Bells | Closet Saints | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026 | James Behan

Neither one was dumb.

The actor Judy Holliday and her character in Born Yesterday, Billie Dawn, shared something the world kept mistaking for simplicity. Both carried an interior logic that defied the cynicism and corruption of the day — a way of seeing clearly while everyone else assumed they see nothing at all. This collage celebrates the life and times of the amazing Judy Holliday:

1921 — Born Judith Tuvim in New York City.

1927 — Her parents separate when she is six. She is raised by her mother.

1943 — Judith Tuvim changes her stage name to Judy Holliday, adopting it when her comedy troupe, The Revuers, travels to Hollywood and she signs with Twentieth Century Fox. She chooses “Holliday” as the English translation of her Hebrew surname, Tuvim.

1948 — Marries David Oppenheim.

1950 — Born Yesterday is released. The world reads her as a blonde who barely follows the conversation, and she finds the opportunity in that — being underestimated can be its own kind of superpower. Her performance is instant stardom.

1951 — Wins the Academy Award for Best Actress and the Golden Globe for Best Actress, Comedy or Musical, for Born Yesterday — beating out Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson in what is considered one of the biggest upsets in Academy history.

1952 — Called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee during the Red Scare, the same era the Lavender Scare runs alongside. It is alleged she also carried an affair with a woman from her early Greenwich Village years. The fear in that hearing room is not only political. It is also a fear of rejection at its most fundamental level, an accusation of being less than human based on what you believe or who you love. She gets out of it by trusting the same interior logic that got Billie Dawn out of every scene where the men underestimate her.

1954 — Her marriage to David Oppenheim is failing, and she falls into a severe depression. Around this time, Betty Comden and Adolph Green begin writing Bells Are Ringing, meant as a lifeline for Judy. Though there is no guarantee she has the stamina left for it.

1956 — Bells Are Ringing opens on Broadway. She goes on.

1957 — Wins the Tony for Bells Are Ringing. Divorces David Oppenheim the same year.

1960 — Films the movie version of Bells Are Ringing with Dean Martin and Vincent Minnelli. Her body is already sick with undiagnosed breast cancer. Cast and crew know her history with depression and anxiety, so they read her exhaustion and pain as more of the same story they already have about her. Even while dealing with a debilitating illness, she receives a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress, Comedy or Musical. The film receives a nomination for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture. This is her final film performance.

1960–1964 — She continues performing. She undergoes a mastectomy and returns to work, starring in the Broadway musical Hot Spot in 1963. She also collaborates with jazz musician Gerry Mulligan, writing lyrics to his music.

1965 — Judy Holliday succumbs to her illness on June 7, at the age of forty-three. She is remembered as a queer icon and as a prototype for feminism — her characters embodying a working-girl alternative to suburban domesticity years before Betty Friedan gave that critique a name.

Rock Hudson, Cesar Romero, Tab Hunter — the Closet Saints have been a men’s gallery so far. Judy Holliday belongs beside them, and belongs there specifically as a woman, because the closet was never only a men’s condition.

Sources: Advocate.com, The New Yorker, Turner Classic Movies, Playbill, Encyclopedia.com, Jewish Women’s Archive, Love Letters to Old Hollywood, Wikipedia, AllMusic, University of Massachusetts Boston American Studies

Processing The Process

Every work of art starts as an idea, invisible to everyone but the maker. Here’s how one of my digital collages takes form:

Figures are found and sourced online. Twelve separate images, gathered with no relationship to each other yet — the Jupiter 2 from the classic television show “Lost in Space,” a full moon in seven colors for seven seasons, a purple finch, a set of pillows, a black swan, two gay men in a kiss. Raw material, still just separate objects, unrelated to each other.

The figures are aligned with a conceptual understanding of what part each will play within the composition. This is the artist as the screenwriter. Before anything gets placed, it gets meaning. Each piece is assigned a role — danger, freedom, longing, grace — so that by the time the collage is built, every object already knows what role it’s playing.

Note: every figure is planned, with a purpose and understanding.

A background image is selected as a surface, this time, is my own ceiling. A photograph of the room I live in becomes the sky the collage with fall under.

The figures are arranged, in this instance, the artist is a director, planning how the figures move or stand, their entrances and exits within the frame.

Lastly, the collage aesthetic is shaped, in this instance, the artist is a production designer, identifying color saturation, value range, point of focus, overall visual variety and cohesion:

Space: how much air sits between each moon, so nothing crowds and nothing floats untethered.

Color: open palette with a rainbow of hues, fully saturated, each with varying intensity.

Value: the ceiling’s warm gradient against the cooler tones of blue, teal, and purple, so the piece has depth instead of flatness.

Balance: the two men anchored bottom right, heavy enough to hold the weight of everything scattered above them. The asymmetry creates an image in motion.

Scale: nothing here is actually to scale with anything else, which is the point — mythology doesn’t obey physics.

This is a behind the scenes look at how the collage comes together from inspiration to presentation.

All the World | The Gay Gaze | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026 | James Behan

With this work, we focus on two men in an embrace, an expression of romantic love with a kiss. Around them circles all the worlds, ones of support, ones of concerns. The two men in their own world surrounded by an avalanche of views about their love for one another. In this scene arrives the Jupiter 3 as witness, the truth teller, also present the black swan and purple finch, two elements of nature the speak of the nature of gay love as purposeful and noble. Lastly, the set of pillows, as an expression of hope for a soft landing for this couple, to be supported and encouraged in their relationship to one another.

— Behan

Legend

A Key to the Subdivision

Every tradition that lasts long enough grows its own symbols. The medieval church had the lamb, the rabbit, the fish — small pictures that carried whole doctrines inside them. The Subdivision has its own. What follows is the key, and then the reason each one exists.

Jupiter 3 — escape, rescue, witness

The Embrace — connection

Blood Moon — danger

Aquarian Moon — freedom

Harvest Gold Moon — fulfillment

Pink Moon — pleasure

Pale Moon — invisibility

Blue Moon — longing

Purple Moon — allyship

Black Swan — purpose

Purple Finch — nobility

The Pillow — grace

Jupiter 3 does not carry captives. It carries passengers who chose to be onboard, moving toward a life no one assigned them. The ship exists because escape only means something when it’s a decision, not an accident.

The Embrace exists because isolation was the old inheritance, the thing every closeted life defaulted to. Two men holding on is not a symbol of love in the abstract. It’s the specific, physical end of being alone.

The Blood Moon is the other side of the story, and every story here has one. It represents the danger that doesn’t go away just because a life gets freer — the people, the laws, the silences that still want the story reversed.

The Aquarian Moon is freedom in the widest sense, the shift from a world built around one kind of life to a world that makes room for more than one.

The Harvest Gold Moon is what comes after survival. Abundance, not scarcity. A life that adds up to something whole instead of something merely endured.

The Pink Moon is pleasure taken without apology — the part of a gay life that doesn’t need to justify itself by being useful or noble first.

The Pale Moon is invisibility, the years spent present in a room and absent from the record. It’s pale because it was never allowed full color.

The Blue Moon is longing — not satisfied, not resolved, just carried. The wanting that outlasts the waiting.

The Purple Moon belongs to the allies, the straight men and women who showed up. Allyship gets its own moon because it was never nothing.

The Black Swan is the argument the whole Subdivision makes without arguing it: that there is a natural order here, and homosexuality has its place inside it, not outside it.

The Purple Finch is nobility — the idea that there is as much dignity in being gay as there is in being straight, and neither needed to be earned.

The Pillow is grace — a soft landing, an inclusion. Not comfort as an idea, but comfort as a wish extended to everyone: the fulfillment of potential, the being treated well, the being let all the way into the room instead of tolerated at its edge. It belongs to no one in particular because it should belong to everyone.

— Behan

Uberest

Front seat. Rearview. Full view.

Three passengers. Jupiter 3 rides slow then hard. The Blue Moon hangs low and full.

Behind him, the back seat doing what back seats do: holding two men who forgot the car was moving.

Closets don’t always come with seatbelts. Buckle up if you can.

— Behan

Into the Glossary We Go

Weeboom

wee·boom / ˈwiː.buːm / — noun

Etymology: A portmanteau coinage — “wee,” carrying its double sense of smallness and the exclamation of a thrill, fused with “boom,” the sudden report of impact or arrival. Together they name a paradox: influence that announces itself loudly while occupying almost no time or space at all.

Definition: Access or proximity to power; the state of influence at the confluence of desire and determination. Measured not in résumés but in minutes — how long someone gets to guest on a talk show before the segment ends and the name changes.

The desk is where it lives. Conan owns the desk, which means Conan is weebooming — he is the fixed point, the eye contact, the mug that never moves. Everyone else performs proximity to him: the couch, the greenroom, the ninety seconds of charm before the next guest is called. Weeboom is not the fame. It is the clock running while you have it.

Eric Andre tests the form from the inside. For a decade he has let the question of his own sexuality sit half-open — everyone is bi, a hole is a hole, never quite yes, never quite no. It reads like evasion, but it functions like currency. A one-time disclosure cashes itself out; ambiguity keeps generating interest. Andre’s weeboom is not a fact he’s hiding. It’s a position he keeps occupying.

…and then, Chippendales. Chant? Alarm?

Weeboom.

— Behan

Introducing: The Gay Historical

Bill and Phil’s Outrageous Battle | The Gay Historical | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

Two men who wanted men, leading armies that wanted each other’s land.

The Subdivision has, until now, worked in three registers: The Closet, for men who could not be seen; The Gay Gaze, for the culture’s ongoing performance of desire and denial; The Gay Domestic, for the ordinary life gay men were told they couldn’t have. None of them fit what follows, because the men in this piece were never hidden. They are simply men history already knew about and declined to say so plainly.

The Gay Historical exists for exactly that gap. Its subjects are real, its evidence is documented, and its complaint is not that the record is empty but that the record has been handled carelessly — footnoted where it should have been foregrounded, hedged where the evidence is strong, quietly dropped from the popular account while surviving, technically, in the academic one. This category doesn’t invent queerness where none is attested. It restores weight to queerness historians have already attested to and popular memory has simply declined to carry forward.

Bill and Phil’s Outrageous Battle

On April 11, 1677, two armies meet outside Cassel in French Flanders. One is commanded by William III, Prince of Orange, stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, a man who will go on within a decade to take the English throne and set the terms for two centuries of British imperial expansion. The other is commanded by Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, brother to Louis XIV, known at court simply as Monsieur. Philippe wins. It is his only major field command of the war, and the one clear military triumph of a life otherwise kept, by his brother’s design, well clear of real power.

Both men are documented, by contemporaries and by serious modern historians, as having preferred men. Philippe’s case was never really a secret in his own time — his court favorites were a known and largely tolerated feature of who he was, distinct from the dynastic marriages arranged around him, which functioned as foreign policy rather than romance. William’s case has been treated more cautiously by history, but not because the evidence is thin. His closeness with William Bentinck, who rode with him on this very campaign, and later with Arnold Joost van Keppel, drew comment from contemporaries and has been weighed seriously by historians on both sides of the North Sea ever since. The balance of circumstantial evidence, by the reckoning of scholars who’ve actually done the archival work, sits at least as strongly on the side of William having loved men as on the side of the dutiful, politically arranged marriage that produced no children and precious little warmth.

Which means: on this field, in this year, two men each documented as loving men led armies that existed to take land from each other’s countries. Nothing about that fact changes the outcome at Cassel. What it does is puncture the tidy separation the culture likes to maintain between “great men of history” and “men who loved men” — as though the second category could only ever produce private lives, never public ones, never armies, never empires. William goes on, four years after losing this battle, to steer the events that will hand England its imperial century. History remembers the empire. It has been considerably less interested in remembering the man who built its foundation, or who he actually loved while he did it.

The collage presents on a background of a then contemporary painting by Adam Frans van der Muelen of the battle of Cassel. The main actors are rendered in contemporary dress against the original battlefield, played by actors drawn from gay adult film — a deliberate collision of registers. History has spent three centuries treating William and Philippe’s desire as a footnote to be managed, hedged, or ignored outright, while treating their military and political record as the only part of them worth painting. The Subdivision refuses the split. Two men. One battlefield. Full color, present tense, unhedged.

The battle ensues.

— Behan

Sources: “Battle of Cassel,” various historical accounts of the Franco-Dutch War, 1677; “William III of Orange,” Wikipedia and standard biographical accounts; Cormac Moore/History Ireland, “Billy’s Boys, or an Orangeman’s Dilemma,” on the historiographical debate over William III’s sexuality; H. Montgomery Hyde, The Other Love: An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain (1970).

Sunday Essay: Get. A. Dog.

The Modern-Day Eunuch

The culture has a script for gay men who end up alone, and it is not a script about tragedy. Get a dog. Take up a hobby. Throw yourself into charity work. Find god. These are offered, gently and often sincerely, as solutions — as if solitude were a condition to be managed rather than a wound to be acknowledged. No one hands a grieving widower a leash and calls it even. But a lonely gay man is regularly handed exactly that, along with the quiet expectation that he will be grateful for it, and grateful, too, for not asking for anything more.

The Subdivision’s three most recent collages — a truck window, a corner store, a garage — all begin at the same site: an image built for solitary consumption. A thirst trap. A reel. A picture-book spread with a spine running down the middle. Each source image sells attention one man at a time, and each collage answers by refusing the premise, populating the frame until the man is no longer performing alone. The work is not subtle about its argument. It is making the case, image by image, that the aloneness gay men are so often pictured in is not natural. It is manufactured, and it is expected, and the expectation has a long history.

Boys in the Band is as good a place as any to see the manufacturing at work. The film gets remembered as a landmark of early gay representation, and it is one, but look closely at what it actually resolves. Alan, the straight college friend whose unexpected visit derails the party, spends the whole night circling something he never names — old rumors of an affair with another man, a visible discomfort he can’t quite explain even to himself. By the end, he calls his wife and reconciles with her, on screen, confirmed, done. Hank and Larry, the film’s one gay couple, get something far less certain: after a night of accusations about infidelity and commitment, they go upstairs together, and the film lets the audience assume reconciliation without actually showing one. Given everything the film has spent two hours establishing about Larry’s resistance to monogamy, calling that ending a real partnership requires more faith than the text earns. What the film gives outright, without ambiguity, is a straight marriage restored. What it gestures at, and lets the audience fill in, is a gay relationship that may or may not survive the morning. Michael, the host, gets nothing at all — he ends the night sobbing in a friend’s arms and then walks alone into a church.

This is worth sitting with, because Boys in the Band was not made by people hostile to gay life. Mart Crowley was gay. He knew this world from the inside. And even his own instrument, gay-affirming to the extent that instrument could be in 1968, could not resist the old shape: the straight man gets restored to partnership, cleanly, while the gay men are left in various states of unresolved aloneness, self-loathing, or unearned hope. If the closet was a trick the culture played on gay men, this is the sleight of hand at its center — even the stories built to defend gay life default to picturing it as fundamentally solitary, as if solitude were simply what being gay costs.

The psychology bears this out in ways that are no longer speculative. Sexual minority adults report markedly higher rates of loneliness and social isolation than their straight peers, and researchers working from the minority stress framework first developed by Ilan Meyer have traced why: living under chronic, minority-specific stress — discrimination anticipated even when it isn’t present, identity concealment, a lifetime of learning to expect rejection — makes intimacy itself feel unsafe to reach for. The isolation is not incidental to the stigma. It is one of the primary mechanisms by which the stigma does its damage, and it compounds: gay and bisexual men who have internalized shame about their own desire become more isolated, and isolation itself becomes a source of further distress, a closed loop with no obvious exit.

None of this is an argument against solitude itself. A man who chooses to be single, who wants his own company and finds it sufficient, is not the subject of this essay. That kind of aloneness can be chosen fearlessly, held without apology, lived as a complete life rather than a diminished one. The tragedy isn’t solitude. The tragedy is solitude imposed by a culture that has spent a century telling gay men, in a thousand small and large ways, that they are meant to be modern-day eunuchs — desired, sometimes, looked at, often, but never quite entitled to the same ordinary partnership it hands straight men without a second thought. And when that imposed aloneness produces exactly the sadness anyone would predict, the culture has a second script ready: the lonely gay man becomes pathetic, his late-night encounters read as desperate rather than human, his solitude treated as evidence of some personal failing rather than the cost of what was demanded of him.

The Subdivision’s answer to all this isn’t an argument so much as a correction, made one collage at a time. Populate the frame. Close the gap the spine insists on. Give the man in the truck a companion, the man in the store a boyfriend to mind the cart, the men in the garage a shared space instead of a shared page. It is a small gesture, repeated. But so was the original exclusion — small, repeated, built into pictures long before anyone thought to call it a pattern.

— Behan

Sources: Meyer, I.H., “Minority Stress and Mental Health in Gay Men,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior (1995); Meyer, I.H., “Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations,” Psychological Bulletin (2003); “Minority Stress and Loneliness in a Global Sample of Sexual Minority Adults,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (2022); The Boys in the Band, dir. William Friedkin (1970), screenplay by Mart Crowley.

Once Upon a Time Zone

Time Upon Time Zones

“Forever separated, forever alone.”

The first timezone this collage crosses is the picture book — that familiar architecture of gay representation where two men are photographed separately, then paired across a spread, held together only by proximity and layout. They share a page. They never share a frame. The spine runs down the middle like a border nobody asked for, and the two men on either side of it are, as Behan puts it, forever separated, forever alone.

The Subdivision refuses the spine. It takes the separation the picture book enforces and undoes it — populating the space between the two men with others, closing the gap that publishing convention insisted on keeping open. No one is paired-but-distant here. They occupy the same garage, the same light, the same body of collaged time.

The second timezone belongs to persona rather than person. Deadpool’s pansexuality wasn’t incidental — his director said so on record, and Reynolds himself pushed to have it quoted. Off-screen the bit continues: a Family Guy cameo built around fixating on another man, a running habit of on-camera kisses with men from Andrew Garfield to Conan O’Brien, the joke always hovering at the same close distance without ever quite landing anywhere. The Subdivision isn’t interested in what any of this says about the man. It’s interested in what the performance says about the culture — that even a straight man’s brand can be built, in part, on flirting with gay legibility, because the flirtation itself has become valuable.

Two timezones, one closet, with its’ architecture of separation, corrected, and the culture’s ongoing flirtation with the thing it claims not to be.

— Behan

Heels Up

No man is an island. The internet keeps insisting otherwise.

The source clip announces itself as a joke before it’s anything else: “POV: Just doing errands,” shot in a corner store between snack shelves and a drink cooler, the shirt lifted like an accident rather than a choice. Six hundred fifty-four likes, nineteen comments — proof that the bit works, that solitude staged as spontaneity is its own kind of content.

Behan doubles him: the same man appears twice behind himself, caught in motion, one flex blurring into the next. In motion, he needs a spotter. The Subdivision gives him a boyfriend up front to steer the cart — so nothing gets bumped, so the errand actually gets done while he’s busy being watched. The Blue Moon crowds into the corner of the frame like it wandered in from the parking lot, and Jupiter 3 hovers over the register, a witness that has clearly seen stranger things than this. Motion and stillness share the same aisle.

No one should be alone, not even mid-errand, not even mid-motion.

Who’s minding the cart?

— Behan

The Fix

The content-creator economy sells the myth of the desirable man as a solitary transaction. One body, one camera, one subscriber.

In this instance, the source image is a thirst trap built for Facebook: a truck-window reel, one man alone, performing for a phone camera at a stoplight. Two hundred and twenty-one likes, three comments, a battery running low. He’s angling for likes and shares — every like feeds an algorithm, the algorithm returns reach, and reach is the actual currency: it becomes brand deals, sponsorships, a subscriber base somewhere else. The performance reads effortless because effortlessness is the product.

Behan answers that solitude by multiplying it: one man becomes three, with all the suggestion of a ménage à trois neither Facebook nor the algorithm would ever reward. The hyped-up color isn’t decoration — it pushes the emotions already present in the frame, makes them impossible to scroll past.

Solitude was never the gay man’s instinct. It is a condition of the closet, constructed by others and mistaken for nature.

The Subdivision solves the problem of singlehood one collage at a time, building worlds where gay men are not alone. They are, instead, in good company.

Summer Time

Subject to Context: A Summer Scene

1869

Frédéric Bazille paints young men bathing on the banks of the Lez, near his family’s estate in the south of France. Two of them wrestle in the grass, bodies pressed close, watched by nothing but trees. Nothing in the painting names what it shows. It doesn’t have to. Bazille chooses contemporary men in contemporary swimwear rather than reaching for the usual cover of Greek myth — a mythological alibi would have made the homoeroticism safe, distant, classical. He paints his own moment instead and leaves the subject exposed rather than costumed. Historians now count Summer Scene among the earliest visual precedents for a specifically modern gay gaze: not allegory, but the thing itself, barely veiled.

1982

Making Love becomes the first major studio release to put a gay romance at its center rather than its margins. Michael Ontkean and Harry Hamlin, a Los Angeles doctor and a writer, a marriage that comes apart because a man finally admits what he wants. The film is clumsy in places, cautious in others — but first. It proves a mainstream American audience could be handed a gay love story as the main event, not the subplot, not the joke, not the warning. Between Bazille’s canvas and this screen sit over a hundred years of the same subject learning, slowly, how much it was allowed to say.

2026

The Subdivision takes up Bazille’s move and finishes it. Where his wrestling men gesture toward desire, Behan’s kiss. Where his river became a private grove out of time, Behan’s becomes a water park — gaudy, contemporary, unmistakably now, the same instinct toward modernity Bazille had a century and a half earlier, since a pastoral setting would have let the eye look away. The subtext becomes context. Nothing here needs decoding.

Firsts are rarely fully realized. They just have to happen. Someone has to go first so the next one doesn’t have to negotiate the terms all over again.

Sources: Bazille’s Summer Scene (1869), Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums; on the painting’s place in early queer visual history

Video: on the Nature of Ambiance and Refracted Light

We are our own videos; we only see light.

This piece plays with the idea that queer visibility has never been simple witnessing — it’s always been mediated, refracted, filtered through something. Bodies appear here suspended inside glass pods, their color shifted into strange saturations: one figure rendered in warm amber and gold, as if caught on old VHS tape; another submerged in cool blue-green, distorted like something viewed through aquarium glass or an old television screen with the settings wrong. Jupiter 3 hovers overhead — the same witnessing spacecraft that recurs throughout The Subdivision, present but never landing, watching without intervening. A blue moon glows faintly inside one of the pods, grief and longing folded into the frame itself.

For generations, gay men learned to see desire this way — not directly, but through something: a glance held a beat too long and then broken, a magazine passed hand to hand, a scrambled cable signal, a video rented under a fake name. Vision itself became a technology of survival, something angled and indirect rather than open. The two figures standing at center are, in fact, the same man — light catching him mid-turn, the way a long exposure holds motion the eye alone can’t. Even alone, he’s caught watching himself from two angles at once. And the face on the far right isn’t part of that landscape at all — he’s the one watching it. Everything to his left isn’t a place; it’s a screen, and he’s sitting in front of it. Which means the viewer isn’t looking at a landscape either. The viewer is looking at a man looking at a tape of one. Refraction stacked on refraction: light off the bodies, light off the screen, light off his face as he watches.

None of this is unique to queer looking, either. Nobody sees the thing itself — not really. Everyone sees light bouncing off a surface, bent by whatever glass, distance, or assumption happens to be in the way, and calls that seeing. A straight man looking at two men standing close together is seeing the same refracted light as everyone else in the room; what differs is the angle he’s been taught to bend it through, the meaning he’s been handed for what the light means before he’s even finished looking. That’s not a metaphor confined to this piece — it’s closer to the whole of human history. How people interpret the light that reaches them, more than the light itself, is what gets written down and called truth.

Which is why the title insists on ambience over image. The piece isn’t asking to be seen clearly. It’s asking the viewer to notice that they were never going to see it clearly — that the bending was always happening, on both sides of the glass.

— Behan

Kodachrome

A hundred years didn’t just loosen the dress code.

It handed one man the right to be looked at without apologizing for it — and left everyone else in the frame standing exactly as their century allowed.

Kodachrome is the word for the contemporary man. Brighter, sharper, more intense, more colorful, perhaps even happier?

100 years have marked great progress toward the liberation of the human body and spirit, a liberation that some want to restrict by returning to a romanticized notion of the good old days.

Harsh as it may seem, the good old days were not that good, at least not worth what we would have to lose to return there.

Nostalgia is a kind of Kodachrome, brightening a past that was, for anyone who did not fit its frame, considerably dimmer than memory prefers to admit. The figure standing at the center of this piece is not asking to go back. He is positive proof of what was gained by not going back.

— Behan

Courage

The Courage They Had, Briefly

January 12, 1981. A new soap opera premieres on ABC, an oil family in Denver, a patriarch about to remarry, all the ingredients of an hour meant to be by Tuesday. Except the show does something nobody asked it to do. It gives the patriarch a son, Steven Carrington, and it makes that son gay, not as a punchline, not as a scandal to be resolved by episode’s end, but as a fact he carries into every room he enters. Blake cannot look at it directly. The show does.

Eight years earlier, America had already been given the test run. An American Family arrives on PBS in 1973, a documentary series meant to simply observe a household in Santa Barbara, and partway through the filming the eldest son, Lance Loud, comes out on camera, unplanned, unscripted, entirely himself. He is flamboyant where Steven will later be careful, unashamed where Steven will later be tormented, and ten million people watch anyway. The country does not look away. It argues, it debates, it takes sides on the Louds around dinner tables for months, but it watches, Thursday after Thursday, all the way to the end. By the time Dynasty premieres in 1981, the proof already exists. America was ready to see this. Steven Carrington did not need to be invented cautiously. He was invented cautiously anyway.

This is, by any honest measure, a startling piece of bravery for the year it happens. Billy Crystal’s character on Soap has already tested the water for comedy, but Dynasty asks something harder of its audience, that they sit with a drama, not a joke, and let a leading man’s sexuality be a source of gravity rather than relief. Steven is not there to lighten a scene. He is there to complicate one. For a moment, the network trusted its audience with that complication.

Then February arrives, and March, and the show blinks. Ted Dinard, Steven’s lover, dies in episode thirteen, shoved by Blake into a fireplace hearth, and the bravery that opened the series spends the rest of its run in retreat. Steven marries Sammy Jo. Steven marries Claudia. The writers hand him wife after wife like a man being handed sandbags, weighting him back down into a shape the network can live with. Al Corley says as much on his way out the door in 1982, that Steven has stopped being allowed to have any fun, any humor, any steadiness in who he is. The courage that opened the series does not evolve. It collapses.

Picture the version that does not collapse. Ted lives past episode thirteen. The show that had the nerve to introduce him has the nerve to keep him, and Steven’s story becomes not a pendulum swinging between women assigned to prove something, but a life, difficult and ordinary in the ways lives are, allowed to simply continue on screen the way Blake and Krystle’s continues, the way Fallon’s continues. The premiere’s dare gets a second act instead of an apology.

That version of Dynasty is not a softer show. It is a more finished one. The audacity that made the pilot a sensation was never really about the shock of a gay character existing, it was about the promise that television might finally treat one as fully as it treated everyone else. A story that kept that promise across eight seasons, rather than making it once and spending the rest of its run walking it back, would not have diluted the show’s reputation for daring. It would have been the thing the show was actually remembered for.

Instead the record shows a single bold opening move, followed by years of the network deciding that bravery was a pilot episode expense, not a running cost. The tragedy of the real Dynasty is not that it made Steven gay. It is that having made him so, it could never again find the nerve of its own premiere.

— Behan

The Moment

Al Corley and Steven Carrington Finally Have Their Moment | The Gay Gaze | The Subdivision | Dynasty Edition | Digital Photocollage | 2026

In 1981, ABC gives America Steven Carrington — one of the first gay series regulars in the history of American network television. Dynasty is, by design, a show about romance and conflict, about who is allowed to want whom and what it costs them. Steven wants men. The show never lets him have one.

The record of what American television actually permits, in the years around and after his debut, tells the story plainly. In 1972, That Certain Summer offers the first sympathetic gay portrayal on network TV, a divorced father hiding a relationship from his son — no kiss, no touch. In 1975, Hot l Baltimore puts a gay couple on screen together for the first time, still without physical intimacy. Steven arrives in 1981 into this vacuum, one of the earliest gay characters allowed a name and a story line, and the writers still cannot give him a lover. In 1991, L.A. Law airs what is considered the first same-sex kiss on American network television — between two women, largely remembered even by the actress involved as a ratings stunt. It takes until 2000, on Dawson’s Creek, for two men to kiss on American network television at all.

Nineteen years pass between Steven Carrington’s debut and the first time a man is allowed to kiss another man on the medium that made him famous.

Al Corley understood what was being asked of him in real time. Dynasty runs for nine seasons. Corley leaves after two, walking away from a hit show because the writers would not let Steven’s identity be more than implication. It is a quiet kind of protest, the kind that costs a career its momentum rather than making headlines. Jack Coleman inherits the role and inherits the same limitation — a character permitted to be gay in theory and never in scene.

This is the work of The Subdivision: to build a visual record of gay history that was never allowed to be recorded, and gay history that was never allowed to happen at all. Some of what appears in these collages is restoration:

— pulling a buried moment back into the light. Some of it is invention

— imagining the moment institutions refused to let exist in the first place. Both count as history here. Both are owed a place in the record.

Steven Carrington gets his moment in this collage:

— tender, unhurried, decades late, and entirely his own. Not a correction. Not a fictional addition. A completion of a debt due.

— Behan

Sources: Wikipedia, ABC News, LGBTQ Nation

The invisible (Gay) Man

An Invisible Life

A landmark 2015 study on gay men and aging surveyed 312 participants with an average age of sixty-one. Here is an imagined timeline of what that life may have looked like, year by year.

1954 — He is born.

1964 — He turns ten. He is doing well in school — bright, articulate, the kind of kid teachers single out. He is athletic enough to hold his own on any field, but it’s the piano he actually loves, the hour after school when no one is watching him perform anything. This is also, without a name for it yet, the year he first understands he is different — years before puberty, years before language for it exists anywhere in his world. National surveys later confirm this isn’t unusual: gay men report, on average, first sensing this difference around age ten, long before most can articulate what it means.

1968 — He enters high school. Vietnam is everywhere. He has a name for what he is now, but there is no one he can safely tell it to. Being gay is a crime in nearly every state in the country. His closet does not begin as a choice. It begins as the only safe option available to him.

1972 — He graduates, barely missing the draft, enrolls in a community college that opened a few years earlier. He has his first closeted sexual encounter with another man — an act that, in most of the country, could still get him arrested.

1972–1976 — He begins frequenting the three B’s of gay life: bars, bathhouses, bookstores. These rooms are, for now, the only places mattering is available to him — and even these are periodically raided by police.

1978 — He contracts HIV. He does not know this yet. No one does.

1984 — He turns thirty. Still single, still closeted, protecting a job he could legally be fired from in most states simply for being known as gay. He is quietly worried about whether he might have contracted AIDS — there is no way yet to know. Besides, he still feels healthy. The ordinary markers of a life at thirty — a spouse, a shared mortgage, a family that knows who he is — are not delayed by circumstance. They are foreclosed by law.

1985 — He takes the first AIDS test available to him. It comes back positive.

1985 — Shaken, he enrolls in a long-running natural history study of HIV among gay men, one of the first of its kind. He does this quietly, the way he does most things. He has no idea that this same cohort will still be tracking him thirty years later.

1987 — He begins taking AZT, the first FDA-approved AIDS drug. The side effects are huge, but he is alive.

1988 — He is turned away from a friend’s group at a bar he’d gone to for over a decade — not told outright, just not included in the plan. He notices the men who get approached now are ten, fifteen years younger than he is. He says nothing. He starts going out less.

1994 — He turns forty. Sodomy remains a crime in roughly half the country. He is still closeted, still legally exposed for the whole of his adult life, and this is also the year he first feels a second, separate loss — the sense of being looked past rather than looked at, in the few rooms that were ever built to want him.

1995 — Combination antiretroviral therapy arrives. He will live. Survival does not resolve what he’s begun to feel about his own visibility — it just gives him more years to feel it in.

2003 — Lawrence v. Texas strikes down the remaining sodomy laws nationwide. For the first time in his life, at forty-nine years old, being who he is stops being a crime.

2004 — He turns fifty. Dating has become quietly, consistently harder — fewer replies, fewer glances held. He starts to believe the difficulty is a fact about him rather than a pattern in the culture. Legal exposure is gone now, but forty-nine years of it do not undo themselves in a year. None of the scaffolding that deepens most people’s sense of mattering at midlife — a legally recognized marriage, children, in-laws, the ordinary architecture of a public life — was ever built, because for most of his life the law made sure it couldn’t be.

2012 — PrEP is introduced: the closest thing to a vaccine the community has ever had, offering younger gay men something close to a future without fear of AIDS. For a man in his fifties, the reaction is different. It isn’t relief. It’s regret — the arithmetic of what a drug like this, thirty years earlier, might have meant if the government had been more concerned to find a treatment and a cure.

2012/13 — A cohort study he joined in 1985 circles back and asks him questions it never asked before: whether aging feels especially hard because he is gay, whether he feels more invisible now with other gay men than he used to. He answers yes to both, and does not think of it as remarkable. It is simply how the last twenty years have felt.

2014 — He turns sixty. Still alive. Still alone. HIV is now a long-term condition he manages rather than a death sentence he was waiting out. He is, without knowing the term for it, one of the 312 men whose answers become the study’s data.

2015 — Marriage equality arrives nationwide. The institution that might have anchored him at thirty, that might have given him in-laws and shared history and legal next-of-kin standing, becomes available to him at sixty-one. He has been alone so long the idea of marrying is a foreign language.

2024 — He turns seventy. Retired, mostly at home. His viral load has been undetectable for years. Medically, he is thriving. Socially, he has been disappearing since 1988, compounding for thirty-six years, with no spouse, no children, and no legal family ever entering the picture to hold the line against it — not because he failed to build one, but because the law spent most of his life making sure he couldn’t.

Researchers have a name for the mechanism now: internalized gay ageism. Critically, they separate two things often confused. Ageism is the real, external bias he lived — being overlooked at the bar in 1988, treated as less wanted with each passing decade. Internalized gay ageism is what happens when a man takes that external pattern, the one he answered honestly about in 2012, and converts it into a verdict about his own worth. The second layer predicts depression on its own, independent of how much actual exclusion a man faces. It is not imagined. It is absorbed.

The study’s real finding is not that gay men fear aging more than straight men. It is that gay men often age without the structures — marriage, family, institutional recognition — that let most people’s sense of mattering survive the loss of youth intact. This man did not fail to build those structures. For most of his life, it was illegal for him to. Take the option away for five decades, then wonder why invisibility stops being a feeling and becomes a biography.

Sources: Wight, R.G. et al., “Internalized gay ageism, mattering, and depressive symptoms among midlife and older gay-identified men,” Social Science & Medicine, 2015. Pew Research Center, “A Survey of LGBT Americans,” 2013.

— Behan

Stitch in Time

On Cloth and Armor

A fabric does not know what gender it is. It knows thread count, dye lot, the weight of gold in its brocade. Someone else decides, later, what body it is permitted to touch.

This piece begins with a length of luxury brocade — the kind of paisley once woven for Persian and Kashmiri courts, worn by men of rank as a public announcement of wealth and standing. Ornament, on a man, was not always suspect. For centuries it was the opposite: proof.

Something happened to that. Somewhere in the passage from court dress to the modern West, men’s clothing was stripped down and men’s ornament was reassigned — handed to women, to interiors, to the feminine-coded register of “decorative.” What remained for men was the suit: dark, unpatterned, cut close, built to signal seriousness through the absence of beauty rather than its presence. Call it contemporary armor. It protects by refusing to be looked at too closely.

Antinous is placed here as the counter-argument the historical record already contains. A body permitted — required, even — to be beautiful, adorned, gazed upon, memorialized in stone precisely because it was gorgeous. No renunciation asked of him. No fabric too ornamental for a man to wear.

Between the sculpture and the suit stands the male nude — not as provocation, not as an erotic object, but as the plain fact the armor exists to cover. This is the condition of being a man before any tailor gets to it: skin, back, the particular vulnerability of a body with nothing arranged over it yet. The brocade, lifted from its ground and laid across that back, is the moment the decision gets made — the moment the body stops being simply a body and starts being dressed in someone else’s idea of what a man is allowed to wear.

The photographs show both stages: the fabric as ground, and the fabric as it lands on the figure. Process, left visible, because the argument is in the transition as much as the result.

CIS VS TRANS

Cisgender men who take testosterone therapy are using the same hormone treatment as trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people. Gender-affirming surgery isn’t unique to trans people either — cis and intersex people have safely received the same procedures for decades.

Elon Musk has confirmed getting a hair transplant, calling his hairline “a source of insecurity.” Men’s cosmetic care is a multi-billion-dollar industry. No therapist letter is required.

Bioethicists Schall and Moses have shown this care is less scrutinized and less stigmatized for cis patients than for trans patients receiving the exact same treatment. Meanwhile every major medical association — AMA, AAP, Endocrine Society, 2,000+ studies deep — says gender-affirming care for trans patients is medically necessary.

Gender-affirming care should be available to everyone, trans or cis, without interruption or judgment.

The objection was never medical.

Stop the nonsense.

Sources: T. Schall and J. Moses, “Gender-Affirming Care for Cisgender People,” Hastings Center Report 53, no. 3 (2023): 15–24. GLAAD, “Medical Association Statements in Support of Health Care for Transgender People and Youth.”

Same Toys New Families

Same Toys, New Families

Wilco is a full-scale diorama of an entire town, built out of original vintage Fisher-Price Play Family sets — the same toys that, when they were made, came pre-loaded with a very specific idea of family: mother, father, son, and daughter. Nothing about the toys themselves has been changed. What’s changed is the makeup of the families.

New Neighbors Up Ahead

Seven families call Wilco home. David and Carl — a married gay couple, a pilot and artist / drag performer, with their dalmatian Brigid. Emily and Sandy, lesbian newlyweds raising a joyfully blended household they call the gay Brady Bunch. Orrin, Miguel, and Frank — a gay throuple raising daughter Sally together. Kai and Sam, a cisgender bisexual couple raising their kids Kit and Remy nonbinary. Karl and Louis, both bisexual, co-parenting with their ex wives daughter Madi and son Kris during summer vacation. Mark, a transgender father, raising his son Cal. And Nan and Kat, a lesbian couple splitting their time between an off-grid life and a downtown loft.

Waco’s Tragic History

The name Wilco is a play on Waco, Texas — where, in 1953, a gathering of gay men was raided in what’s now a mostly forgotten piece of local history, and where queer life is still often made to feel unwelcome. Wilco asks a simple question: what if Waco had chosen tolerance instead?

A New Start

Wilco is a fictional lakeside city built entirely out of real childhood toys, made to house diverse families the toys were never designed to support.

Are more families moving in? Stay tuned!

— Behan

Birds of a Feather Flocking Together

Two New Arrivals: The Black Swan and the Purple Finch

The Subdivision welcomes two new symbols to its legend: The Black Swan and the Purple Finch.

The Black Swan is a bird that mates for life, defends its territory fiercely, and, among a significant portion of its population, does all of this with another male. Homosexuality is not a curiosity in this species. It is load-bearing. Male pairs raise young more successfully than opposite-sex pairs, hold more ground, share the work more evenly. The swan does not carry a burden for this. It simply is what it is, and the species is better for it.

Across the traditions that have written about it, the Purple Finch represents passion, romance, individuality, the courage to follow one’s own path. It is called a messenger of transformation, its purple plumage tied to nobility, to the crown chakra, to spiritual growth. It is the bird of artists and musicians, its song said to unlock creative expression. Every one of those qualities maps directly onto gay culture at its best — the insistence on one’s own path, the romantic intensity, the outsized creative contribution, an inner nobility that doesn’t ask permission to exist.

Two birds, two temperaments, one series, one vision.