Jonathan Ned Katz, an independent scholar, historian of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and heterosexual American history, and a visual artist.<BR><BR>His historical work has focused on same-sex attraction and changes in the social construction of sexuality and intimate relationships over time. His works stress that the categories with which we name, describe, define and understand human sexuality are historically and culturally specific, along with the social organization of sexual activity, desire, relationships, and sexual identities. In his work, language is studied as one important tool that human beings use to construct different, historically specific sexualities and sex/gender systems.<BR><BR>In 2004 Katz returned to visual art, a talent of his childhood, teens and youth. On Friday, February 15, 2013 the first solo show of Jonathan Ned Katz's art opened at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, in New York, curated by the noted art historian Jonathan David Katz. (The two are not related.) The show runs until March 31, 2013.<BR><BR>Katz is that rare bird, a pioneering, innovative historian whose books have helped to create the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, and sexual history in general, whose publications have received the highest scholarly accolades, who has taught and organized a historical exhibit at Yale, and headed a faculty seminar at Princeton, but who lacks any college degrees.
