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.

Bishop to Queen

The Catholic Church, through the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is actively opposing the Equality Act, a federal bill that would add sexual orientation and gender identity to civil rights nondiscrimination law.

It lobbied against a national suicide hotline bill because the bill also funded LGBTQ-specific crisis support.

It filed briefs supporting Colorado’s conversion-therapy ban being struck down, and supporting a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for trans minors.

It backs the Conscience Protection Act, the same legal mechanism that has let hospitals cancel scheduled surgeries for transgender patients and pharmacists refuse to fill valid prescriptions.

All this based on “morality.”

By the same institution’s own numbers, at any given time, roughly half of its priests are not celibate. That figure comes from A.W. Richard Sipe, a former priest and psychotherapist who studied roughly 1,500 priests over 25 years. Out of roughly 37,000 priests currently serving in the United States, that’s on the order of 18,500 men.

An institution whose own clergy cannot uniformly keep the vow they took is lobbying to strip other people of medical care and legal protection over private conduct that harms no one. That is not a moral position. It is a double standard with a legislative budget.

Religious liberty protects the right to practice a faith without the state interfering. It has never meant the right to withhold someone else’s medical care.

Nobody is asking these bishops to change their beliefs. Yet they are asking for a veto over other people’s healthcare, and they are getting it, one bill and one court case at a time.

The Real Contagion: How Straight Culture’s Panic, Not Gay People, Is the Thing Spreading Out of Control

Gay culture is not a threat to American life and limb. The conservative movement organized against it is.

In 1958, a low-budget science-fiction film called The Blob became far more successful than anyone involved expected — it gave a young Steve McQueen his first starring role, a part he famously took for a flat salary instead of a cut of the profits, a decision he’d come to regret. The film’s premise is simple: a shapeless, growing mass arrives in a small town and begins absorbing everything and everyone it touches, spreading faster than the town’s institutions know how to respond to it. It endures as a piece of American pop culture because that image — an undefined, contagious danger threatening to overwhelm an ordinary community — continues to pose a danger to ordinary American life. This essay reads that film as a metaphor for the gay panic that has run from the 1950s to today: the fear, on the part of straight culture, that emerging gay consciousness and gay visibility poses a danger to ordinary American life. But the metaphor actually points the opposite direction. The contagion in this history isn’t gay people. It’s the irrational fear of them — promulgated and sustained for seventy years by conservative religious institutions and political parties — that has infected American law and culture. And what that fear actually threatens is the essential freedom every American is entitled to: the freedom to live openly and honestly, gay, straight, bisexual, or otherwise, without the state deciding which of those lives is permitted to exist in the open.

The town in The Blob never finds a way to destroy the creature, and it never learns to live alongside it either. They discover, by accident, that cold disables it — not kills it, disables it — and the film ends with the military freezing the blob solid and airlifting it to the Arctic, where the closing narration says it will remain harmless only “as long as it stays cold.” That is not a story about defeating a threat. It is a story about a majority deciding a minority-of-one is too dangerous to live among them, finding a method to immobilize it, and permanently exiling it somewhere it can be monitored and controlled rather than treated as something with its own claim to exist. That is the exact shape of the pattern below: not destruction, and not acceptance, but a repeating cycle of freezing access — to care, to information, to legal recognition — and shipping the “problem” somewhere it can be kept small and out of sight.

Note on the artwork. The first collage accompanying this essay places a crowd of alarmed faces from the film on one side and a single gay man on the other, and asks the viewer which side is actually the danger. The answer this essay gives is the crowd — the mob, not the man. From the mob’s own vantage point, he isn’t read as an object of desire; he’s read as an object of fear, a stranger recast as a threat — posed the way the film poses its monster, oversized and isolated, because the confrontation the image stages is about who the frame casts as the danger, not about attraction. That misreading — seeing an individual as something to be feared rather than someone to be known — is itself the contagion this essay is describing, and it doesn’t just harm the person being feared. It corrodes conservative thought from within, taking a political and religious tradition that has a legitimate place in American life and reducing it to a reflex of panic.

Part One: When Gay Culture Became Visible, It Was Treated as an Outbreak

For most of the 20th century, gay life in America was hidden by force. Sodomy laws, police raids, psychiatric classification of homosexuality as a mental illness, and the threat of losing a job, a family, or a place to live kept gay people largely invisible to the straight majority — not absent, but unseen. When that enforced invisibility began to break down — through the postwar growth of urban gay communities, the 1969 Stonewall uprising, and the gradual emergence of an openly gay culture through the 1970s — the dominant response from straight institutions was not to treat this as people finally living openly. It was to treat it as something that had gotten loose.

That is the shape of a panic: not a reasoned assessment of a new social reality, but the sense that something formerly contained has begun spreading and must be stopped before it spreads further. And nothing in American history exemplifies that response more starkly than how the country’s institutions treated the AIDS epidemic — not primarily as a public health emergency to be solved, but as a containment problem: a population to be isolated, marked, and controlled.

The 1986 tattoo proposal. On March 18, 1986, conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. published a New York Times op-ed arguing that everyone who tested positive for AIDS should be tattooed on the upper forearm to protect intravenous drug users, and on the buttocks to protect other gay men. The proposal was not fringe internet rhetoric; it ran in the paper of record, from one of the most influential conservative intellectuals in the country. It treated infected people not as patients but as hazards to be permanently marked, in language and method that drew immediate comparisons to the tattooing of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Buckley never fully disavowed the idea — in 2005 he suggested it should be reconsidered.

Proposition 64 and the quarantine camps. That same year, political operative Lyndon LaRouche placed California Proposition 64 on the ballot, a measure that would have let public health officials quarantine anyone diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. Advocacy groups who fought it called it plainly what it was: a measure that would create de facto concentration camps for people living with HIV/AIDS. That summer, polling found half the California public favored quarantining AIDS patients. Voters ultimately rejected the measure by a wide margin — but the fact that it reached the ballot with mainstream political support shows what a threatened straight culture reached for first: not treatment, but containment.

The closet inside the panic. A sad irony runs through much of this history: some of the loudest voices driving anti-gay policy have themselves been closeted gay men, using the panic as cover. This isn’t just a pattern visible in scandal — Ted Haggard and Larry Craig are two of the better-known examples of anti-gay politicians and pastors whose own same-sex conduct became public — it’s borne out in research. A 2012 University of Rochester study found that implicit attraction to the same sex, when it conflicts with a person’s stated straight identity, predicts stronger anti-gay hostility and support for anti-gay policy; the researchers described this as people “at war with themselves” who turn that conflict outward. Broader survey and behavioral data point the same direction: only about 3% of self-identified political conservatives report an LGBTQ+ identity, far below rates on the political left, even though anonymized behavioral data — same-sex search and media-consumption patterns — show a fairly consistent baseline of same-sex attraction across the population regardless of a state’s political leanings. In the most socially conservative regions, only about 20% of gay men are open on social profiles, compared to roughly half nationally. The panic doesn’t just target gay people from the outside. For some of the people driving it, it’s also the thing keeping them from admitting who they are.

The Same Suppression, Updated for 2026

The AIDS-era panic did not disappear. It just moved into ordinary legislative process.

1. Legislation that names its target as contagion

The language of spread is not a metaphor imposed from outside — it is the literal language legislative advocates use today. Groups pushing to reverse marriage equality argue that legal recognition of same-sex couples caused an accelerated decline in marriage rates overall, challenges to religious liberty, and the spread of “LGBT ideology” in schools and public institutions. Advocacy organizations tracking the 2026 legislative session describe LGBTQ people as the targets of an unprecedented number of enacted or proposed state laws that stigmatize and harm them. Put plainly: it is the bills that are spreading from state to state, each one copying and escalating the last — not the people they target.

2. Conversion therapy and information suppression — the modern quarantine

Conversion therapy is the direct descendant of the instinct to treat gay identity as a condition to be reversed rather than a life to be lived. As of mid-2026, licensed practitioners remain legally free to attempt to change a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity in roughly half the country: 23 states plus D.C. prohibit it, while 4 states restrict but do not prohibit it. That protection narrowed further this year — in March 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in Chiles v. Salazar against a Colorado law restricting conversion therapy for minors. An estimated 698,000 LGBT adults have undergone conversion therapy in the United States, 350,000 of them as minors.

Information suppression does today what the tattoo and the quarantine camp did in 1986: make a population easier to identify, isolate, and control — in this case by cutting off access to information and to each other rather than by marking bodies. As of early 2026, roughly half of U.S. states mandate some form of age gating for adult content or social media access, and reporting on the rollout notes that several of these bills use vague content categories that could be used to target LGBTQ+ content specifically. Advocates argue in ongoing litigation that social media is often the critical tool that lets LGBTQ+ youth and adults find community without fear of exposure, and that these laws strip away the anonymity people need to navigate their identity safely. The effect, whatever the stated intent, is to make gay and transgender people harder to find and easier to isolate.

3. Healthcare suppression

Transgender healthcare suppression. Twenty-six states now ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth, following the 2025 Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld state authority to ban these treatments for minors. A proposed federal rule would end Medicaid and CHIP reimbursement for gender-affirming care for minors nationwide starting October 2026, and about 18 states already restrict Medicaid coverage of this care for adults. Even where state law protects care, federal pressure has been enough to end it in practice — a Massachusetts hospital stopped providing it in February 2026 despite the state’s own protective law. These laws take medical care away from people whose own doctors recommend it, based on who they are rather than on medical evidence.

HIV medication suppression. The same pattern has reached the medication that actually keeps HIV from spreading. In February 2026, Florida’s Department of Health slashed its AIDS Drug Assistance Program, cutting income eligibility from 400% to 130% of the poverty level and dropping the most-prescribed HIV treatment regimen from the formulary — stripping coverage from roughly half of the program’s more than 30,000 enrollees. Florida has one of the nation’s highest HIV diagnosis rates, and the cuts hit PrEP, the medication that prevents transmission, along with treatment. A South Florida HIV clinician put it plainly: without stable access to prevention and treatment, the virus spreads in the dark, and by the time the damage is visible, the outbreak is already uncontrolled. A state government invoking the language of stopping spread while cutting off the one thing actually proven to stop it.

4. Moving to rescind an already-established right

The federal right to same-sex marriage, settled in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, remains under sustained attack. In 2025, at least nine states introduced bills or resolutions challenging it — five urging the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell outright. Idaho’s House passed its resolution 46–24; North Dakota’s passed 52–40. In January 2026, a coalition of 47 conservative organizations launched the “Greater Than” Campaign to build state pressure toward a new Supreme Court challenge. These resolutions carry no legal force on their own — their purpose is political signaling, an organized, multi-state campaign aimed at taking away a right the Supreme Court already ruled gay Americans have. It is the film’s ending pursued through statute: freeze the right solid, and ship it out of reach the moment enough legislatures agree to try.

None of these efforts, then or now, has ever announced itself honestly. In 1986 it was framed as public health. Today it is framed as child safety, medical standards, free speech for therapists, and federalism. Strip the framing away and the content is the same in every case: laws and campaigns built to reduce the rights, care, and visibility available to gay and transgender Americans.

The film ends with the monster frozen and exiled, told it will stay harmless only as long as it’s kept cold. That is the goal here too — not to live alongside gay and transgender Americans as equal citizens, but to keep freezing off their access to care, information, and rights, and to keep them small enough and far enough away to feel controlled. If something in this story deserves to be called a contagion — something that keeps finding new hosts, new justifications, and new legislatures to spread through — it is that.

Appendix: A Documented Record, Not a Rumor

The pattern described above — anti-gay politicians and public figures who were themselves closeted — isn’t speculation. The following cases are documented by arrest, conviction, resignation directly tied to the conduct, or direct admission, spanning roughly the last century of American politics.

1. Robert Bauman (R‑MD, U.S. House) — 1980. Arrested for soliciting sex from a 16-year-old male stripper; pled no contest; lost reelection. One of the most conservative members of Congress at the time.

2. Jon Hinson (R‑MS, U.S. House) — 1981. Resigned after being arrested for a sexual act with another man in a Capitol restroom (his second such arrest).

3. Roy Cohn — died 1986. Chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s anti-communist hearings and a driving force behind the parallel “Lavender Scare” purge of gay men from government. Later a powerful New York fixer-lawyer and personal mentor to a young Donald Trump — often described as an early consigliere figure who shaped Trump’s combative, deny-everything playbook — while working against LGBTQ civil rights measures and using anti-gay slurs throughout his career. Cohn died of AIDS-related illness, having told friends, reporters, and doctors to the end that he had liver cancer. His co-author confirmed after his death, in the posthumously completed The Autobiography of Roy Cohn, that he had in fact been gay.

4. Ted Haggard — 2006. President of the National Association of Evangelicals and a close advisor to the Bush White House on policy including opposition to same-sex marriage; admitted to methamphetamine use and paying a male escort for a massage, and resigned his church and NAE post.

5. Mark Foley (R‑FL, U.S. House) — 2006. Resigned after explicit messages to teenage congressional pages became public. Had co-chaired the Congressional Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children.

6. Larry Craig (R‑ID, U.S. Senate) — 2007. Arrested in a Minneapolis airport men’s room; pled guilty to disorderly conduct. Longtime opponent of LGBTQ rights legislation.

7. Bob Allen (R‑FL, state legislator) — 2007. Convicted of soliciting an undercover officer for sex in a park restroom. Had sponsored a bill increasing penalties for “unnatural and lascivious acts.”

8. Bruce Barclay — 2008. Los Angeles Republican party official; resigned after hundreds of videotapes of himself with male escorts became public.

9. George Rekers — 2010. Co-founder of the Family Research Council and a paid expert witness against gay adoption rights; caught traveling with a male escort hired through a gay-escort site.

10. Phillip Hinkle (R‑IN, state legislator) — 2011. Caught soliciting a young man via Craigslist at a hotel; had voted for a state constitutional amendment against marriage equality.

11. Steve Wiles — 2014. North Carolina Senate candidate; confirmed to have performed as a drag queen years earlier, contradicting his campaign’s socially conservative positioning.

12. Wes Goodman (R‑OH, state legislator) — 2017. Resigned after being found with a man in his legislative office; more than 30 additional sources described a pattern of similar conduct. Ran on “family values.”

Sources

• Buckley, William F. “Identify All the Carriers.” The New York Times, March 18, 1986. (As cited in retrospectives from FAIR, back2stonewall, and The Body.)

• “Californians Reject LaRouche’s Quarantine Initiative.” EBSCO Research Starters.

• “Friends Boldly Form ‘Stop the AIDS Quarantine Committee.’” AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

• “The Fight Against Prop. 64” and “Lyndon LaRouche.” Queer Silicon Valley.

• “1986 California Proposition 64.” Wikipedia.

• Weinstein, Netta, et al. “Parental Autonomy Support and Discrepancies Between Implicit and Explicit Sexual Identities.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012 (University of Rochester/University of Essex study).

• Coverage of the Weinstein et al. study: University of Rochester news office; Scientific American; NBC News/LiveScience.

• Poll and behavioral data on LGBTQ+ self-identification versus regional social conservatism: reporting via The Week and Time Magazine.

• “The Ongoing Betrayal of Red States on Overturning Obergefell.” American Thinker, 2026.

• “Idaho House Approves Request to US Supreme Court to Overturn Ruling That Legalized Gay Marriage.” Idaho Capital Sun, March 2026.

• “State Lawmakers Introduce Resolution Targeting Same-Sex Marriage Supreme Court Ruling.” WIS News 10, April 2026.

• “Lawmakers in 9 States Propose Measures to Undermine Same-Sex Marriage Rights.” Associated Press/Yahoo News.

• “Same-Sex Marriage Under Fire: A Pride Month 2026 Update.” T. Stahl Law, June 2026.

• “The Campaign to Overrule Obergefell.” SCOTUSblog, June 2026.

• “Protecting LGBTQ+ Families and Identities: A 10-Year Reflection on Obergefell.” Lambda Legal.

• “How Has the 2026 State Legislative Session Impacted LGBTQ+ Youth?” The Trevor Project.

• “U.S. Supreme Court Ruling Against Conversion Therapy Ban” (Chiles v. Salazar). RCPA.

• “Colorado Passes New Law to Protect LGBTQ+ People Against Harms of Conversion Therapy.” The Trevor Project, May 2026.

• “Equality Maps: Conversion Therapy Laws.” Movement Advancement Project, data as of August 2026.

• “Conversion Therapy Laws Dataset Tracks 12 Years of U.S. State Policy.” Center for Public Health Law Research, Temple University.

• “Gender-Affirming Care for Minors: What the Law Says.” LegalClarity, May 2026.

• “Gender-Affirming Care Medicaid Coverage by State 2026.” CoveredUSA.

• “Alert! Health Care for Transgender People is Under Attack.” Human Rights Campaign, May 2026.

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• “Even in Blue States, Hospitals Drop Gender-Affirming Care for Youth.” NPR, April 2026.

• “Age-Verification Laws Seek to Erase LGBTQ+ Identity from the Internet.” Ms. Magazine.

• “10 (Not So) Hidden Dangers of Age Verification” and “The Impact of Age Verification Measures Goes Beyond Porn Sites.” Electronic Frontier Foundation.

• “Half of US States Now Enforce Age Verification Laws: The 2026 Mass Rollout of Digital ID Requirements.” Breached.Company, February 2026.

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• “AIDS United Condemns DeSantis Administration for Putting Tens of Thousands of Lives at Risk by Gutting Florida ADAP.” AIDS United, January 2026.

• “Florida ADAP Crisis + State Cuts Rapid Response Kit.” Save HIV Funding Campaign, January 2026.

• “Funding to Fight HIV in Florida at Risk on State and Federal Levels.” WUSF/Central Florida Public Media, April 2026.

• “Ducking Legal Challenge, Florida Cuts HIV/AIDS Medication Assistance.” WLRN, February 2026.

• “10 ‘Family Values’ Republicans Caught in Gay Sex Scandals Proving They Are Giant Hypocrites.” Yahoo News / LGBTQ Nation.

• “17 Antigay Leaders Exposed as Gay or Bi” and “17 Gay Sex Scandals That Rocked American Politics.” The Advocate.

• “Political Scandals.” Encyclopedia.com.

• “Who Was Roy Cohn? All About the Closeted Gay Lawyer Who Mentored Donald Trump.” The Advocate.

• “Politico Takes Heat for Blaming Roy Cohn’s Death by AIDS on His ‘Decadent Homosexual Lifestyle.’” TheWrap.

• Meeropol, Michael. “The Many Lives of Roy Cohn.” WAMC commentary.

• “A Generation After His Death, Roy Cohn’s Legacy Lives On.” Brennan Center for Justice.

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Happy Happy

The Happy Ending in American Culture: A Repressed Society’s Open Secret

The “happy ending” — sexual release offered at the end of an ostensibly therapeutic massage — occupies a strange place in American life: widely known, rarely discussed openly, and shaped by a culture that treats sexuality as something to manage rather than integrate. Its persistence says less about massage parlors themselves and more about how the U.S. handles sexual need broadly.

American attitudes toward sex have long carried a tension between puritanical restraint and market-driven availability. Legitimate massage therapy exists alongside a shadow economy of establishments offering sexual services under a therapeutic label. This ambiguity lets customers access sexual services while maintaining plausible deniability — a workaround for a culture uncomfortable naming sexual want directly.

For heterosexual men, the happy ending often functions as a low-commitment, transactional outlet, frequently associated with anonymity and avoidance of emotional entanglement. Demand is well-documented in urban areas with dense parlor networks, and enforcement tends to focus on labor and trafficking violations rather than the service itself.

Gay men engage with parallel institutions — gay bathhouses, saunas, and massage services — that historically served a dual function: sexual encounter and communal space, particularly important during periods when gay social life had few sanctioned venues. These spaces often carried additional cultural weight, functioning as sites of community formation as well as sexual activity, especially before broader social acceptance made other venues for gay social life available.

In both cases, the underlying dynamic is similar: a culture that criminalizes or stigmatizes direct acknowledgment of sexual need pushes that need into liminal, quasi-legal spaces. The persistence of these services across demographics suggests less a niche subculture than a symptom of a broader gap between public sexual conservatism and private sexual reality.

Beefcake and the Collar

Two Symbols of the Male Figure Juxtaposed

The beefcake model and the priest function in American visual culture not as depictions of real individuals but as abstractions — symbols constructed to reach toward a form of idealized, almost divine status rather than ordinary human identity. Each figure is stylized past the point of individual personhood into something closer to an archetype.

The Icons

The beefcake figure descends from mid-20th-century physique photography and bodybuilding culture, later absorbed into advertising and gay visual media. Its visual grammar emphasizes bare skin, muscular definition, a light-catching surface (oil, sweat), and poses that invite the viewer’s gaze rather than avoid it. The body itself carries the entire meaning of the image.

The priest carries an opposite visual grammar: the black cassock or collar, minimal exposed skin, and vertical lines suggesting discipline and distance rather than invitation. His iconography signals authority, celibacy, and proximity to the sacred — the body deliberately obscured and subordinated to institutional role.

The Conflict

The two figures conflict along the axis of visibility versus concealment, indulgence versus restraint. The beefcake represents desire made available for consumption; the priest represents desire deferred or denied by vow. Popular culture frequently stages this conflict directly — placing a symbol of bodily restraint into proximity with a symbol of bodily display generates narrative and visual tension precisely because the two figures are built to oppose one another.

The Convergence

Both figures carry an erotic subtext specific to gay culture, and this is where the two archetypes meet most directly. The priest’s vow of celibacy and the model’s staged unavailability produce a shared quality: both are positioned as out of reach. The priest is withheld by sacred obligation; the beefcake, despite his visibility, is withheld by the fact that his image is designed for looking rather than access. This shared inaccessibility gives both figures a “forbidden fruit” quality within gay cultural imagination — desire directed at something structurally set apart, whether by vow or by the conventions of display. The erotic charge in each case depends less on explicit content than on distance: what is set apart, restricted, or ritually protected becomes, by that same mechanism, an object of heightened want.

The Accents

Three accent symbols run beneath both figures: the blue moon, the black swan, and the Jupiter phi. The blue moon stands for desire itself — the rare, singular pull that draws the eye to either figure. The black swan stands for the naturalness of homosexuality — a corrective to the idea that either archetype represents something aberrant rather than simply another expression of nature. The Jupiter 3 stands for freedom — the possibility that both figures might step outside the confines of their inaccessibility, priestly vow or model’s staged distance alike. Together, these accents point past the symbol to the person underneath it. Beneath the icon and the collar, this is, at heart, an account of two men.

Pizza anyone? Or Can Either of These Two Guys Ever Get Laid?

The persistence of both figures — and their collision in narrative and image — reflects an American discomfort with reconciling body and spirit, indulgence and discipline, as compatible rather than opposed. Their pairing tends to generate cultural fascination because it makes explicit a tension most people experience privately: the pull between sanctioned restraint and permitted indulgence. The beefcake normalizes bodily display as aspirational; the priest normalizes bodily denial as virtuous. Their collision in narrative works because it stages, symbolically, an argument American culture has thus far refused to resolve.

On Nike, the Field, and Gay Athletes

A Queer Timeline of US Athletics

• ~800–700 BCE — Nike appears in Greek mythology, in Hesiod’s Theogony, as the winged goddess of victory and patron of athletics, daughter of the Titan Pallas and the sea-nymph Styx.

• 1920 — Bill Tilden, openly gay, wins Wimbledon and goes on to be named the greatest tennis player of the half-century.

• 1971 — Blue Ribbon Sports, founded in 1964, rebrands itself as Nike, taking the goddess’s name and wings for its logo, the swoosh, and grows into one of the largest sponsors and patrons of athletics in the world.

• 1975 — David Kopay, a former NFL running back, becomes the first professional team-sport athlete in America to come out, three years after retirement.

• 1981 — Martina Navratilova comes out publicly as bisexual; Billie Jean King is outed the same year by a lawsuit.

• 1982 — Glenn Burke, former Dodgers outfielder credited with inventing the high-five, acknowledges he is gay after retiring, the first Major League Baseball player to do so.

• 2013 — Brittney Griner comes out at the start of her WNBA career and signs an endorsement deal with Nike, the first openly gay athlete to do so. Robbie Rogers comes out and joins the LA Galaxy, the first openly gay man to play in a top North American men’s league.

• 2014 — Having come out in 2013, Jason Collins plays for the Brooklyn Nets, the first openly gay athlete to be active in any of the four major North American men’s leagues. The Galaxy, with Rogers, win the MLS Cup. Michael Sam is drafted by the St. Louis Rams, the first openly gay player drafted into the NFL.

• 2016 — Nike ends its relationship with boxer Manny Pacquiao after he calls same-sex couples “worse than animals,” calling the remarks abhorrent.

• 2021 — Carl Nassib becomes the first active NFL player to come out as gay while still on a roster.

• 2026 — A record 49 openly LGBTQ+ athletes compete for Team USA at the Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina — about one in five of the team. The Olympics are largely individual and small-team events; the four major U.S. professional men’s team leagues — the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL — still have no openly gay active players at all.

Having one fifth of Team USA’s athletes at the Olympic level be openly LGBTQ+ is something worth sitting with. This is the tier where only the most disciplined, most physically capable athletes in the country qualify to compete at all. The old idea — that gay men in particular are somehow less athletic, less coordinated, less fit for competition than straight men — was never true, and the numbers make that plain once athletes are actually free to be visible.

On the Collages

Eight collages make up this set, all built from the same three-part legend: Ground, Figures, and Accents.

The Ground is a grid of previously created collages, compressed into a single field that forms the foundation the new work is built on top of. It’s not a backdrop in the traditional sense — it’s the layer of past work underneath the present one, often only partly visible once the rest of the composition sits on top of it.

The Figures are found, sourced from social media — specifically Facebook — then cut, cropped, and reused. The same handful of bodies recur across all eight pieces, at different scales, rotations, and croppings, rather than one figure serving one collage. Figures are allowed to extend past the edge of the frame rather than being contained within it, keeping the composition open rather than closed, and no piece is built for symmetry — bodies, accents, and ground are balanced against each other unevenly, weight against weight, rather than mirrored.

The blue moon, the black swan, and Jupiter 3 are the three accents, and each carries its own charge rather than functioning as decoration. The blue moon stands for desire and longing. The black swan points to the positive natural occurrence of homosexuality across species, a fact of the animal world rather than an anomaly. Jupiter 3 acts as a witness to the scene, but also as a symbol of escape and freedom. None of the three appear at the same scale or position twice; they’re a fixed vocabulary, reinvented per each collage.

Color, value, rhythm, repetition, and balance are what hold each piece together formally. The collages function as a kind of playing field: a bounded space where figures act out the realities of gay life the way athletes act out a game. Nike patronized athletics without knowing which bodies would eventually stand on the field she named. These eight pieces put that question, does sexual orientation hinder athletic ability, back in front of her, and us.

From Inside

Artist Timeline

Born in 1961, into a Cold War childhood shadowed by the threat of nuclear annihilation — a fear that never fully receded, only changed shape. By 1981, that same Cold War anxiety had intensified, joined by a new and quieter threat: the emergence of the AIDS crisis, and with it, a culture that responded with suspicion and blame rather than care. In 2001, the threat became domestic and immediate — September 11th, followed by two decades of war in the Middle East. By 2021, it was biological and global: COVID-19, arriving alongside a breakdown in family structure, a culture confined to bed and screen, and a public health crisis that curdled into outright distrust of science itself.

Taken together, these decades trace something like a return to an older, more fearful way of living — a new medieval era, where basic safety can no longer be assumed, where bunkers and self-sufficiency have crept back into the cultural imagination as reasonable responses to an unstable world.

The Disruption, Dislocation, and Disease. The Call Is Coming From the Inside.

Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds is a film returned to often — not for the spectacle, but for what it captures about a particular, ongoing anxiety. H.G. Wells wrote the original novel over a century ago, and there’s something eerily prescient in it: the Martians in the 2005 adaptation don’t arrive from the sky so much as emerge from beneath — machines buried and waiting, already here, already among us. It echoes an old horror-movie premise: the call is coming from inside the house.

That image feels apt for the present moment. American culture is currently consuming itself from within — polarized, fractured along political lines, turned inward against itself rather than facing any outside threat. No one is fully safe right now, and the danger isn’t some invading force from elsewhere. It’s already here.

The Collages

That’s the frame for the collages associated with the film: disruption, dislocation, and disease — not as three separate crises, but as one continuous condition, the atmosphere this body of work has been made inside of, a narrative of anxiety encouraging escape, to anywhere, and burrow. The atmosphere within these collages is intense, fraught with the fear of what comes next. Dark values and high-key colors pervade the visual narratives, offering no relief — only unrelenting fear.