," he wrote in "The Loves of My Life."

Most important, he understood that our stories had to be written so they could not be undone, and that books were the last defense against erasure. That his death should come on the same day that Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth has ordered the Navy to review the names of vessels honoring prominent civil rights leaders, including Harvey Milk, is the kind of bitter coincidence that probably would have made him laugh.

Not that he craved straight society's approval. Edmund White had no use for shame, and, in both life and work, he refused to sand down the edges of queer existence to make it palatable. Acceptance was never the point. Truth was.

Studio 54: 'The Best Party of Your Life'

By Vincent Dowd

BBC World Service

26 April 2012

It's 35 years since Studio 54 opened in New York. It quickly became the best known nightclub in America, riding the wave of 1970s dance music and newly found personal freedom. It made vast amounts of money for its two young owners. But after three years the party came crashing to a halt.

"On a good night Studio 54 was the best party of your life," says Anthony Haden-Guest, who reported on the club as a journalist throughout its short existence. He says Studio 54 was the right club in the right city at the right time.

Women were thriving in terms of their sexuality and it was also a great time to be gay. There was no stigma inside Studio 54. "Everything was happening at the same moment: there was the woman's movement, the gay movement, ethnic movements of all kinds. The whole place was combustible with energy."

Studio 54 opened just off Broadway in April 1977. The building had originally been a theatre and later a CBS studio.

Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager already had a club in Queens called Enchanted Garden. But 1977 was the year of Saturday Night Fever and disco reigned supreme. The young men were certain that what worked in an outer borough of New York could work in central Manhattan too.

Celebrities by the dozen flocked to Studio 54 and long lines of would-be clubbers queued outside hoping to be admitted. Most would-be clubbers never got past the doormen at Studio 54 who were looking for the right mix of people - especially those with high energy. Celebrities from every walk of life could be found at this legendary nightclub, including the former first lady of Canada Margaret Trudeau.

"There was always a ton of people outside waiting to get in - people from all walks of life," says Myra Scheer, an early fan who later became Rubell's assistant. "Most never got in, but if you caught the eye of Steve or of (doorman) Marc Benecke suddenly a path opened up. "Beyond the velvet rope was what I used to call the Corridor of Joy. It had ornate chandeliers and everybody there was screaming with joy that they got in. You could hear the pulsating music as you walked through and then you turned left and there was this dance floor. Everybody on that floor had the energy of being a radiant star."

Benecke can still recall how desperate people were to enter the club. "At one point you could buy maps which claimed to show how to get in through tunnels up from the subway system. It was crazy. Naturally people tried good old-fashioned bribery but that didn't work. Then I'd say to them they should go and buy the exact same jacket I was wearing - forgive me but I was only a teen at the time. And they'd go to Bloomingdale's and buy it and still they wouldn't get in."

"But if you were just dressing up in costume to get through the door, it showed you probably weren't the right person. We were looking for people with high energy," he says.

Looking great did not guarantee entry. "What we really wanted was the mix."

Haden-Guest says owner Steve Rubell had a sense for who ought to be on the dance floor on a specific night. "Every time was different. It was like a salad bowl - they might let in some straight-looking kids from Harvard, but then they'd also want a bunch of drag queens or whatever. Often it was surprisingly relaxed."

He said it would be impossible to run the club's VIP room today when a photo taken on phone can be spread around the world in an instant. But the VIPs were photographed and often. The list is long and included Calvin Klein, Truman Capote, Liza Minnelli, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elizabeth Taylor and Andy Warhol. Other regulars are perhaps more surprising: Benecke recalls the classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz turning up regularly with his wife Wanda. "He always wore ear-plugs. He hated the music but he loved watching the people."

Scheer recalls Andy Warhol saying the club was a dictatorship at the door but a democracy inside. "There was no A-List or B-List or C-List. We came after the pill arrived and before Aids had a name. Women were thriving in terms of their sexuality and it was also a great time to be gay. There was no stigma inside Studio 54."

The club soon had a reputation as a place where physical intimacy needn't be limited to the dance floor. Benecke insists the sexual free-for-all has been exaggerated.

"They had a place called the Rubber Room upstairs. You would go up there and sure there might be couples having sex - but only one or two."

Haden-Guest was a regular visitor to what some assumed was a non-stop Bacchanalia of sex and drugs. But he thinks the amount of drugs taken has been overstated. "I had a wonderful time in disco culture but drugs played an extremely minor part. I think most people were just there to dance and have a good time."

The club's sudden end had less to do with public morality than with the fact that huge amounts of cash had gone undeclared for tax purposes. In 1980 Rubell and Schrager were sentenced to jail.

Attempts were made to revive the Studio 54 brand but the party was over. Steve Rubell died in 1989 and today, at 65, Ian Schrager is a successful hotel owner.

Looking back, Benecke wonders if the club's heyday had already passed when it closed. "The tax problems certainly speeded up the demise. But as a society we were changing into Punk and New Wave right after that. So Studio 54 would have had to change a lot to carry on at the same level of success."

Last year Studio 54 Radio launched on satellite in the US. It plays the hits of the disco era and Benecke and Scheer have a show discussing the old days. "It's like we have Class of 54 Reunions," says Scheer. "Because we went to the coolest high school. Modern kids spend so much time texting or tweeting or getting on YouTube. But we were in the moment. We were really there."

Let's Make Anti-fascism Great Again

 info-es-seville@democratsabroad.org

The next four years are gonna suck

"The next four years are gonna suck. But they’ll suck worse if we let the news cycle — and the man who dominates it — drain the joy from our lives. We need to pay attention and we need to stay in the fight. Because of course we do. But we should spend as much time as we possibly can over the next four years with friends and lovers doing things that bring us joy.

Anyone who tells you that making time for joy — however you define it — is a distraction or a betrayal has no idea what they’re talking about. During the darkest days of the AIDS Crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.

It didn’t look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn’t feel like we’re going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing."

- Dan Savage

Tech oligarchs

This is the cartoon The Washington Post censored last week. The cartoonist, Pulitzer prize winner Ann Telnaes, has resigned out of dignity.

The 10 Commandments belong in (some) places of worship — not in public schools

Photo/Brad Bowie/The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate via the AP / Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signs bills related to his education plan on Wednesday, June 19, 2024, at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette, La. Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.

By St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board (TNS), June 24, 2024

Do Americans have the right to not practice religion?

When the question is phrased like that, even most fervent religious believers out there would likely concede that, yes, non-belief (like belief itself) must qualify as a fundamental American right.

Yet that right is under frontal attack, from a religiously driven political movement operating under the premise that if government doesn't promote religion, it is by definition attacking it.

That premise is not only backward but is a slippery slope toward theocracy. The latest slide comes in Louisiana, with a new law requiring that every public school and college post the Ten Commandments in every classroom.

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed the law Wednesday. It makes his state the first to test the Constitution's church-state separation in this manner since a U.S. Supreme Court opinion in 1980 that found a Kentucky requirement to display the commandments in public schools violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

That clause is unambiguous: Congress (and, by extension, the states) "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

As clear as that seems, it won't necessarily be clear to today's radical-right Supreme Court. The conservative majority in 2022 upheld a public high school football coach's right to pray on the school's football field after games and invite his players to join him. The ruling brushed off the obvious implied pressure the coach created on his players to pray.

The Louisiana law goes beyond merely implied pressure: Every student attending publicly funded schools in the state will literally be a captive audience to a religious doctrine specific to Judeo-Christian faith. The new law even sets minimum dimensions for the commandment displays (11 by 14 inches) and mandates that they must be "in a large, easily readable font."

That slippery slope we mentioned? This is what it looks like.

Defenders of the new law maintain that the commandments aren't solely a religious statement but a historical document of cultural principles ingrained in the laws of America and elsewhere over the ages.

That may apply to some of the commandments — the prohibitions on murder, theft and false witness, for example.

But what is an adherent to polytheist religions like Hinduism or Buddhism supposed to do with "Thou shalt have no other gods before me"? And what is an atheist supposed to do with any of it?

In fact, even many of the Judeo-Christian faithful may discover that with this law, Louisiana officially relegates their beliefs to secondary status as well. The law specifies wording that religious scholars say generally represents a Protestant version of the commandments — a version distinct from those recognized by Catholics and Jews.

What is it that business conservatives always say about the free market? The government isn't supposed to pick winners and losers? Shouldn't something as complex and personal as faith have at least that level of insulation from government?

Allowing the religious beliefs of a few to dictate public policy for everyone creates dangers that go beyond the merely philosophical.

There's some irony in the fact that Louisiana's new law is fervently supported by the same conservative movement that has turned school board meetings into culture-war battlefields over books and curriculum.

They argue that teaching racial history or gender issues in schools strays from legitimate education and into the realm of cultural indoctrination. But it's OK to force religious belief (and, in fact, one specific version of religious belief) into every classroom?

If this law stands, every public school student in Louisiana will face what amounts to a daily religious sermon — whether they (or their parents) like it or not.