On Being Published

Men Loving Men: A Media History of Connection

This timeline places the history of gay adult publication and film alongside the era’s key political and social milestones. From coded beefcake magazines to today’s creator platforms, this media gave gay men visual proof they weren’t alone — breaking down an isolation that was itself a tool of suppression.

1951 — Physique Pictorial founded (Bob Mizer, Athletic Model Guild) — the beefcake magazine era begins, using bodybuilding imagery as legal cover for homoerotic content.

1967 — Redrup v. New York Supreme Court ruling loosens obscenity law, opening the door to explicit publication.

1969 — Physique Pictorial’s January issue publishes full nudity for the first time, following a further Supreme Court ruling on nudity in art.

1969 — The Stonewall uprising in New York marks the start of the modern gay rights movement.

1971 — Boys in the Sand, directed by Wakefield Poole, a genuine filmmaker (former Broadway choreographer) — the first widely distributed, narrative gay adult film, theatrical release. It was the first gay adult film reviewed by Variety, and remains the only X-rated film ever reviewed by The New York Times.

1973 — The American Psychiatric Association removes homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.

1978 — The Other Side of Aspen (Falcon Studios) — Falcon’s first feature-length release; one of the first adult films distributed on videocassette; set the era’s aesthetic template.

1983 — Spokes (Falcon Studios) — extended the Falcon formula’s popularity, spawning two semi-sequels.

1988 — Big Guns (dir. William Higgins) — named Adam Film World’s Gay Movie of the Year.

2001 — Sean Cody launches — studio-run subscription paysite model.

2003 — Lawrence v. Texas strikes down remaining state sodomy laws nationwide.

2004 — Bel Ami builds out BelAmiOnline — internet-first distribution.

2009 — Grindr launches — the first major location-based gay dating app, shifting gay connection from viewing content to real-time, geographically-anchored contact between men.

2015 — Obergefell v. Hodges legalizes same-sex marriage nationwide.

2016 — OnlyFans launches — creator-direct model begins displacing the studio system.

2017 — Cade Maddox enters the gay adult film industry, debuting through both streaming platforms and traditional studios.

2020 — Maddox named Performer of the Year at the GayVN Awards.

March 2026 — Maddox’s official OnlyFans page is live and active — he’s running all three channels at once: studios, streaming, and OnlyFans.

JD KD

The Ballad of James D and Ken D

Some men can’t be improved upon.

All the looks, none of the mess.

Leather jacket. Sideways glance.

Twelve inches, fully cooperative.

Trouble Mother warned about.

A Father’s Dreamboat.

He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t apologize.

No attitude. No back talk.

Full strength. No substitutes.

Stands where you land him.

They don’t make ’em like this anymore.

Manhood made safe the American Way.

On Connections

This evening I found a moment where my own practice briefly crossed with another artist’s: Wade Guyton, and a detail from his work from 2011, fifteen years before mine.

His piece, “Untitled (Joseph Cataldi),” took a photo of a male figure from an existing book and ran it through an inkjet printer, letting the printer’s own misprint become part of the final image. Mine works a similar way — a male figure layered and obscured.

Fifteen years apart, but from where I’m standing, there’s a real kinship between the two pieces, if not the artists. I find that fascinating.

Enter the Shift

Practice Update: this collage is notable with its shift in visual presentation in three specific forms:

Color drenching: More saturated color, pushing hue intensity across the whole piece.

Value intensity: Overall deeper tonal range, flattening the image somewhat, but also unifying it as a secondary result.

Surreal elements: Objects with no narrative connection to the rest of the scene — separate from recurring symbolic imagery like the moon and Jupiter 3, which remains a recurring symbolic element in this work. This new assertion is arbitrary rather than symbolic. It is meant to disrupt the space being asserted.

These three moves are intentional, part of the evolution of an active practice. It’s what keeps me engaged visually.

Domestic Bliss: the Hand Towel

Beneath each figure in these four works is a hand towel. This is not a neutral background. It represents bland domesticity — the ordinary rituals of setting up a home: wedding gifts, a first house, the accumulation of everyday objects that come with building a life alongside another person. For many gay men, including myself, this was denied. What looks like an inconsequential, even trite, choice of pattern is instead a marker of loss — the specific ache of never having access to that kind of domestic life.

— Behan

For the Record

Representation and the Record

The gap in the archive

For most of American visual history, gay men were absent from ordinary scenes. Family photos, neighborhood snapshots, advertising, and local news did not include them as neighbors, coworkers, or people at a lake house. When gay men did appear in media, it was often as a stereotype, a punchline, or a warning.

This body of work responds to that gap directly. It combines images of gay men with the settings of everyday American life — cars, backyards, bathrooms, decks by the water — to build the kind of ordinary visual presence that was rarely produced at the time.

What the numbers show

The absence was not incidental. It shows up clearly in the data.

On screen, representation stayed thin for decades. GLAAD’s 2024–25 “Where We Are on TV” report counted 489 LGBTQ characters across broadcast, cable, and streaming — and noted that number had dropped from the year before. In film, the picture is worse: GLAAD’s 2024 Studio Responsibility Index found that only 59 of 250 major studio releases contained an LGBTQ character at all.

Familiarity with gay people has changed more slowly than acceptance itself. Pew Research Center has tracked this for over a decade. In 1993, only 61 percent of Americans said they personally knew someone who was gay or lesbian. By the 2010s that number had climbed into the high 80s. That rise did not happen on its own — researchers link it directly to increased visibility, both in personal life and in media.

The gap is uneven across the community. A 2022 Trevor Project poll found that while roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults said they personally knew someone gay or lesbian, fewer than one in three knew someone transgender. Familiarity, and the acceptance that follows it, has not extended equally to every part of the community.

Knowing someone changes minds measurably. Gallup polling has found that Americans who personally know a gay or lesbian person are far more likely to support same-sex marriage than those who do not — in some surveys, a difference of more than 20 percentage points. GLAAD’s 2025 Accelerating Acceptance study reports the same pattern: when non-LGBTQ people see gay people represented in media, their comfort and familiarity increase measurably. The study also notes that most non-LGBTQ adults still do not personally know many members of the community, which leaves media as one of the main ways that familiarity gets built at all.

Why this matters for the work

The statistics point to a specific mechanism. Straight Americans who have never known a gay person, and who have rarely seen one in ordinary media, are working from a smaller and thinner set of information. Distance produces unfamiliarity, and unfamiliarity has measurable downstream effects on support, empathy, and basic recognition.

Placing gay men inside recognizable American scenes is a direct response to that mechanism. It is not decoration. It is an attempt to fill an archive that was left empty by omission, and to do it with images that show ordinary presence rather than spectacle.

Now and Then

Eighteen Months Apart

These two collages sit about a year and a half apart. The first is from March 2025. The second is from September 2026. Looking at them side by side shows what has shifted in the work and what has stayed constant.

What stays the same

Both pieces keep the same core method: a photographic male figure or figures placed against a built-up background of unrelated imagery. Both use bodies as the compositional anchor, with everything else in the frame arranged around them. Both still work in bright, saturated color, and both still pull from a mix of sources rather than staying inside one visual register.

What has changed

The March 2025 piece keeps its background elements relatively separate from the figures. The hotel room, the nightstand, the bedding all read as a coherent single space, and the two men are placed within it fairly naturally.

The September 2026 piece is more densely layered. A moon, a black swan, a passing figure on a beach, and a UFO-like object are all packed into the same frame as the three men in the foreground. The color treatment is also more processed here, with a flatter, more posterized look across the skin tones and background alike, compared to the more photographic color of the earlier piece.

The composition has also gotten more crowded. Where the earlier piece has two figures and a handful of identifiable background objects, the later piece stacks in more elements at once, with less visual separation between what is “background” and what is “foreground.”

What this suggests about the process

The direction of travel is toward more layering, not less. The impulse to juxtapose is still central to the work, but the later piece pushes that impulse further, combining more disparate elements in less space and flattening the color treatment further from anything resembling a single, coherent photographic scene. The earlier piece could still pass, at a glance, for a slightly altered photograph. The later piece cannot.

From Behan:

“The objective is the same, to build queer identity in the American landscape. And the sourcing is the same, looking daily and finding both figures and ground on social media and elsewhere online.

What I think is changing is a movement away from a sense of realistic space, originally to emphasize the historical reality of queer presence. Now the visual goal has evolved to include breaking that illusion of space, which I find endlessly interesting.”

Wesselmann and Behan

Updating the Great American Nude

Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude series ran from 1961 into the 1970s. It placed the female nude inside interiors built from mass-produced American objects: patterned curtains, plastic fruit, appliance ads, furniture catalogs. The nude stood for heterosexual desire as the culture assumed and displayed it at the time.

This series takes the same structure and changes the subject. The male nude replaces the female nude. The desire on display is gay rather than straight. Everything else about Wesselmann’s method carries over: the flattened planes of color, the collage layering of unrelated objects into one scene, the interior as a stage set for the body at its center.

What the interiors carry now

Wesselmann’s interiors held mid-century consumer goods: television sets, cigarette packs, canned goods, wallpaper patterns pulled from the period. The objects placed the nude inside a specific decade of American domestic life.

These collages update that inventory. Rainbow flags sit next to American flags. A framed photo of two people waving from a stage stands in for the political imagery Wesselmann might have used. Smartphone-era color saturation and digital layering replace paint and printed ephemera. The technology of collage-making has changed from scissors and paint to image editing software, and the resulting surfaces look different because of it: harder edges, more uniform color fields, a flatness that reads as digital rather than painted.

What the body is allowed to represent

Wesselmann’s female nude was not a specific woman. She stood for an available cultural fantasy, presented without controversy because heterosexuality needed no argument in that context.

The male nude in this series occupies the same position, but the representation itself carries weight that Wesselmann’s original never had to carry. A gay male nude, presented as casually desirable and as generically “American” as Wesselmann’s woman was, makes a claim: that this body belongs in the same visual category of unremarkable, mass-market desirability. The surrounding objects—flags, patriotic stars, suburban landscapes, a couple waving from a podium—place that body inside the ordinary furniture of American life rather than outside it.

The throughline

Wesselmann took the female nude and made her interchangeable with the products around her, all equally flattened, equally consumable. This series does the same with the male nude, updated for a culture where a gay man’s body can occupy that same everyday, mass-produced visual space. The method is inherited directly. The subject and what it is permitted to mean have moved.

On Cock Pits and Other Matters

Reclaiming the Cockpit: A Queer Insertion Into “The High and the Mighty”

Behan Works’ practice includes working backward through mid-century material — film stills, product photography, studio portraits — to place queer figures inside scenes intentionally built without them. It is a visual argument that absence in the historical record was not the same as absence in real life. Behan Works corrects the record.

One such example is The High and the Mighty, a film from 1954 about a passenger plane in crisis over the Pacific, with John Wayne as the co-pilot who holds the crew together. Every relationship on screen is heterosexual. Every hero, every villain, every quiet moment of tenderness between crew members happens inside that single frame of possibility.

This series works against that frame. It takes stills from the film and places a queer figure directly inside them — not beside the story, not commenting on it from outside, but standing in the cockpit, gripping the same instrument panel, present in the same frame as the original cast.

The Method

Each piece starts with an unaltered still from the film. A shirtless figure is composited into the same physical space as the original actors — sharing their lighting, their proportions, their position in the frame. The figure is not hidden in a corner of the image. It occupies the center, the foreground, the place the eye goes first.

The recurring icons carry the argument. The saucer marks escape, rescue, witness. The blue moon marks longing and desire. Both appear across nearly every piece in the series, turning a set of film stills into a single sustained scene rather than a set of separate jokes.

Why Insert Rather Than Reinterpret

The choice to insert a figure into an existing 1950s film, rather than write a new story from scratch, is deliberate. Reinterpreting the plot to make a character gay asks the audience to imagine an alternate, more honest version of the past. Inserting a figure directly into the original footage makes a different claim: that someone who was gay was surely already there, in the room, on the plane, in 1954 — never filmed, never noticed, never written down, never allowed into the frame.

The work to include gay figures is meant to counter an equally aggressive and intentional work to exclude them. The absence in the original footage was not neutral. It took effort to keep that frame as heterosexual as it is.

The Recurring Figures

Two moments recur across the series. In one, two men stand close together in near-darkness, faces almost touching, in the visual language of an embrace rather than a professional exchange. In another, a uniformed figure and a bare-chested figure occupy the same tight frame that the original film reserved for its heterosexual leads.

Neither moment claims anything about the real actors or the real production. The original footage stays untouched where it appears. What changes is who else gets to be present in it.

Welsh and Behan

A Comparative Look: Two Collage Practices, One Genre

Collage keeps returning to the same problem: what happens when a body is placed inside material that was never made for it. Two current practitioners, working independently and in different mediums, arrive at that problem from opposite directions.

Simon Welsh, based in Sydney, works in physical collage — cut paper, embroidery thread, glued objects. Behan Works works digitally, compositing photographic elements and recurring symbolic icons into a single flattened image. Placing one work from each practice side by side makes the differences in method, and the differences in what each method allows, visible.

The Two Works

Welsh’s piece takes a plate from a 1937 book on the sculptor Étienne Béothy — an ornate porcelain figure group — and interrupts it with a photograph of a man’s face and torso. The man’s head tilts back through a gap torn in the porcelain image. His arms extend upward, hands gripping the gilded rim of the vessel as though it is load-bearing.

The Behan Works piece places a standing male figure in front of a halved piece of fruit, cut open to show its interior in cross-section. A recurring icon — a small flying saucer — sits at the figure’s hip. A blue moon appears in the upper corner. Both objects belong to an ongoing symbolic key used across the body of work: the saucer marks escape, rescue, or witness; the blue moon marks longing and desire.

What the Two Works Share

Both center a single male figure, framed symmetrically by one object roughly equal in visual weight to the body. In both cases, that object is ornate or organic rather than plain — porcelain scrollwork in one, the branching cellular interior of fruit in the other. The effect in both is closer to an icon or a devotional image than a portrait.

Both also depend on appropriated material. Welsh explicitly credits the source plate as part of the work. Behan Works draws its fruit photography and film stills from existing images repurposed as backdrop. Neither piece originates its own photographic content — the authorship lies in the arrangement, not in the capture.

Where the Two Works Diverge

The clearest difference is in how the central object relates to the body.

In Welsh’s piece, the porcelain and the figure are fused. The man’s arms disappear into the gilded rim; his hands appear to be gripping and bearing weight from the object itself. The photographic body and the printed porcelain occupy the same physical space, cut and reassembled so that neither element is fully separable from the other.

In the Behan Works piece, the fruit functions as backdrop. The figure stands in front of it rather than being woven into it. The composition reads as a stage set, with the object supplying atmosphere and meaning rather than physical support.

This difference traces directly back to method. Hand-cut collage forces physical decisions about where one image ends and another begins — the edge itself becomes part of the composition. Digital compositing allows layers to remain visually distinct even when arranged in the same frame, which makes fusion possible but not automatic.

Process as the Real Subject

The comparison points to a structural difference between the two practices rather than a difference in ambition.

Welsh’s work is organized around single, self-contained statements. Each piece draws on its own set of source material and stands alone. Behan Works is organized around a recurring symbolic system — the saucer, the moon, the meanings attached to each — that spans many pieces and asks to be read cumulatively rather than one image at a time.

Neither approach is more demanding than the other. They are simply solving different problems: one is about what a single image can hold, the other is about what a body of images can build together over time.

Paw Paw

The Pawpaw as Queerness in Nature

Queerness is not a human invention. It is biological, and it shows up throughout the natural world. The pawpaw plant is one more example.

The pawpaw tree produces flowers that are both male and female at once. Each flower carries both sets of reproductive organs. The flower also changes phase over time, functioning as female first and then shifting to male.

There is no single, fixed sexual identity built into this plant. It holds both, and it changes. That is not a deviation from nature. It is nature.

On Marlon

The Wild One as a Queer Manifesto

The Wild One was a seminal film in the 1950s, which introduced the masculinity of Marlon Brando to the American public. It also functions as a queer manifesto. The homoerotic content in the film is not a later projection. It is on the screen, and it is intentional.

Johnny Strabler Was Not a Costume

The character of Johnny Strabler from The Wild One was a bisexual man, as played by Marlon Brando, per the actor’s own accounts of the role and the film. In fact, in the building of the costume for Johnny Strabler, Brando himself chose clothes from his own wardrobe that emphasized masculinity, a statement in itself on how he saw a bisexual man: strong, confident, aggressive, a he-man. He was acting as his own costume designer, in the tradition of other queer men who shaped that trade: Adrian, Travis Banton, Orry-Kelly, Howard Greer. Choosing your own wardrobe, building your own look piece by piece rather than having it handed to you, is not a neutral act. It is an act of self-fashioning, a queer skill before it is anything else.

The Fight With Chino

The physicality of the fight with Chino is only matched by their emotional intensity toward one another, with Chino repeating often that he loves him, telling Johnny that the club misses him, and asking him to come inside and have a beer. Meanwhile, Kathie, the sheriff’s daughter, pursues Johnny, not the other way around. She tells him she has been waiting for someone to take her away. Johnny turns her down flat. In turning her down, he rejects the conventionality of the heterosexual arc she offers him, and rides off alone, back toward the club, and toward Chino. A film built around the conventional Hollywood arc would have ended with the two of them together. This one gives Johnny a beautiful woman who wants him, and has him walk past her unbothered.

The World It Came From

The Wild One was released in December 1953. Brando at that time was living and working in Los Angeles, the same city where two of the earliest gay motorcycle clubs would soon form after the release of the film: the Satyrs in 1954, and Oedipus in 1958. Both clubs modeled themselves directly on the look Brando had just put on the screen as Johnny Strabler.

In the forming of these clubs, gay men in Los Angeles were not projecting a reading onto Brando’s performance from a distance. They recognized almost immediately a version of masculinity that was already theirs, and built organizations around it within a year of seeing it on screen.

Los Angeles in the 1950s was not a large city. That a bisexual man was playing the role of Johnny Strabler in this city, at this moment, gave other bisexual and gay men something they had not had on screen before: a permission structure. Seeing that kind of masculinity performed by a man who was living it authentically made it easier for others to express themselves the same way.

What the Manifesto Says

The manifesto The Wild One makes is simple: gay and bisexual men exist, in every form, from effeminate to the most aggressively masculine, and there is nothing wrong with any of it. The film does not argue this in words. It embodies it, in the person of a bisexual actor playing the most masculine man on American screens, and in a gang that rolls into a small town and refuses to apologize for taking up space. Johnny Strabler is a bisexual man not afraid to be bisexual, in a world that defined such a thing as uncivil. That such a film was made in 1953 is remarkable, and it indicates that the 1950s were not as buttoned-down as they are remembered.

Oh, and By the Way

Four years later, mainstream American film said the same thing again, more plainly. The title number in Jailhouse Rock (1957) puts Elvis Presley in a cell block set surrounded entirely by men, and has one inmate tell another, “You’re the cutest jailbird I ever did see,” inviting him to dance. Music scholars have identified that line as a direct reference to prison sex, sung and staged in a film aimed at the same teenage audience The Wild One had reached four years earlier. Two major studio releases, Columbia and MGM, four years apart, both built around a masculine icon, both carrying real coded content aimed at teenagers, in the decade everyone remembers as the most buttoned-down in American history. That’s not a stretch anymore. It’s a pattern.

C+B 4 Profit

Selling to an Audience You Won’t Admit You Have

Three eras. One pattern. Straight-presenting men monetizing a gay male audience while keeping enough distance to deny it.

Magazine Ads (1930s–1950s)

It started coded. Underwear and pajama ads in mainstream magazines — Wilson, Reliance, Jayson — showed men lounging together in bedrooms, “roommates” trading loaded glances, locker-room scenes staged like pinups. Illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, who was gay himself, built an entire career on the same trick for Arrow and Kuppenheimer. Nothing was ever stated. In the 1940s, stating it could end a career.

That’s the baseline: an image that reads two ways, and a company that never has to pick one.

Social Media Thirst Traps

The coding drops away and the flirtation gets direct. A shirtless photo, a caption written to invite speculation, a comment section that lights up with gay male attention — all of it drives engagement, and engagement drives the algorithm. The creator still doesn’t have to claim anything. The audience does the interpretive work, and the platform rewards them both for it.

Ask directly and the answer is never yes. It’s also never quite no. That non-answer is the product.

OnlyFans

The paywall finishes what the thirst trap started. Solo content, fetish content, stripping — built explicitly around what a gay male subscriber base will pay for, sold by performers who may hold none of the identity being marketed to.

There’s no cover story left at this point. The audience is named in the content itself. What’s still missing is any acknowledgment of who that audience is or what the arrangement actually is.

The Throughline

Magazine ads planted the seed with a wink. Social media grew it into an open flirtation. OnlyFans turned it into a paycheck. Same audience, same denial, three escalating price points.

The 1940s ads had an excuse — the law and the culture left no other option. Nothing since has that excuse.

See Saw

Tough Gays

Back in the late 80’s, when I was a young artist building an independent style and a story, I worked as a waiter in Arlington, Texas. Some nights after work I’d stop into a gay bar called the 651, on Division Street — a podunk place that was home to a dedicated group of drag queens who performed there regularly.

One night as I was leaving, another young man came out of the bar and approached me. He started talking, and it was clear he was interested in me. Meanwhile, some men across Division street, hanging around the parking lot of straight bar, started heckling us. The young man's response startled me completely. There was no fear in him at all. He was utterly and completely masculine. The straight men backed down. It was, or so I thought at the time, the first time I had seen this kind of gay man, a tough gay — masculine, interested in me, wanting me to stay, and utterly prepared to slay dragons.

In that moment I saw that tough gays exist, even though I haven’t always been able to recognize them. The tough gay man’s masculinity is entirely genuine and unperformed. Being gay is just one fact about him. It does not reorganize his interests, determine his occupation, affect his manner, or consume his self-understanding as a man.

My nature as an artist is to observe. That’s my modus operandi. But my ability to observe the gay male, and the tough gay in particular, has been truncated by cultural conditioning — the faulty assumption that gay men are somehow failed men. That conditioning (in its purest form the closet) creates a real blindness to the masculine gay man, even when he’s standing right in front of us. Looking back, I don’t think I only encountered the tough gay once or twice in my life. I think it happened all the time. I simply wasn’t able to see it, because I was told not to see it, and because I’d also been taught to follow instructions, as part of that same conditioning. That night broke through. It was a moment of forever freedom.

And that understanding of the tough gay is not without precedent. Martin Levine, who studied gay men’s lives through the 1970s, and R.W. Connell, who interviewed gay men directly about masculinity, both found the same thing I saw that hot summer night in that parking lot: large numbers of gay men whose manner, work, and self-understanding were indistinguishable from any straight man’s, with who he wanted to be with as the only real difference.

The encounter with that young man lasted maybe three minutes. He went back into the bar and I went home. But that moment changed me — a Matrix-style moment, long before the Matrix was a thing. I understood that the world as I’d been seeing it was not the world that actually existed. A visual artist’s goal is always to see more. I’m grateful to that young-now-old man. I think of him from time to time. When I do, I wish him well.

On Cadmus

On Cadmus

Paul Cadmus painted a world that mid-century America mostly refused to acknowledge in public: sailors, bathers, and men who looked at each other openly, rendered with the same technical seriousness as any history painting. He wasn’t illustrating a hidden subculture. He was placing gay presence directly into the tradition of American figure painting, at a time when doing so was a provocation in itself.

My own work references Cadmus for that reason. When I build a composition around men in a shared social space — a locker room, a dance floor, a line of bodies under club light — I’m working from the same premise he did: that this presence belongs in the frame, painted with the same formal attention as any other subject, not set apart from it.

Cadmus made that presence visible in a country that preferred it stay out of view. I’m continuing that effort in my own way, in my own time, with my own version of the world he first put on canvas.

Night Watch

Night Watch, Nightwatch: Two Group Portraits Three Centuries Apart

The basic tools of group composition haven’t changed much in nearly four hundred years. The elements and principles of design — organizing a space, creating the illusion of depth within it — stay consistent across eras and mediums, even when the subject matter has nothing in common. Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” (1642) and my diptych “Nightwatch” make that case. The two works share a title, and on closer look, they share a compositional logic as well. Both organize a crowd of figures around a small number of forward-facing bodies picked out by light, set against a darker field of surrounding activity.

Composition and Lighting

In Rembrandt’s painting, two figures step forward into a pool of light at the center of the group — a captain in black and an officer in cream and gold. Everyone else recedes into shadow behind them, caught mid-motion: loading muskets, raising a flag, beating a drum. The light does the work of selecting who the eye should register first, even though the painting depicts an entire company.

My diptych repeats that structure. The right panel isolates a single dancer under a spotlight and a rendered moon, his arm raised, headphones around his neck. The left panel holds a line of men in near-identical poses and clothing, functioning as the surrounding company rather than as individuals. The moon in my panel occupies the same role as the arch and banner in Rembrandt’s background: a fixed point that anchors the scene and confirms it takes place at night, despite the artificial brightness of the central figures.

Uniform and Individual

Rembrandt’s militia company wears a mix of matching sashes and individualized dress — the same civic uniform interpreted differently by each man. The line of dancers in my left panel works the same way: identical shorts, identical sneakers, nearly identical stance, individuality reduced to small variations in posture. That repetition sets up the contrast with the single figure in the right panel, just as the militia’s uniformity sets up the two captains stepping forward from the group.

Figures Removed From Context

Both works also share something in how they are built. Rembrandt assembled and adjusted a paid company of individual sitters into an invented, dramatized night scene that never occurred as depicted. My own practice works from the same premise — pulling figures out of their original photographic context and layering them together so they inhabit a new setting that didn’t exist until the composition put them there. In both cases the “night watch” on the canvas is staged, not documented.

Why It’s Worth Noting

I didn’t set out to reference Rembrandt when building this piece. The parallel surfaced afterward, in the shared title and in how similar the underlying structure turned out to be: a company of uniform figures, a pool of light isolating the ones meant to be seen first, and a night setting that holds the whole arrangement together.

DMJ

What’s in a Name: On Duke, Marion, and John

He carried three names over the course of his life, and each one tells a different part of the story.

Marion

He was born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, in 1907, the son of a pharmacist. Later in life the middle name was formally changed to Mitchell, and Marion Mitchell Morrison is the name that appears on his death certificate. It was never a name he was fond of. By his own account, he was glad to be rid of it once Hollywood gave him something else to go by. Mostly it was his mother who kept using it.

Duke

The name that actually stuck came from a dog. When the Morrison family moved to Glendale, California, around 1916, they brought along an Airedale terrier named Duke. The dog walked young Marion to school every morning, past the local firehouse, and the firemen there started calling the boy “Little Duke” after his constant companion. The nickname outlasted the dog by decades. It was the name his friends used, the name that followed him into his early working life at Fox Film Corporation, and the name he was actually credited under on screen in his earliest film work. In the 1929 musical Words and Music, he appeared in the cast list as Duke Morrison, playing a small role called Pete Donahue. Some filmographies list a second early credit under the same name, in Cheer Up and Smile (1930), around the same period he was still working as a prop man between bit parts. Duke Morrison was, briefly, an actual screen name, not just a private nickname.

John

That changed in 1930, when director Raoul Walsh cast him in the lead role of The Big Trail. The studio did not think either “Marion Morrison” or “Duke Morrison” would work for a leading man. Walsh first proposed “Anthony Wayne,” after the Revolutionary War general “Mad” Anthony Wayne, but studio chief Winfield Sheehan rejected it as sounding too foreign. Walsh then suggested pairing “Wayne” with “John,” reportedly because the two names had a good rhythm together. Sheehan agreed. Morrison was not in the room for the discussion and had no say in the outcome. He learned about his new name the way the rest of the world would: as a decision already made.

Who’s on first; What’s on second

Marion was the name he was first handed and didn’t want. John Wayne was something else again: a piece of cinematic masculinity, built broad and abstract on purpose, all steadiness and flatness, a silhouette designed to read the same way from the back row of any theater in the country. It was a costume, and probably a fairly fun one to wear, given how far it stood from anything real. Duke Morrison was the actual man underneath it, the one who read seriously, who danced well enough that Katharine Hepburn noticed his footwork, who told other men on set to be graceful rather than stiff. That is authentic masculinity, not the performance but the person who had the range to perform it and still come home from it. Playing John Wayne may have been the best thing that ever happened to Duke Morrison, not because the character was who he was, but because it wasn’t.

The cartoonish version of manhood, a paper doll cut out, could never exist in the real world. Real life contains all different types and quality of men. It is the expression of the real that gives the many variations of masculinity a place to be.

Fast Forward

Fast Forward on the Last Word

Robinson, Zeffirelli, Gentileschi, Tassi

1967

Bruce Robinson, a twenty-year-old drama student, is cast as Benvolio in the film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet after director Franco Zeffirelli performs oral sex on him during preparation for the film. It is Robinson’s film debut, his big break, and he is straight. What transpires is not about desire, but the absence of a real choice. A twenty-year-old drama student, in his film debut, working under one of the most powerful directors in the industry, is not in a position to say no without risking the opportunity of a lifetime.

1611

The Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi is raped by Agostino Tassi, a painter her own father has hired to tutor her. The trial that follows lasts seven months and includes Gentileschi being tortured to test the truth of her testimony. Tassi is convicted but serves no sentence. In the years that follow, Gentileschi paints several versions of Judith Slaying Holofernes, showing the widow Judith mid-act, gripping the general Holofernes down by the hair with the help of her maid, driving the sword through his neck with visible physical effort. Many art historians note a resemblance between the face of Holofernes and Tassi, and read the paintings as Gentileschi reclaiming, on canvas, an authority the courtroom and the culture around her refuse to give her. She has the last word.

1987 / 1998

Robinson has his too, twice over. In 1987, twenty years after Rome, he writes and directs Withnail and I, in which a lecherous, upper-class older man named Uncle Monty makes aggressive advances toward a young actor staying at his country house, a character widely understood to be based on Zeffirelli. Then in 1998, thirty-one years after the fact, Robinson says what the film had only gestured at, telling an interviewer plainly what Zeffirelli did to him in 1967. Zeffirelli gets to remain, publicly, one of the most celebrated directors of the twentieth century. Robinson takes his time, but he gets there: first in fiction, then on the record.

The last word is real, but it is not the same as the first word. Tassi dies a free man, his sentence never served. Zeffirelli spends the rest of the century being celebrated, and dies decades later with his reputation largely intact. The paintings and the film do not undo any of that. What they do is put something permanent on the other side of the ledger: an account that outlasts the men who assumed no account would ever be given.

Oh Lady Graham

With the tragic demise of Senator GG, we’re happy to report the gay Republican vacancy is being filled over and over, sometimes doubly. The “questioning” wing of the Republican party is alive and well — closeted primary candidates with eyebrows so groomed they could win a pageant, a handful of out candidates who are, against all odds, still Republican, and former lawmakers publicly regretting their anti-gay votes like they just remembered they left the oven on in 2004. It’s a full smorgasbord of gay-adjacent energy, side-eyes, and rumors thick enough to cut with a butter knife. The closet isn’t just full — it’s got a waitlist. And so does Grindr. Party on boys.