This report draws on prize-winning scholarship in Byzantine studies — principally Roland Betancourt’s Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020) and Kathryn Ringrose’s The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium (University of Chicago Press, 2003) — together with medieval legal and monastic history, the documented career histories of specific artists whose practices were destroyed by criminal prosecution, and journalism on the 2025–2026 federal assault on LGBTQ+ cultural institutions in the United States.
This version adds to the original: (1) a corrected account of the Anatomy Set in Stone series and its historical source material; (2) the Iberian LGBTQ+ legal history, integrated as a parallel strand in the legal timeline; (3) current medical research data on gender bias in clinical science; and (4) an updated assessment of the founding argument in light of the March 2026 Portuguese parliamentary vote. A Gaps and Tensions section has been added, following the A Substrate of Exclusion series’ standard structure.
The historical argument in Part I requires a methodological caution that Betancourt himself states explicitly: the extant sources do not provide enough information to support a claim that any medieval figure “felt their gender identity did not match their birth-assigned sex in the way that this subjectivity is simplistically imagined today.” This report reads those figures as what Betancourt calls “possible intersectional subjectivities” — not as modern LGBTQ+ identities projected backward, but as evidence that the devotional spaces in which mosaic achieved its greatest expression were never the sexually and gender-normative spaces they are retrospectively imagined to have been.
The founding narrative in Part IV draws directly on a public statement by Rachael Que Vargas published on her Substack on August 21, 2025. It is cited as such throughout.
On 11 February 1873, at seven minutes past seven in the evening, Simeon Solomon was arrested in a public urinal in Stratford Place Mews, off Oxford Street in London. He was thirty-two years old.
By any measure of the Victorian art world, Solomon was at the height of his career. He had exhibited at the Royal Academy since the age of fifteen. Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter then at the peak of his own reputation, had written of Solomon: “He is the greatest artist of us all; we are mere schoolboys compared with you.” Solomon’s work — devotional, sacred, suffused with Jewish and Christian mysticism, the figures of angels and saints rendered in the androgynous idiom that was his signature — had been celebrated, collected, and discussed as among the finest painting of its generation.
The charge was attempted sodomy. Solomon and George Roberts, a sixty-year-old stableman who could read but not write, were found guilty. Solomon was released on surety. He never exhibited at the Royal Academy again. He did not exhibit publicly in any significant venue for the remaining thirty-two years of his life. He spent periods in the St. Giles Workhouse. He became dependent on alcohol and died there in 1905.
The Royal Academy, which had received his work since he was a child prodigy, said nothing. His former colleagues, who had described him as the greatest artist of his generation, did not write in his defense. His name was spoken, when it was spoken at all, in whispers. Oscar Wilde, who admired Solomon’s work, referred to him as “that strange genius” after the arrest — a phrase that contains, in its careful distance, everything the institution chose not to say.
This is A Substrate of Exclusion‘s recurring structure: the institution extends recognition and withdraws it on terms it never explicitly states. At the Royal Academy in 1768, it was the media women predominantly used that were banned from exhibition, not paintings made by women. In 1873, it was not Solomon’s paintings that were expelled from the Royal Academy — it was Solomon. The work was untouched; the artist was made to disappear.
This report traces what that disappearance has meant across the history of a medium whose greatest achievements were made in the same devotional and imperial contexts that also contained, documented, and in their own ways accommodated, queer lives. And it traces what it means now, in 2025 and 2026, when the United States federal government has passed executive orders declaring trans visibility “improper ideology” and defunded organizations whose work affirms LGBTQ+ existence — and when a Portuguese parliament has voted, in first reading, to roll back its own gender self-identification law. The mechanism has changed. The logic is continuous.
The scholarship of the past two decades has fundamentally revised what is known about gender and sexuality in the Byzantine Empire and medieval ecclesiastical communities. This revision is not a matter of reading modern identities backward into the past. It is the result of close work with primary sources — art, medical treatises, hagiographic texts, legal codes, and liturgical manuscripts — that reveal a medieval world far more complex in its gender arrangements than the retrospective imagination of Victorian and early modern scholars allowed.
Roland Betancourt’s Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020) — winner of the Medieval Academy of America’s Jerome E. Singerman Prize and a finalist for the American Academy of Religion award — is the most comprehensive recent synthesis of this material. Betancourt documents, through art and literature, transgender monks who lived their entire lives in all-male monastic communities as men; narratives of same-gender desire in imperial and ecclesiastical contexts; and the figure of the eunuch, which Byzantine society understood not as a pathological deviation but as a distinct third gender position — male in biological sex, but carrying social meaning that neither the male nor female category fully captured.
Kathryn Ringrose’s The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium (University of Chicago Press, 2003) remains the standard scholarly work on this subject. Ringrose argues that Byzantine society — particularly from the eighth through the eleventh centuries, precisely the period of mosaic’s greatest artistic achievement — had developed a flexible, multi-category understanding of gender that went substantially beyond the binary model. Eunuchs occupied positions of enormous power in the imperial court: chamberlains of the imperial bedchamber, military commanders, senior administrators, and leading church officials. The eunuch’s role as mediator between male and female social spheres was not merely tolerated but institutionally structured.
A Harvard course syllabus on gender in Byzantium summarizes the scholarly landscape: the Byzantine gender order was largely patriarchal and heteronormative, yet late antique and Byzantine texts and images regularly reveal complex constructions of gender, with pronounced essentialisms coexisting with beliefs and practices defying simple binaries of male and female in often surprising ways.
For the medieval Western church, the picture is similarly documented. Historic England’s LGBTQ+ heritage research notes that church records show officials in English abbeys, convents, and monasteries were consistently concerned with containing same-sex desire and love among otherwise chaste monks and nuns. The rite of adelphopoiēsis — spiritual brotherhood, binding two men in a ceremony that echoed elements of the marriage rite — was documented by Yale historian John Boswell as a possible medieval same-sex union. Subsequent scholarship has contested Boswell’s reading while confirming the existence of the rite and the intensity of the bonds it formalized.
The required scholarly caveat, which Betancourt himself states with care and which this report repeats: the extant sources do not provide enough information to support a claim that any of these figures understood their own identity in terms that map cleanly onto modern LGBTQ+ categories. The argument here is not that Byzantine eunuchs or medieval monks were “gay” in any modern sense. The argument is that the contexts in which mosaic achieved its greatest expression — the imperial court, the monastery, the ecclesiastical institution — were spaces that contained, documented, and in their own ways structured, non-normative gender and same-sex desire. The medium and these lives have never been separate.
This matters for the history of mosaic specifically because the medium’s greatest achievements are inseparable from those contexts. Hagia Sophia, Ravenna’s San Vitale, the Menologion of Basil II — the very works Betancourt analyzes as containing queered visual content — are also the supreme examples of mosaic as fine art. The medium reached its apex of achievement in exactly the imperial and ecclesiastical environments that the scholarship now shows to have been considerably more complex in their gender arrangements than the Victorian imagination of a unified, heteronormative Christendom allowed.
The Menologion of Basil II, commissioned for the Byzantine Emperor around the year 1000, is one of Betancourt’s primary analytical texts. The image of Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch, which appears in that manuscript, is the capstone of his analysis in Byzantine Intersectionality — an image that brings together race, gender, and non-normative embodiment in a single composition. The mosaic environments in which the Byzantine court lived and prayed were made by artists and artisans who belonged to the same social world that produced these texts and images.
A Substrate of Exclusion has argued consistently that the history of mosaic cannot be separated from the history of the populations that produced it. Designed to Fail: A History of Gender Inequality, Pay Disparity, and the Art/Craft Divide established that mosaic has been predominantly practiced by women, channeled into community and devotional contexts, and devalued by the same institutional hierarchies that devalue women’s artistic labor. LGBTQIA+ Artists, Erasure, and Medium extends that argument: the devotional and imperial contexts that produced the medium’s greatest work were also queered contexts. The history of mosaic is, in part, a queer history. The art history that omits this is not neutral. It is a choice.
The persecution of LGBTQ+ people through legal systems is not a medieval relic. It is a history with documented dates, documented victims, and a documented timeline that ends, in the United States, only in 2003 — and that has resumed, in a different register, since 2025. This version of the timeline integrates the Iberian legal history as a parallel strand, not an addendum. Portugal and Spain are the countries in which the MME operates and was founded; their legal histories are not supplementary context. They are the founding location’s own past.
| Date / Period | Event | Consequence for Artists and Cultural Life |
|---|---|---|
| 1533 | England: Buggery Act passed. Gay sex punishable by death. | Capital punishment for any same-sex act. No public art, no public life. |
| 1533–1821 | Portugal: The Inquisition prosecutes sodomy. Records in the National Archives show 4,000 complaints; 30 executed at the stake. Portugal is considered relatively lenient by inquisitorial standards. | Sodomy conflated with heresy. Artists and cultural figures subject to denunciation, torture, exile. |
| 1835 | James Pratt and John Smith executed for sodomy — last such executions in England. Both had to be carried to the gallows. | Death by execution. The year Simeon Solomon was born. |
| 1873 | Simeon Solomon arrested in a public urinal. Convicted of attempted sodomy. Career ends at 32. | Expulsion from the Royal Academy, alcoholism, workhouse. Never exhibited publicly again. |
| 1886 | Portugal: homosexuality re-criminalized under laws against “offenses against modesty” and, after 1912, explicitly under the law against “vices against nature.” Imprisonment or forced labor. | Artists face criminal exposure for same-sex practice. Selective enforcement targeting lower-class men. |
| 1895 | Oscar Wilde convicted of gross indecency. Two years hard labour. | Career destroyed. Works removed from sale. Publishers dropped him. Died in exile, 1900. |
| 1912 | Portugal: law against “whoever indulges in the practice of vices against nature.” Up to one year imprisonment; correctional labor houses and agricultural penal colonies. | LGBTQ+ artists in Portugal face criminal prosecution, forced labor, and social erasure for over six decades. |
| 1933–1974 (Portugal) | Estado Novo dictatorship under António de Oliveira Salazar begins. Decree-Law No. 26 643 creates the “state of delinquency,” allowing punishment of homosexual behavior without a proven criminal act. Special detention centers and labor colonies established; sentences of 1–6 years. Over 12,000 people institutionalized between 1933 and 1951. The 1954 Penal Code (Decree-Law No. 39 688) explicitly criminalizes homosexuality with “security measures” including asylum and labor-house confinement. | Artists, intellectuals, and political figures persecuted simultaneously. Júlio Fogaça, Portuguese Communist Party leader, convicted for homosexual conduct in 1962. Cultural production censored. Homosexuality defined as sinful, abnormal, and threatening to the “God, Fatherland, Family” triad. |
| 1933–1945 | Nazi Germany: Paragraph 175 enforced. Over 50,000 convictions. Gay men sent to concentration camps. | Imprisonment, death. Works of “degenerate” artists confiscated and destroyed. |
| 1939–1975 (Spain) | Franco dictatorship. 1954: Ley de Vagos y Maleantes amended to declare homosexuals “dangerous to society.” 1970: Law on Social Danger and Rehabilitation (Ley Sobre Peligrosidad y Rehabilitación Social) — homosexuality criminalized with 6 months to 5 years imprisonment. Thousands sent to “galerías de invertidos” (special prisons) and re-educational camps. Electro-shock and aversion therapy deployed. | Artists and intellectuals persecuted or exiled. Singer Miguel de Molina tortured and shows banned. Lesbian women largely erased from the legal record — the regime did not conceptualize that two women could have sex. |
| 1948–60s (US) | US: homosexuality illegal in 49 states. Gay and lesbian people barred from federal employment. DSM classifies homosexuality as mental disorder (until 1973). | Closeted practice, coded visual languages, destroyed careers. Warhol’s early drawings of men kissing rejected by every New York gallery. |
| 1967 | UK: Sexual Offences Act. Consensual sex between adult men partially decriminalized in England and Wales. | First partial legal protection in UK. Scotland and Northern Ireland follow later. |
| 1974 | Portugal: Carnation Revolution (April 25). Estado Novo ends. Political persecution of LGBTQ+ people by the state ceases — but Penal Code retains criminalization under “vices against nature” and “security measures.” | First LGBTQ+ activists in Portugal begin organizing. “Manifesto for the Liberation of Sexual Minorities” issued. Same-sex acts legally risky until 1983. |
| 1979 | Spain decriminalizes homosexuality as part of post-Franco constitutional reforms. First Madrid Pride Parade held. | Artists no longer face criminal prosecution. LGBT organizations legalized in 1982. |
| 1982–83 | Portugal: September 23, 1982, Parliament approves new Penal Code, removing provisions criminalizing consensual same-sex relations between adults. Takes effect January 1, 1983. | Legal persecution of homosexuality in Portugal ends — eight years after the Carnation Revolution, 49 years after the Estado Novo began. |
| 1990 | NEA Four: grants to mostly LGBTQ+ artists revoked. Congress adds “decency clause” to NEA funding. First federal defunding of queer art. | Direct federal targeting of LGBTQ+ artistic content. Supreme Court upholds NEA discretion in NEA v. Finley, 1998. |
| 2003 | Lawrence v. Texas: US Supreme Court strikes down remaining state sodomy laws. | Decriminalization of same-sex intimacy across the United States — 462 years after England first criminalized it. |
| 2004 | Portugal: constitutional amendment enshrines ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation — one of only a handful of countries to embed this protection at the constitutional level. | Non-discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation acquires constitutional weight in Portugal — protection unavailable at the federal level in the United States. |
| 2005 | Spain becomes the third country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage (June 30). The law grants full marriage rights including adoption. | Spain reaches marriage equality ten years before the United States. The Iberian Peninsula begins building the most advanced LGBTQ+ legal frameworks in Europe. |
| 2010 | Portugal: same-sex marriage legalized (June 5). Portugal becomes the eighth country in the world. | Portugal reaches marriage equality five years before the United States. The Iberian Peninsula’s legal framework now substantially exceeds the Anglo-American baseline. |
| 2018 | Portugal: Law 38/2018 — legal gender self-identification without psychiatric evaluation for adults and minors 16+ with parental consent. Cited by the UN Human Rights Council as a model of best practice. | Trans people in Portugal can change legal gender through a simple administrative declaration. No medical diagnosis required. |
| 2025–2026 (US) | Trump executive order labels trans visibility “improper ideology.” NEA bars grants to organizations that “promote gender ideology.” Smithsonian ordered to erase trans people. Stonewall National Monument website removes trans women. HR 1329 amended to bar trans women from American Women’s History Museum — passes House Administration Committee March 19, 2026. | Federal defunding of LGBTQ+ arts organizations. Institutional censorship of trans-inclusive exhibitions. Chilling effect documented across the sector. Artists self-censor. Some leave the country. |
| 2026 (March 19–20, Portugal) | Portugal: PSD, Chega, and CDS-PP advance three bills to roll back Law 38/2018, 151 votes to 79. Bills pass first reading and move to the Committee on Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees for further debate. Not enacted law. Constitutional lawyers raise questions of compatibility with Portugal’s 2004 constitutional non-discrimination protections. | The 2018 self-ID provision is under legislative attack. Portugal’s constitutional floor — non-discrimination since 2004, marriage equality since 2010 — is not affected. The mechanism visible in the United States is now visible in Portugal. The logic is the same. |
Sources: Equaldex (Portugal and Spain LGBTQ rights histories); Wikipedia, Homosexuality in Medieval Europe; Minneapolis Institute of Art / Medium, What Really Happened to the First Gay Art Star; Simeon Solomon Research Archive; The Art Story, Queer Art Movement; ACLU v. NEA, 2025; GCN; Portugal Post; ECPS; Erin Reed / Erin In The Morning, March 2026.
Solomon’s case deserves a full account because it demonstrates, with unusual precision, what institutional erasure looks like when it operates through criminal law rather than policy. His work was sacred and devotional: angels, saints, the rituals of Jewish and Christian observance, figures from classical mythology treated in the idiom of spiritual rather than erotic desire. He had explored his gay identity through exactly the coded language the art world required — the androgynous male, the ambiguous beauty, the suggestion of “Greek love” sufficiently veiled to be celebrated rather than condemned. He had made the work the institution wanted.
The arrest ended that calculation. The conviction meant not merely legal penalty but social death: his former colleagues in the Pre-Raphaelite circle ceased to associate with him, fearful of contamination. The Royal Academy, which had exhibited his work since his adolescence, never showed it again. His sister Rebecca, herself a painter of considerable reputation, largely withdrew from public association with him. John Addington Symonds and Oscar Wilde, who had admired him, maintained careful distance. Wilde, writing from Reading Gaol in 1897, lamented the loss of his “precious Simeon Solomons” — artworks sold at auction of his possessions two years before — in a letter that mourns a man the institution had already made invisible.
Solomon continued to work. Scholars who have studied his post-1873 output have argued that some of his finest drawings date from the workhouse years — smaller in scale, more concentrated in their imagery, suffused with the mysticism that was always his deepest subject. But the institution had no further use for them. The career, in the institutional sense, was over at thirty-two. The art continued. The artist died in the workhouse at sixty-four. Scholars and the art market have restored his reputation as a significant figure in Victorian painting almost entirely within the past thirty years.
Solomon’s career represents the extreme consequence of exposure. Most LGBTQ+ artists before decriminalization did not face arrest and ruin; they developed a more sustainable strategy: coded visual language, strategic ambiguity, work designed to be read as something other than what it was.
Marsden Hartley used abstracted symbols to convey his queerness. Charles Demuth kept his watercolor depictions of gay subculture in the 1930s entirely private. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, ascending the avant-garde in New York in the 1950s, made some references in their work but remained closeted because they understood, correctly, that openness would cost them. Andy Warhol, refusing that calculation, presented his drawings of men kissing to New York galleries in the early 1950s and was turned down by every one of them. He kept making the work. He showed the male nudes in Paris in 1977. The market that had rejected them in New York embraced them in a different jurisdiction.
The double erasure that operates specifically on LGBTQ+ artists working in media coded as craft — the situation that is most relevant to mosaic — compounds the two invisibilities A Substrate of Exclusion has documented separately. Designed to Fail: A History of Gender Inequality, Pay Disparity, and the Art/Craft Divide established that the art/craft hierarchy suppresses recognition and valuation of work in tactile, labor-intensive, collaborative media. LGBTQIA+ Artists, Erasure, and Medium adds: LGBTQ+ practitioners in those media face two overlapping institutional disqualifications simultaneously. The medium is not fine art. The artist’s existence is improper ideology. The system has multiple mechanisms for the same outcome, and they reinforce each other.
On 27 March 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order directed Vice President JD Vance, in his role as a member of the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents, to eliminate “divisive, race-centered ideology” from all Smithsonian properties. It ordered Congress to prohibit the Smithsonian from receiving appropriations for any exhibition or program that “promotes programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.” And it explicitly required that future appropriations ensure the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum “not recognize men as women in any respect.”
The order labeled transgender exhibits “improper ideology.” This is not rhetorical shorthand. It is a federal designation. Trans visibility in a publicly funded institution is, under this order, in the same category as content that “degrades shared American values” and “distorts shared history.” The phrase “improper ideology” appears in the order directly. No qualification. No distinction between depiction and advocacy. The existence of trans people in an exhibit is the ideology.
In August 2025, the Trump administration wrote to the Smithsonian’s secretary announcing a comprehensive internal review of eight museums. Institutions had 120 days to replace content the administration found objectionable. The administration framed the review as preparation for America’s 250th anniversary celebration — a context in which certain American lives, by federal designation, do not constitute American history.
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery had invited artist Amy Sherald — best known for her 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama — to mount “American Sublime,” what would have been the first solo exhibition by a contemporary Black artist in the gallery’s history. The exhibition included Trans Forming Liberty, her painting of a Black transgender woman posed as the Statue of Liberty.
The Smithsonian proposed exhibiting the painting alongside a video of people reacting to it from varying perspectives. Sherald withdrew the entire exhibition in July 2025. In her letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, she wrote that she had “entered into this collaboration in good faith, believing that the institution shared a commitment to presenting work that reflects the full, complex truth of American life,” and that “the conditions no longer support the integrity of the work as conceived.” She told the New York Times that the proposed video “would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility” — and that she was opposed to that.
The Smithsonian is not a hostile institution. It proposed the video from a position of institutional anxiety rather than ideological agreement with the executive order. That is the point. The mechanism of erasure in 2025 does not require malice; it requires the institution to place a condition on recognition. The condition the Smithsonian placed on Sherald’s work — that the painting’s subject’s legitimacy as a human being be framed as a discussable question — is structurally identical to the condition the Royal Academy’s silence placed on Solomon in 1873. The institution extends acknowledgment while requiring the artist to accept that the terms of that acknowledgment include the debatability of their subject’s right to exist. Both artists refused. Both paid a price.
Trans Forming Liberty, after Sherald’s withdrawal, was reproduced widely — appearing on the cover of The New Yorker. The painting’s visibility increased after it was expelled from the institution. Solomon’s work is now the subject of doctoral dissertations and Sotheby’s auction catalogues. The institution’s silence, in both cases, did not erase the art. It erased the institution’s relationship to the art — that is a different loss.
The Stonewall National Monument exists because of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Both women — trans women of color, both working-class, both unhoused at various points in their lives — were among the people who fought back during the police raid on the Stonewall Inn on 28 June 1969. Johnson in particular has been described by historians as among the first to resist.
In 2025, the National Park Service removed transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument’s own website, changing “LGBTQ+” to “LGB.” Rivera and Johnson — the women who helped make the monument’s existence possible — were removed from the digital record of the monument that commemorates the event they helped create.
The legislative extension of this erasure followed in March 2026. House Republicans added an amendment to HR 1329 — a bipartisan bill to authorize the site of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum — that bars transgender women from any museum exhibit. The amendment states: “The museum shall be dedicated to preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women. The Museum may not identify, present, describe, or otherwise depict any biological male as female.” Under this language, Rivera and Johnson cannot appear in the American Women’s History Museum. The museum of women’s history, as legislated, is a museum of a specific and politically defined category of women’s history.
The Grant Economy documents the 2025 NEA grant revocations in full. The specific dimension that LGBTQIA+ Artists, Erasure, and Medium adds is the targeting of LGBTQ+ organizations with particular directness. The National Queer Theater, whose Criminal Queerness Festival focuses on playwrights from countries that criminalize LGBTQ+ people, lost its $20,000 grant. BOFFO, the LGBTQ+-focused nonprofit arts community in Fire Island Pines, lost $45,000. Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, lost $20,000. The NEA told these organizations in termination emails that it was “updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.”
The ACLU filed suit against the NEA in March 2025, arguing that the requirement that grant applicants certify they would not “promote gender ideology” violates the First Amendment. The suit represents four organizations — Rhode Island Latino Arts, Theatre Communications Group, National Queer Theater, and The Theater Offensive — all of which had promoted art affirming the lived experiences of transgender and nonbinary people.
The chilling effect extends beyond specific revocations. Documented cases include artists asking organizations to remove their biographies from websites out of fear of doxxing or harassment. Actors turning down roles in plays that might attract federal scrutiny. Curators postponing exhibitions. Artists who are not LGBTQ+ steering away from work that touches gender identity because any connection to the subject has become a funding risk.
This is where the abstract becomes personal and the personal becomes institutional.
Rachael Que Vargas spent ten years and $101,748.97 creating the Anatomy Set in Stone series — twenty-two large-format mosaics, each paired with an etching, drawn from the sixteenth-century anatomical atlas of Bartolomeo Eustachi. The work is self-financed. No grants, no institutional support, no secondary market history that would allow an auction house to establish a reserve price. It was made the way the entire A Substrate of Exclusion series has described self-taught artists making things: with what was available, at personal cost, outside the apparatus that generates institutional recognition.
Bartolomeo Eustachi (c. 1510–1574) was an Italian anatomist whose work stands as one of the foundational documents of Western medical science. Around 1552, he completed approximately 47 copper-plate engravings — the Tabulae Anatomicae — depicting musculature, the nervous system, and internal structures with a precision that, in some respects, exceeded the contemporaneous work of Andreas Vesalius. The plates were then lost in the Vatican for approximately 140 years. They were published posthumously in 1714 by Giovanni Maria Lancisi, Papal physician. By that date, they had missed the historical window in which they might have reshaped 16th-century anatomy alongside Vesalius, and their contribution was absorbed into a scientific record already organized around other authorities.
The Anatomy Set in Stone works from this single historical researcher’s record. Because the work draws from Eustachi’s atlas and Eustachi’s atlas draws from 16th-century European anatomical practice, it does not include female anatomy. This is not a curatorial failure. It is itself the argument.
The absence of women’s bodies from the foundational record of anatomical science is not a 16th-century problem that has since been corrected. It is a structure that persisted in documented form through the 20th century and continues in documented form today.
In 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidelines excluding “women of childbearing potential” from Phase I and early Phase II clinical research — a ban not lifted until 1993, and whose legacy remained entrenched long after. In early-phase industry-sponsored clinical trials, women currently account for fewer than 30% of participants, according to a March 2025 Nature analysis. In 2021, over 80% of preclinical studies assessing drug safety and efficacy were conducted solely on male mice. A 2001 U.S. Government Accountability Office audit found that 8 of the 10 drugs withdrawn from the American market between 1997 and 2001 had more severe adverse events in women — largely because they had not been sufficiently tested on women. Women are 1.5 to 1.7 times more likely than men to develop adverse drug reactions. Endometriosis, affecting approximately 10% of women, takes an average of 8 to 9 years to diagnose.
The medical AI tools now being trained on this accumulated record carry the bias forward. Studies have documented that AI diagnostic tools trained on male-dominated datasets perform better for men than women for the same conditions. The male body was the default subject of the scientific record. The tools trained on that record inherit the assumption.
The gap in Eustachi’s atlas mirrors the gap in mosaic market data, the gap in the scholarly history of the medium, the gap in the critical apparatus: the absence is the data. The exhibition does not apologize for the absence. It names it. It presents the record as a record — shaped by the person who made it, the century in which it was made, and the institutional frameworks that determined whose bodies were worth studying.
The series was designed from the outset as a touring museum exhibit. The business logic was clear: exhibit fees are a recurring revenue stream. Que Vargas estimated that a work of this scale and ambition could generate $200,000–$400,000 annually if booked continuously as a traveling show across North American museums. The model presumed that museums would be willing to host it.
The executive order of March 27, 2025 changed that calculation. The political vulnerability of the series in the current U.S. federal funding environment does not rest on the depiction of trans bodies specifically. It rests on two things: the depiction of the human body in a climate where anatomical and medical accuracy in publicly funded spaces has become politically contested; and the identity of the artist who made it. A nationally commissioned, female-presenting, LGBTQ+ mosaic artist whose work includes the human body — in a jurisdiction where trans visibility is “improper ideology” by executive order — cannot exhibit in federally funded institutions without creating a funding risk for those institutions. The curator deciding whether to host the series is not making an aesthetic decision. She is making a risk assessment.
“I spent ten years and $101,748.97 to create my magnum opus, the Anatomy Set in Stone Mosaics as a touring museum exhibit. Now it can no longer be shown in America without putting an institution’s funding at risk. I wish I were making this shit up.”
— Rachael Que Vargas, Substack, August 21, 2025
In 2025, facing the cost of leaving the country, Que Vargas nearly sold the Anatomy Set in Stone series. She brought the catalog to STAIR Galleries in Hudson, New York, to inquire about auction. The gallery declined — not on the merits of the work, but because without secondary market data, they had no objective basis for establishing an auction estimate. The same institutional machinery that had excluded the work from museum touring — the absence of a market record, the absence of the critical infrastructure that generates such records for fine art and withholds it from craft-coded media — now prevented the work from even being sold.
If the auction had proceeded, the mosaics would have been dispersed. The museum would not exist. The decision that made the museum possible was not a strategic choice but a contingency: the system that had failed to recognize the work also failed to take it from her. The Anatomy Set in Stone series exists as a collection, as the founding permanent exhibit of the MME, because no institution wanted it badly enough to acquire it on its own terms.
What replaced the touring model was not sentiment but arithmetic. The Museu Nacional do Azulejo in Lisbon — Portugal’s most popular museum, housed in a former convent — received 276,209 visitors in 2023 at entry fees in the range of fifteen to thirty euros. A medium entry fee of twenty euros at one hundred thousand visitors generates two million euros annually — several times the maximum projected earning from the US touring model, without the logistics of shipping, insurance, or the curation of curatorial relationships across dozens of institutions.
The case for Lisbon has always rested on more than real estate and visitor projections. Portugal’s constitutional framework includes an explicit ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation — embedded at the constitutional level since 2004, not merely as ordinary legislation. Portugal legalized same-sex marriage in 2010, five years before the United States. The country enacted gender self-identification without psychiatric evaluation in 2018.
On March 19 and 20, 2026, Portugal’s parliament approved in first reading three bills targeting Law 38/2018 — the 2018 gender self-identification provision — by a vote of 151 to 79. The bills were advanced by PSD, Chega, and CDS-PP. They move to the Committee on Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees for further debate and amendment. They are not enacted law. Final passage would require another full parliamentary vote, followed by possible presidential referral to the Constitutional Tribunal.
Constitutional lawyers have raised serious questions about the compatibility of the proposed rollback with Portugal’s 2004 constitutional non-discrimination protections. Those protections — which cover sexual orientation and gender identity at the constitutional level — are not affected by this vote and are not targeted by these bills.
The founding case for Lisbon does not rest on Portugal being permanently safe. It never did. No jurisdiction is permanently safe. The mechanism this series has been documenting — the institutional withdrawal of recognition on political grounds — is now visible in two countries in the same month. The logic is continuous. The geography has changed.
What makes Lisbon the correct location is a comparative argument, not an absolute one. The comparison is not Portugal versus an ideal. It is Portugal versus the United States in 2026, where: executive orders are in effect, not in committee; LGBTQ+ arts organization grants have been revoked, not proposed for revocation; the Smithsonian review has proceeded, not been debated; and trans women have been barred from the American Women’s History Museum by legislative amendment that has already passed committee. Portugal’s bills are in committee. The U.S. executive orders are operative.
The structural vulnerability of LGBTQ+ legal protections everywhere is itself the founding argument — not a qualification of it. An institution whose purpose includes defending the art these protections make possible cannot depend on any jurisdiction being permanently safe. It must be built to last through weather it cannot predict. The constitutional floor in Portugal — non-discrimination since 2004, marriage equality since 2010 — remains higher than the U.S. federal floor in 2026. That floor has held. That comparison still holds.
The MME will name the March 2026 vote plainly in its public communications. It will not pretend the development did not occur. It will present the development as evidence of what this report has been arguing: that the structural vulnerability of LGBTQ+ legal protections is not unique to the United States, and that institutions whose founding purpose includes this work must be built with that vulnerability in mind, not in denial of it.
“By presidential decree, I can no longer work as an artist in the US.”
— Rachael Que Vargas, Substack, August 21, 2025
That sentence is not hyperbole. It is a legal and institutional description. The MME is the institutional response to that closure. The founding is documented. The cost is documented. The decision is documented. The arithmetic is documented. The report is this document.
No formal demographic survey of the mosaic field by sexual orientation or gender identity currently exists — a data absence that is itself the argument, as Designed to Fail: A History of Gender Inequality, Pay Disparity, and the Art/Craft Divide established for gender and The Outsider Art System established for the outsider art system. Fields that are institutionally marginalized do not generate the bureaucratic record-keeping that would quantify their own inequities.
What circumstantial evidence exists points toward a predominantly female, predominantly self-taught practitioner community — documented in Designed to Fail: A History of Gender Inequality, Pay Disparity, and the Art/Craft Divide through the SAMA founding demographics and exhibition records. For LGBTQ+ identification specifically, no equivalent data exists. The absence is not neutral. It reflects the same mechanism documented throughout this report: the institution does not count what it does not recognize, and it does not recognize what it does not count.
There are specific and documented exceptions. Sharon Day, a Bois Forte Ojibwe self-taught artist, made a glass mosaic on wood in 2024 titled Animikee is Dancing! for the exhibition Queering Indigeneity at the Minnesota Museum of American Art. Her artist statement describes the work explicitly: “I wanted to create a piece that shows a powerful manido that is queer! What is in the spirit realm is also in the earth realm; we are a reflection of each other.” Day is a self-taught artist who describes having taken many years to name herself as an artist — the same threshold difficulty documented throughout this series. She chose mosaic as the medium for a specifically queer and devotional image. The connection between the medium and the queered sacred that Part I documents in Byzantine scholarship is not merely historical. It is present in a 2024 work in the American Midwest.
In 2025, the feminist art collective Hilma’s Ghost — co-founded by queer artists — installed Abstract Futures, a large-scale mosaic mural at Grand Central Station in New York, commissioned by the MTA as permanent public art. It was installed in the same period the NEA was revoking grants from LGBTQ+ organizations on grounds of “gender ideology.” A queer-founded collective installed a permanent mosaic in one of the most publicly visible spaces in the United States in exactly the moment when federal policy was attempting to render queer artistic identity invisible in publicly funded institutions.
The compounding of the invisibilities A Substrate of Exclusion documents is most acute for LGBTQ+ practitioners working in mosaic. Designed to Fail: A History of Gender Inequality, Pay Disparity, and the Art/Craft Divide documents the art/craft hierarchy as a gendered devaluation mechanism. The Unpaid Canvas documents the economic precarity of the working artist. The Outsider Art System documents the outsider art system’s articulateness disqualification and extraction dynamic. LGBTQIA+ Artists, Erasure, and Medium adds: LGBTQ+ identification, in the current institutional environment, is a funding liability in any institution that depends on federal grants, state arts council funding, or any other form of public money subject to the executive orders now in effect.
A self-taught, female-presenting, LGBTQ+ mosaic artist in 2026 faces: a medium classified as craft in most institutional taxonomies; a practice that generates no secondary market data and therefore no auction valuation; an outsider art system that would require her to be inarticulate to qualify for its recognition and would extract her work if she did; a wage gap documented at 77 cents on the dollar for women artists generally and 60 cents on the dollar for trans women workers specifically; and a federal policy environment that labels her existence, if visible in a publicly funded institution, “improper ideology.” A Substrate of Exclusion documents each of these separately. Together, they describe a structural position from which it is not irrational to leave the country to build a museum.
The history documented in Parts I through V is not context for the MME. It is the MME’s founding argument. The institution was built in the institutional space the United States federal government vacated when it declared trans visibility improper ideology. The commitments below are the operational consequences of that founding.
| Commitment | Operational Specification |
|---|---|
| Queer history taught as mosaic history | The Byzantine and medieval contexts documented in Part I are not supplementary content for the MME’s curriculum. They are mosaic history. The queered devotional spaces in which the medium achieved its greatest expression will be taught as part of the history of the art form — not as a special topic, not as a pride-month addition, not as contextual footnote. |
| Explicit LGBTQ+ inclusion in commissioning policy | LGBTQ+ artists are named explicitly in the MME’s commissioning and acquisition policy. The minimum 50% women artists commitment established in Designed to Fail is a floor that applies across all axes of the series’ framework — including LGBTQ+ identity, race, disability, and self-taught practice. These are not separate programs. They are the same commitment applied consistently. |
| No identity disclosure requirements | No artist or student at the MME will be required to disclose LGBTQ+ identity, disability status, or any other personal characteristic as a condition of participation, exhibition, commissioning, or scholarship eligibility. The institution collects demographic data for its annual Equity Report; participation in that data collection is voluntary and anonymized. |
| Lisbon as the strongest available jurisdiction — named as such | The MME’s location in Portugal is an institutional response to the closure of the American institutional context for trans-inclusive programming. The museum will say this plainly in its public communications, including acknowledging the March 2026 parliamentary vote and the ongoing legislative process. Trans visibility is not “improper ideology.” It is art history. The MME was founded to exist in a jurisdiction where that can be stated — and where the constitutional floor, even under political pressure, remains higher than the U.S. federal baseline in 2026. |
| Public advocacy against defunding of queer arts organizations | The MME will publish an annual statement on the state of LGBTQ+ arts funding, documenting specific grant revocations, exhibition cancellations, and legislative actions targeting queer cultural institutions — in the US and in Portugal. This is an extension of the annual Equity Report established in Designed to Fail. The MME will not be silent about what is happening in either country. |
| The school as counter-institution | The MME’s vocational training program explicitly includes professional development: CV writing, pricing, grant applications, contract literacy, and arts business fundamentals. For LGBTQ+ artists in particular, who face compounding wage gaps documented in Designed to Fail Section 2.4, the ability to sustain a practice without institutional dependence is a protective mechanism. The school teaches self-sufficiency as a survival strategy, not merely a career option. |
| The Anatomy Set in Stone exhibition policy | The Anatomy Set in Stone series will be exhibited with interpretive materials that document the Eustachi historical record accurately: the plates’ creation c. 1552, their loss in the Vatican, their posthumous 1714 publication. The absence of female anatomy from the record will be named as part of the exhibition’s interpretive argument. The absence is not a liability. It is the evidence. |
The history in this report runs from Byzantine eunuchs to a federal executive order signed on 27 March 2025, and to a Portuguese parliamentary vote on 20 March 2026 — six days before this version of the report was finalized. It runs through a Victorian artist arrested in a public urinal at thirty-two, through the coded visual strategies of mid-century artists who made queer work under the daily risk of criminal prosecution, through the first federal defunding of queer art in the NEA Four case, through the slow, contested arc of legal protection in both the United States and on the Iberian Peninsula, to an executive order that has reverted the federal government of the United States to the position that LGBTQ+ visibility in public institutions is ideologically impermissible — and to a Portuguese parliament that has, in first reading, voted to roll back the most progressive element of its own gender recognition framework.
The argument that runs through all of it is structural, not partisan. Institutions decide what counts as culture. Those decisions have economic and legal consequences for the artists whose existence falls inside or outside the boundaries institutions draw. The mechanism changes — execution, criminal prosecution, professional ruin, defunding, chilling effect, legislative rollback — but the logic is continuous: there is a category of person whose existence an institution can recognize, and a category whose existence it cannot, and the drawing of that line is always a political act with economic stakes.
The founding case for Lisbon does not rest on Portugal being permanently safe. No jurisdiction is permanently safe. The March 2026 vote is evidence of that. What makes Lisbon the correct location is a comparative argument that survives the vote: Portugal’s constitutional floor is higher; the comparison class is worse; and the very structural vulnerability of LGBTQ+ legal protections everywhere is the argument for building a permanent dedicated institution — not the argument against it. An institution whose founding purpose includes defending the art these protections make possible must be built to last through weather it cannot predict.
The Museum of Mosaic Environments is being built in Lisbon because the United States federal government drew that line in 2025 in a place that made Rachael Que Vargas’s work impossible to exhibit in publicly funded American institutions. That is not a dramatic framing of the situation. It is the situation. It is documented. The executive order exists. The grant revocations are on record. The Sherald withdrawal happened. The Women’s History Museum amendment passed committee on March 19, 2026. The Portuguese parliamentary vote occurred on March 20, 2026.
The MME will name all of it plainly in its public communications, in its curriculum, in its exhibition programming, and in this document. The queer history of Byzantine devotional art is mosaic history. Simeon Solomon’s arrest is art history. The absence of female anatomy from Eustachi’s atlas is medical history and exhibition argument simultaneously. The Anatomy Set in Stone series was made for US museums that can no longer show it without risk of federal penalty. The museum exists in Lisbon. The argument for Lisbon is this report.
Betancourt, R. (2020). Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press. Winner, Jerome E. Singerman Prize, Medieval Academy of America.
Ringrose, K.M. (2003). The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium. University of Chicago Press.
Boswell, J. (1994). Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. Villard Books.
Boswell, J. (1980). Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. University of Chicago Press.
Karras, R.M. (2020). The Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and West. Speculum: Journal of the Medieval Academy of America, 95(4).
Simeon Solomon Research Archive. simeonsolomon.com.
Art UK (2019). Simeon Solomon: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Aesthete. artuk.org.
Gay & Lesbian Review (2015). Simeon Solomon’s Shame-Free Art. glreview.org.
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Wikipedia. LGBTQ rights in Portugal. en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. LGBTQ history in Portugal. en.wikipedia.org.
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The Portugal News (2022). The path of LGBTQ+ community in Portugal.
Medium / Carrington, O. (2023). 22 dates in Portugal’s LGBTQ+ history.
Forbidden Colours. (2026). Portugal moves toward anti-LGBTIQ+ legislation. forbidden-colours.com.
Medidata (2025). History of Women in Clinical Trials: Overcoming Bias & Exclusion. medidata.com.
TIME (2024). Does the Gender Gap in Medical Research Still Exist? time.com.
ScienceDirect (2025). Gender biases within Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT. sciencedirect.com.
Hyperallergic (2025, March 6). ACLU Sues NEA for Enforcing Trump’s Anti-Trans Mandate.
The Art Newspaper (2025, March 28). Trump Aims to Remove “Improper Ideology” from Smithsonian.
NPR (2025, March 27). Trump Executive Order Aims to Remove DEI Initiatives from Smithsonian.
artnet News (2025, May 8). All the Arts Organizations Impacted by NEA Funding Cuts.
Que Vargas, R. (2025, August 21). Creating a Museum + School of Mosaics. Rachael Que Vargas — What am I thinking? Substack. rachaelquevargas.substack.com. Primary source for Section 4.1–4.3 and the founding narrative throughout.