The Seen Witness

In these three collages, the viewer is a witness, and the viewer is seen. In each piece, a dark-haired man turns over his shoulder and looks out of the frame, at whoever stands in front of the work.

Every figure comes from the feed. The over-the-shoulder pose is common on social media. It is made for an audience the person posting will never meet. In these collages, that audience is specific: the person looking.

The settings change. The first collage is an open field, where a second man in red trunks walks away into tall grass. The second is the Dallas skyline. The third is a high-rise interior facing the Empire State Building at sunset. The glance repeats in all three.

Two other witnesses are present. The Jupiter 3 represents freedom and escape. The Blue Moon represents desire and longing. Both watch from above, and no figure looks at them. They are unseen witnesses.

The viewer is the only witness any figure acknowledges.

That acknowledgment changes the act of looking. An unseen witness observes from a distance and remains uninvolved. A seen witness has been identified. Once the man turns and looks back, the viewer becomes part of the scene: part of the attention, the display, and the desire between men.

Each piece positions the viewer differently. In the field, a close-cropped face at the right edge also looks sideways, so the viewer stands between two looks. In Dallas, the other two men face forward, and all three look at the viewer. In New York, a silver-haired man photographs himself in a mirror, and the glance is the only look directed out of the frame.

My work takes subtext and makes it context. Here, the subtext is the viewer's own looking. The glance makes it part of the picture.

Today's Feed = Today's Collages

Seven new works built from social media, algorithms and hefty scrolling to build gay-positive representations

Each collage here comes from one day's feed. The figures, the grounds and the combinations all arrive through social media, sorted by the day's algorithm. The goal is gay-positive representation built from what the scroll delivers.

Two men in army fatigues carry over from yesterday's collages. Today they stand beside a Freedom Elite motor home, its floor plan laid open below them: a dinette that converts to a bed, a wet bath, a cab-over bunk. They appear again inside a church, near a crucifix and a miraculous staircase behind a foreshortened figure.

Elsewhere, two wrestlers stand under a large blue moon with a new Veronica veil. A mid-century ranch house frames a lawn full of men at dusk, one holding a snake. A grid of OnlyFan selfies sits beside a White Star Line crew photograph and a smiling man in a 1950s plaid shirt. Contemporary figures share an AI representation of an ancient Greece exercise court. In a mall food court setting, gay men react to a chiseled torso at the center of the frame. Time for snacks!

Jupiter 3 appears in all seven. It stands for freedom, escape and witness.

Social Media Meets Gay Culture

The source material reflects how central social media is to LGBTQ life. A 2024 national survey by LGBT Tech and Data for Progress polled 1,304 LGBTQ adults and found that 96% use the internet at least once a day. Nearly 80% use social networking platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn or X, and 78% use video platforms such as YouTube or Twitch. Social media is super gay.

The purpose is connection and expression. At least 77% of LGBTQ adults use the internet to express themselves creatively, explore new ideas and connect with friends and family. 57% report often using social platforms to connect with friends or family.

This is not limited to the young. A 2025 study found that LGBTQ adults 55 and older were significantly more likely than younger LGBTQ adults to use social media for social bonding.

Sadly, the same platforms carry hostility. Half of LGBTQ adults report anti-LGBTQ bullying or harassment online, and more than a third have seen anti-LGBTQ misinformation shared online.

The feed supplies both the images and the conditions. These collages take what it offers and assemble it in support of gay life.

— Behan

Sources

  • LGBT Tech and Data for Progress, "ctrl+alt+lgbt: Digital Access, Usage, and Experiences of the LGBTQ+ Community" (2024): dataforprogress.org

  • LGBT Tech, survey release: lgbttech.org

  • Statista, LGBTQ+ adults using social platforms to connect with their communities (April 2024): statista.com

  • "Intergenerational Differences in Social Media Use Among LGBTQ+ Adults," Innovation in Aging (2025): ncbi.nlm.nih.go

The Lingering Shot

In a scene from the 2024 series Earth Abides, Alexander Ludwig slowly undresses. The narrative pauses, the camera holds an inverted full shot, a peekaboo framing that film has usually reserved for women.

The original dark ground is kept. It reads as flat space and infinite space at once. This simultaneous compression and extension produces ambiguity, and with it, unease.

The natural color of the darkened shot is heightened into a palette reminiscent of Matisse's Blue Nude. The questions asked of Matisse apply here: is this a new understanding of beauty, or a distortion of the human form?

The collages extend the 3-second shot with multiple views of the scene, combined, inverted, overlaid, and repeated, to ask the question: if this scene had been filmed for a male audience instead of a female one, would it have been called inappropriate?

Other questions follow. How does this scene serve the narrative? Viewers interested in Ludwig capture the moment and repost it, which drives views and revenue for the series. Is the scene only about money?

Compare the nude bathing scene in the 2021 film The Power of the Dog. That film drew criticism, including from actor Sam Elliott, for its homoerotic content. Ludwig's slow strip passed without apparent objection. The only difference is the implied audience, women for one, men for the other.

This returns to the long debate over the naked and the nude. What counts as appropriate is often decided by the intention behind an image, not the image itself. That judgment usually rests on one assumption: heterosexual attraction is acceptable, homosexual attraction is not.

The objection, then, is not to the nude body. It is to LGBTQ+ people.

Singularity

A singularity is a point at which known rules stop applying.

The two collages below are built around that point.

Both began as advertisements. A mid-century Masonite ad that sold aspiration: a home and a room built by hand. A 2001 Italian shower gel ad selling desire: the body, a scent, and the company of men known as "the boys."

Into each space I added men from different times to compliment those from the original ads. Within this compression, the rules that separated one period from another necessarily stop applying. The experience of being human becomes all present, all at once.

Two separate collages, one of aspiration and one of desire, each compressed and combining to complete the other.

Symbiosis.

Fall and Winter 1974

In the 20th century, gay men had almost no way to see themselves in publications or in print. When they did appear, they were shown in the most negative light.

One source of positive male imagery was the department store catalog of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Within those pages were images of men together, presented as subtext. For gay men, seeing those images was powerful.

These three digital collages use the actual Fall and Winter 1974 catalog covers of JCPenney, Sears and Montgomery Ward, and make the subtext context.

Since 1974, Montgomery Ward has closed, Sears is down to five stores, and JCPenney survives as part of a larger company. Perhaps if they had published covers like these, all three would still be thriving today.

Kittens a Go-Go

Three new collages bring together kittens, an atomic mushroom cloud, and a man flexing his bicep.

The kittens come from paint-by-number canvases. The hobby began in the early 1950s and filled American homes with sentimental, domestic images..

The mushroom cloud comes from the same decade. It is the defining image of the Cold War, the threat that existed alongside postwar comfort.

The flexing man comes from social media today. He displays his strength in front of the blast.

Two recurring symbols complete each piece. The blue moon stands for desire and transformation. The Jupiter 3, the next version of the Jupiter, built for gay people, stands for freedom and movement.

Together the five elements form a sequence: comfort, threat, strength, desire, escape. The 1950s told men to protect the home and to fear what could destroy it. These collages place a contemporary gay man at the center of that picture and give him a ship to leave in

Balla Duchamp Behan

Duchamp in 1912, Balla in 1912, Behan in 2026: three artists, more than a century apart, working on the same question: how to show the figure in motion on a two-dimensional surface.

Behan, Leg Day (2026). The repeated legs fan out in arcs that echo the dog's feet in the Balla. Duchamp and Balla painted their motion studies in muted tones from an observed or imagined model. Leg Day builds its motion from a photograph in the feed, in full color, with the figure a man at the gym.

Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). A single figure broken into overlapping planes as it moves down the stairs. The painting caused a scandal at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where one critic mocked it as an explosion in a shingle factory.

Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). Painted the same year, it shows motion as repetition: the dog's feet, the tail, the leash, and the walker's skirt all multiply into blurred arcs. Both painters drew on the chronophotography of Muybridge and Marey.

Making Endurance Pay

Every morning begins with my feed, which brings me images and spaces to consider for collaging. This collage uses three of them.

One comes from an outdoor shower. One comes from a gym. The room comes from a news article with tips for decorating a small space.

An algorithm selects each one and sends it to me.

Each presents a version of the good, at least to the people who made it.

The collage places them in one composition. The flexed arm is the foreground, the showering figure the middle ground, the furnished room the background. Three flat images produce the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface.

Editing on the iPhone unifies them. Focus, sharpness, and softness are adjusted until the three sources read as one space.

At the bottom edge, a fragment of caption remains from the source: "Solid G…" I leave it in because it identifies the image as coming from social media, and because the word states what all three sources promise. "Solid" means firm, full, and complete: a solid body, a solid build, a solid home.

The source of inspiration is an artwork seen in the same article on best practices in home design: in a pink bathroom, a reclining figure in red on a desert highway, reflected in a mirror. Two things in that work hold my attention: the intensity of the color and the relation of the figure to the ground. As an artist, it is important for me to find other artists who are pushing the same boundaries, each in a distinct way.

For many artists, the payoff is found in the long road. It may come as a future audience, a better understanding of the purpose behind the work, or both. Endurance is critical to building a successful portfolio. Artists make endurance pay by defining a unique visual point of view and by finding the audience that connects with that view.