Soft Landing

Soft Landing recreates the harem — in contemporary terms of American masculinity — as a study in containment.

Where Ingres’ bathers are attended to and observed by a gaze positioned entirely outside the frame, the men in these two merged diptychs are staged in a similar fashion, dressed in the branding of a different century’s silk.

The comparison is about a culture, like Ingres’ world, where in this case straight and queer men alike are held captive inside the same structure, the closet, neither one built, nor can fully escape.

The eight men gathered here span forty years, 1984 to 2024, and from gym machines to underwear ads and commercials they trace the evolution of the male figure with the confines of US marketing strategies: the American male as an object of desire that is never allowed to be attained. Visible but unreachable, on buildings or video screens high in the sky.

With the collages, one half carries a subtle gravity — held, weighted — and in the second, that same scene shifts almost imperceptibly toward weightlessness, a sense of floating just beginning to take hold. With both the vertical and horizontal versions, a slight vertical shift lifts the second panel’s heads toward the frame’s upper register, loosening the composition’s hold on the bottom edge — the same scene, caught just before it lets go of the ground.This marks the transition from social obligation and conformity for the sake of the other, to the quiet possibility of change and self-determination for the sake of self.

When one person is reduced, all are reduced. The closet was built for a time when people were to be directed, staged, placed within a system that refuses individuality, diversity, or uniqueness in favor of conformity. And for the fact that the closet is still present in our world, we are all diminished by it.

— Behan

Sweet Sweets

Sweet Life and Sweet Treats | Merged Diptychs | The Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

There’s always a sweet side to life — if you can get to the center of the Tootsie Pop.

A diptych is two panels connected thematically, not physically — two images that sit side by side, related but separate, each still its own frame. A merged diptych takes that space away. It brings the two together and makes them one instead of two — the seam disappears, or stops mattering. The two collages in this post take the architectural structure of merged diptychs in their own unique candy coated fashion.

The subject of these two works, Sweet Life and Sweet Treats, is the true story of Roman Emperor Hadrian and his lover Antinous, considered the most well-documented gay romance in Western history. Hadrian never recovered from losing Antinous. All of his efforts after — the city, the cult, the coins, all to his memory — trace back to the tragedy of a man losing his other half and staying broken by it for the remainder of his life. Two people had become one, and when the seam reopened, it didn’t heal.

These merged diptychs forever reconnect these two lovers and put them inside a confectioner’s window — brownies stacked like masonry, heart-shaped lollipops keeping watch, marshmallows crowding a hot-pink cup, Jupiter 3 hovering at a statue’s hip like it’s always been there. History treats men like Hadrian and Antinous coldly — dates, titles, a paragraph reducing grief to political theater. But they were human, not historical. They ate, they touched, they got lost in each other the way any couple does. The marble is a reality. The softness around it is the correction — flesh where the history books left only stone.

The sweet life, and sweet treats, if the phrases mean anything, mean wanting someone in the open, the way Hadrian wanted Antinous, without translating it into something smaller first. Most of the world still can’t. As of 2026, roughly 63 to 66 countries criminalize homosexuality outright, and in about a dozen of them the penalty on the books is death. Even in the United States, where the law mostly stopped policing the bedroom decades ago, national surveys still find somewhere between 39 and 46 percent of LGBTQ+ workers closeted on the job — not out of shame, necessarily, but out of a cost-benefit calculation made fresh every morning. That’s the same tension the candy is built on: human, not historical, plays both ways here too — the tenderness is real, and so is the risk.

Here, for one merged diptych at a time, the risk gets suspended. The sweetness holds. The two stay merged.

— Behan

Sources: ILGA World Database on criminalisation of consensual same-sex acts (2026); Human Dignity Trust, Map of Jurisdictions that Criminalise LGBT People; Human Rights Campaign, “Equality Rising: LGBTQ+ Workers and the Road Ahead” (2026); Stonewall UK workplace research (2025).

Under The Ozone Sky

Dive in—The Sunscreen’s Fine

Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

Being Gay is Often an Outdoor Sport—Stay Alert and Protected

Poolside light does the flattering work: it catches oiled shoulders, blue Speedos, a hand raised into an umbrella’s shade. It is the most forgiving light there is, which is precisely the problem. The ozone layer thins every year, and the sun that made these bodies desirable is quietly becoming the thing that will age or endanger them.

In the open air jeep a blue moon hovers overhead, tattooed chest turned toward the rear — decoration competing with exposure, clocking the cop on the motorcycle a short distance behind.

At the pool, a group of men towel off under a red umbrella while a saucer drifts past, unbothered, as if surveillance from above comes as expected as the cabana boy. “Dive in,” the image insists in its corner text, half invitation and half dare.

The tag for this diptych — Being Gay is Often an Outdoor Sport — is not an observation about athleticism. Gay social life has long happened outdoors: beaches, pool decks, cruising grounds, backyard parties, all spaces built around visibility and exposure by necessity as much as choice. That exposure was once mostly social risk. Now it is also literal — skin held up to a sky doing a worse job protecting it than it used to. The ozone layer’s decline is not new information, but it is easy to file away as abstract, a problem for polar ice and satellite data rather than a Saturday afternoon outing. Bottom line: stay protected, and eat your greens.

Now about the cops and outings. Outdoor exposure has always carried a second kind of risk for a targeted class, and the numbers back up what the figure on the motorcycle represents rather than invents. LGBTQ+ people are arrested at nearly 20% over their lifetime compared with roughly 13–14% of non-LGBTQ+ people, and transgender people are arrested at closer to 30%. Gay and bisexual men are reported to be roughly 30% more likely to be arrested than straight men, and one national analysis found LGBTQ+ people overall arrested at more than double the rate of straight people in a given year. LGBTQ+ people are also more likely to be stopped, searched, and held in custody than their non-LGBTQ+ peers — and, as a result, are less willing to call police for help when they need it.

Bottom line: cops historically have loved outing gay people, despite the closet’s social contract always being narrow but clear: no public displays, and the dominant culture leaves you alone. In 1953, seventy men gathered for a wedding inside a private home in Waco Texas— no street, no park, no public square. Police broke down that door anyway, arrested the men on vagrancy charges, and printed their names and addresses on the front page of the local paper. The state did not enforce the closet’s terms—it violated them — publicizing what had been kept private, costing these men not just their jobs but the protecting lie the culture demanded they live.

None of that is abstract to a body in a Speedo on a public pool deck. It’s always important, wherever you are, to stay aware and protected—like light chain mesh armor — from the sun, and from anyone else assigned to watch you.

— Behan

Sources: American Civil Liberties Union / NORC survey analysis (2024); Williams Institute, UCLA (2025); Prison Policy Initiative (2021); Safety and Justice Challenge (2025); general atmospheric science reference on ozone depletion and UV exposure.

Gay, Carefree, and Everything Between

The Subdivision returns to 1921, when a black cat with a permanent grin stars in a short film called Felix the Gay Dog — “gay” then meaning a carefree night out, and Felix’s crime is slipping away from his wife to enjoy a burlesque theater. The word survives into the 1959 television theme, where Felix is introduced as “gay and carefree,” wandering with his little bag of tricks. By the 1990s the joke sharpens into something closer to camp: a flamboyant, gay-coded bulldog named LeadFanny stands in for the character’s old antagonist, modeled loosely on Harvey Fierstein.

This triptych takes Felix at his most literal — the “official queer merchandise” nobody sold — and drops him into a mid-century living room already crowded with the cast of the Gay Gaze: men in briefs and tube socks, a UFO idling over a bowl of marshmallows, a moon standing witness the way it always does in this series. The bodybuilder ad in the first panel is not a joke at Felix’s expense. It is the ad that history almost let him make.

Hadrian Loves Antinous 4Ever

Hadrian never let the world forget Antinous. He built him a city, made him a god, and carved his face across an empire. Two thousand years later, the marble is still looking for its flesh.

Marble Into Flesh: Hadrian and Antinous | Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

Antinous drowns in the Nile in October of 130 CE, not yet twenty years old, and Hadrian — emperor of Rome, master of an empire that stretches from Britain to the Euphrates — does something no emperor does for a private citizen. He weeps, openly, reportedly “like a woman,” and then he acts. He has Antinous deified. He founds a city on the riverbank where the boy died and names it Antinoöpolis. He commissions statues, coins, and temples across the empire — all more surviving portraits of Antinous exist today than of almost any other non-imperial figure from antiquity. Archaeological evidence of his cult turns up in at least seventy cities, from Alexandria to Delphi. This isn’t a private grief kept behind closed doors. This is a Roman emperor turning his mourning into public architecture.

The paintings and busts of Antinous — the curled hair, the heavy-lidded, slightly melancholy eyes, the mouth set somewhere between calm and grief — became a template so consistent that later sculptors could copy it for centuries without ever having seen the boy. He is Bithynian, Greek, young, and beautiful, and that beauty is the entire reason any of this survives: Hadrian didn’t just love him, he made sure an empire looked at him and kept looking.

This new work sets those two-thousand-year-old faces — cast from the busts that survive, rendered as they were rendered then — beside contemporary men: gym bodies, beach bodies, a mustache and a bare chest lifted from the visual language of modern gay desire. The marble doesn’t get replaced. It gets accompanied. Hadrian’s grief built temples; this collage builds a bridge instead, letting the cold permanence of stone sit next to something warm-blooded and current, because the ache Hadrian felt in 130 CE isn’t actually that far from what gets photographed at a pool party in 2026. Same longing. Different material. The moon watches both.

— Behan

Sources: National Museums Liverpool; Encyclopaedia Britannica; TheCollector; Roman Empire Times; Prism & Pen (Medium).

Incline

Inclination is Flattening

Digital Photocollage

2026

The inclination to love is natural, unwavering. It moves beyond calculation — an impulse, a natural act of self preservation and self actualization combined. It is the foundation of civilization, of romantic love, the giving of oneself to another. It is what makes us human.

For gay men, while this impulse is no less real, no less urgent, no less necessary, the obstacles set in place by an intolerant dominant culture to flatten it are formidable. A complex system of strategies — social, political, religious, cultural — designed to keep gay men separate and silent. Alone. This is what happens when inclination is flattened. It will not hold.

On Dinner Etiquette

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Gauguin, 1898

Where Do We Come From? What Are We Having For Dinner?

Behan, 2026

Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti in 1891 convinced he could recover something primal and uncorrupted — that he could arrive in another culture, look at its people, and understand them. His monumental 1898 painting arranges bodies along a long horizontal plane, figures at rest and in motion, asking the largest questions a human being can ask: where do we come from, what are we, where are we going. It is a magnificent painting and a deeply complicated one. Gauguin was the outsider looking in — the Western eye trained on an “other” culture, certain of its own capacity to comprehend what it was seeing. Gay culture has always known that position from the other side. They are the ones perpetually examined, explained, and theorized about by those who have never lived inside the life being described.

The horizontal arrangement found in Gauguin’s work is reflected in Behan’s collage — gay men spread across a sun-drenched domestic interior landscape, going about the vivid, ordinary business of living — reading, exercising, dressing, existing —bodies serving as the argument. Behan’s collage argues the working out of the everyday is the answer to the cosmic questions humans like to ask, and it turns out the answer almost always includes “what do you want for dinner?”

Humor is not a retreat from seriousness. It is one of the most serious responses available to a human being. To laugh at our own fragility — at the gap between the questions we ask and the lives we actually live — is to hold both things at once without being destroyed by either. It is, finally, a form of hope. Cindy Sherman has described seeing humor in almost everything, treating her work as a one-person mischievous show. Her clown series uses garish color and deliberate artifice to expose the fabricated nature of social roles not to mock but to liberate. When the construction is exposed, we are free to laugh at it. And when we laugh at it, we are free.

Gauguin asked where we are going. Sherman shows us the costume we are wearing while we figure it out. The Closet Series suggests we stop and have a bite first.

Beauty

Terrible Beauty | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | Gay Domestic | The Subdivision

Yeats described Ireland as a terrible beauty being born — a nation finally free, but having never known freedom, uncertain how to inhabit it.

For gay men, the cost of freedom is leaving behind the closet for good. Not as easy as one might think.

One hundred years on from independence, Ireland has made those choices with remarkable clarity.

Same-sex activity was decriminalized in 1993. In 2015 Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by popular referendum — not by courts, but by the people. Marriage equality is now constitutionally protected. Discrimination based on sexual orientation is explicitly outlawed. Dublin, Cork, and Galway boast vibrant LGBTQ+ communities.

Ireland went from one of Europe’s most socially conservative Catholic nations to one of its most progressive within a single generation.

A terrible beauty indeed. Fully realized, reborn.

3 THREE III

The Three Musketeers | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet | The Subdivision

Thomson Beattie. Thomas McCaffry. John Hugo Ross.

Three wealthy Canadians, confirmed bachelors, constant companions, and bon vivants.

They traveled the world together — Italy, Egypt, North Africa, the Aegean. They dressed alike. They were mistaken for brothers. The Winnipeg Free Press called them inseparable. They shared cabin C-6 on the Titanic. All three lost in the April 15, 1912 sinking.

LGBTQ+ historians widely believe today they were much more than friends. But labels like “gay” weren’t spoken in 1912. They lived as honestly and as authentically as the constructs of Edwardian society would allow.

Who can blame them? Not the Subdivision.

On Percentage

Interrupted Lives, Interrupted Voyage | Digital Photo Collage | 2026

Historians estimate that between 110 and 220 of the roughly 2,200 people aboard the Titanic would have had same-sex attractions. We know seven names.

Frank Millet, American painter. Major Archibald Butt, military aide to two American presidents. They shared a house for years and are widely believed to have been romantically involved.

Ella Holmes White and Marie Grice Young, who shared First Class stateroom C-32 and lived their lives together.

Thomson Beattie, Thomas McCaffry, and John Hugo Ross — the Three Musketeers of Winnipeg, bon vivants, possible Edwardian throuple, inseparable to the end.

All lost. April 15, 1912.

Because coming out in the modern sense was not an option in 1912 for legal reasons alone, biographical details are the only clues history left us.

Seven names.

Hundreds of stories we will never know.

Ramón

Yes, Silent Film Star Ramón Novarro and Argentine Olympic Swimmer José Caraballo Were Lovers in the 1930s | Digital Photo Collage | 2026

Ramón Novarro.

Mexican-born.

Ben-Hur.

Hollywood’s Latin Lover.

One of the most handsome and highest paid Hollywood stars of the 1920s and 1930s.

Gay his entire life. In the closet his entire life.

MGM marketed him as a straight romantic lead while studio executives privately knew the truth. He struggled to reconcile his sexuality with his devout Catholic faith and the brutal homophobia of his era.

In 1934 he met José Caraballo, a 19-year-old Argentine Olympic swimmer, in Buenos Aires and brought him back to California. They were lovers for a year and a half. He cast José as the lead in his 1935 film Contra la corriente.

Then they parted.

That contradiction — a life lived fully in private, carefully erased in public — defined everything. His hidden life coming into the light only at the very end thru antigay violence.

Prelude

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet | The Subdivision

In 1912 Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed and performed Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune for the Ballets Russes, causing an international scandal with its frank, unapologetic sensuality.

Nijinsky was bisexual. His lover and patron was Sergei Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes.

The desire was always there. Everyone saw it. Nobody named it.

The fauns in this collage are Nijinsky himself — his own image from the original 1912 production, doubled, reaching from across 113 years toward a man from 2025, against the original ballet’s backdrop.

The Crown

Crown | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | Gay Domestic | The Subdivision

Marriage is the crowning achievement of humanity — the triumph of partnership, the art of long conversation, the continuous practice of choosing each other.

Gay people have always known this.

Gays didn’t fight for the right to marry because it was convenient. Gays fought for it because they understood its value.

The crown belongs to all.

Orange You Glad

Orange You Glad | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan |

Married adults live 1.5 to 2 years longer than their unmarried peers.

Married men have a 46% lower rate of cardiovascular death.

Married individuals engage in preventive care at higher rates than unmarried adults.

Married adults report shorter hospital stays, fewer doctor visits, and less need for nursing home care.

Married adults are 16 percentage points more likely to rate their lives as thriving.

Millennial and Gen Z married adults report 15-16% better mental health than their single counterparts.

The science is not ambiguous — marriage is good for you.

That is why it should belong to everyone.

Perfect

Perfect Fit | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet | The Subdivision

Spotted in the Wild:

The Closeted, Preening Gay Peacock. Jeremy has Married Sally, and they are Looking for a New (Old) Home to Purchase.

Their Agent is Jax, Jeremy’s Best Friend, Best Man, and Best Camping Bud. Jax is Bringing Oranges to Remind Jeremy of their Vacation in Florida to Tour Orange Farms.

Sally Thinks Jax is Super Sweet and Doesn’t Mind that He is Around ALL THE TIME.

The Closet offers straight women one option.

Lots of trips to Home Goods with Jeremy and Sally. Frequent camping trips with Jeremy and Jax.

The Closet fits everyone inside its walls — with room to spare.

Dark Sepia

Dark Sepia | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan |

“Len” Keith and “Cub” Coates of Havelock, New Brunswick. Two WWI army vets who found each other in a small rural town and built a life together.

What are the odds?

For almost 30 years, Len pointed his camera back onto themselves. Canoeing. Hunting. Hugging.

One was forced out of town.

The other married.

The photographs survive.

Beholden

Behold the Man | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet | The Subdivision

Behind the marble, behind the scripture, behind the press release, behind public opinion, is the man.

And that man is entirely human — gay, bi, or straight — filled with the same dreams of success, achievement, happiness, adventure, love.

As Maya Angelou said, “we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”

And to quote one of the less used lines of scripture — whatever you do to the least of my brothers.

I Do, Do U?

I Do | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan |

Zephyrus carries Chloris and everything resolves.

That is what marriage does. It resolves. It answers the oldest human desire — to be chosen, to be held, to belong to someone and have them belong to you.

When marriage is available, resolution is possible.

When it is withheld, nothing can fully settle.

Gay marriage is not a political position. It is the resolution of an ancient human longing.

Desire, finally answered.

Bull

Bull | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan |

In the Pompeii Fresco, the bull was unimaginable force, and for Dirce, a reckoning. Then Vesuvius—another unimaginable force with tragic circumstances.

Two thousand years later the bull is still a force to be reckoned with. Industrialization. The iPhone. Artificial intelligence. Unimaginable force meeting the human condition, changing everything.

That is ancient.

That is now.

After Ornan

After Ornan | Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photo Collage | 2026

Homage to Gustave Courbet’s “A Burial at Ornans” (1851)

Gustave Courbet painted ordinary people’s grief at monumental scale — radical in its time, insisting that ordinary lives deserved to be witnessed. The dog at the graveside. The faces of the forgotten. This work carries that tradition forward.

Gay men served in every army of every nation in every war ever fought. They served bravely, in secret, under constant threat — not only from the enemy but from their own commanding officers. In the American military alone, an estimated 650,000 to 1.6 million gay men served in World War II. Those discovered faced dishonorable discharge — stripped of benefits, healthcare, and dignity. The ones who died in battle were buried with honors they were never fully granted in life.

Here French soldiers and captured German soldiers stand together — enemies united in youth, in vulnerability, in the bodies that war would consume. Among them, hidden in plain sight on both sides of every front line, gay men who loved in secret and died without acknowledgment.

Young men. Old men’s wars.

The dog from Courbet’s graveside is here too. Still watching. Still witness to what we lose.

In the end, in every generation, we all want the same thing — to be treated with dignity and respect. Nothing more. Nothing less.