In and Out

Approximate Symmetry | The Closet | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026.

Approximate symmetry is neither nor, both and, all in the same space and time. It is the moment between symmetry and asymmetry, a composition that almost resolves and then declines at the same instance. A form that lives in the gap between two states is a form under pressure, and that pressure, held long enough, becomes its own kind of diamond.

In my newest collage “Approximate Symmetry,” the title is both compositional and spatial at once. A backdrop from Heated Rivalry, whose leads play gay with total commitment on screen and total silence off it. In front, a content-creator pairing who wink at being a couple without ever confirming it, keeping it at the level of are they or aren’t they, a question that probably does more tfor engagement than an answer ever could. Crossing the whole frame, the male odalisque: the body offered as content, desire without an owner. Three ways of visiting queer space without living in it.

That’s where queer people sit today. Inside the culture and outside it. Consumed and disowned in the same gesture. Approximate symmetry as a description of a people’s position — always almost included, never quite settled — while straight culture keeps deciding, room by room, how much queerness it will allow in their world.

Social media is the gatekeeper, and the numbers say the door is closing. GLAAD’s 2026 Social Media Safety Index gives every major platform a failing grade. 2026 scores drop across the board, with X landing lowest at 29 out of 100, YouTube at 30 after an 11-point collapse, Instagram at 41, Facebook at 40, and Threads at 39. A 2025 survey of over 7,000 Meta users across 86 countries found LGBTQ people reporting more vulnerability since Meta’s early-2025 policy rollbacks. The report names the mechanism directly: platforms disproportionately suppress LGBTQ content through removal, demonetization, age-gating, and shadowbanning.

Like many gay content creators in the past year under this new administration, I’ve been banned outright from Instagram, Threads, and X. Facebook and TikTok are what’s left. Yesterday I was reported for one of my long past images and restricted for a day. Facebook could go next.

There’s no notice when that happens. An account is just gone, with no way to find out why, where, or whether it’s coming back. That’s how it goes on social media. So if I’m suddenly gone from Facebook, you’ll most likely know why.

Historically, gay people have been good at not going where they’re not wanted, physically and rhetorically, which in Western culture has been pretty much everywhere. Now that gay culture, gay lifestyles, and gay people are beginning to enter that public sphere in a visible, vocal way, the dom culture has a decision to make. And that decision is whether they’re going to keep treating gay people as a problem for them to solve.

Happy 4th.

Butler Blues

What If the Straight Character Were the Odd Man Out? | The Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

Agatha Christie did not just write mysteries. She wrote England to itself. For four decades — the thirties, the forties, the fifties, the sixties — she was the country’s arbiter of manners, its national narrator, the voice that told the English who they were and how they behaved at a dinner party, in a drawing room, on the witness stand. Two billion copies. A play still running since 1952. When a culture rereads itself that many times through one writer’s eyes, that writer stops being an entertainer and becomes a mirror. The question is what the mirror leaves out.

Christie created, by conservative estimate, some three thousand named characters across sixty-six novels, a hundred and sixty-six short stories, and nineteen plays. Of those three thousand, three are openly gay — not coded, not “artistic,” not a knowing wink between women who share a house and a life. Three, named as such, on the page. Of those three, one is guilty of a crime.

That is one tenth of one percent of a fictional England standing in for the whole of it, against ninety-nine point nine percent who get to be everything else — heroes, victims, detectives, fools, lovers, killers, bores. A tenth of one percent who got to exist at all.

Was this cruelty? Probably not. Christie was educated, worldly, sharp enough to build the best-selling puzzle box in the history of publishing — she was not a woman who missed things by accident. Call it something closer to inherited blindness: a culture so certain of its own default setting that it never occurred to the culture, or its most famous novelist, that the setting was a choice.

So here is the visual experiment. Take one production of Witness for the Prosecution — the famous one, and a more recent film of it — and recast the ratio. Not one gay character in three thousand, but nearly everyone. The barrister, the wife, the accused, the men in the hallway, the man behind the camera. Heterosexuality becomes the rare exception instead of gay life. The shoe goes on the other foot.

The question these collages ask is not complicated: if the dominant culture were shown itself at one tenth of one percent, would it accept that as an accurate account of who it is? Or would it, finally, notice the mirror?

Symposium

Four Legs of the Same Table: Etty, Rose, Jess, Behan — Navigating the Closet Across Time

Two centuries of Western art-making, one throughline: the figure, the male figure, worked and reworked in two dimensions — painting, paste-up, collage — each man navigating the closet of his own moment, its rules, its strategies, its dangers, all of it still humming beneath the surface today.

1821 — William Etty, The Triumph of Cleopatra (painting)

William Etty spends this year becoming famous overnight. Cleopatra’s Arrival in Cilicia, painted in 1821, now hangs in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, ostensibly a history painting — Cleopatra’s court crowding a gilded ship bound for Tarsus, the queen herself laid out like an offering. But look at where the paint actually gets loving: the boys fanning her like attendant Cupids, the crowd of male bodies at the rail, bare-chested and closely observed, doing far more work in the composition than the plot requires. Cleopatra is the pretext. The male figure is the point — smuggled into a mythological scene respectable enough for the Royal Academy walls. Etty is a lifelong bachelor who attracts frequent speculation about his sexuality, and more recent scholarship has pointed to the eroticism of his male nudes and his regular visits to all-male bathhouses as evidence he may have been secretly homosexual. He doesn’t say the word. The bodies at the rail say it for him.

1939 — Francis Rose, L’Assemblée (painting)

Francis Rose spends this year the way he spends most years — gathered around Gertrude Stein, painting the salon that made him. On its face it’s a group portrait, the Stein circle assembled and immortalized in tribute. But the men in Rose’s crowds are never incidental. He’d already collaborated in his work with, and taken as his sometime lover, the English painter Christopher Wood, and the young men who keep turning up in his assemblies — decorative, watched, lingered over — are doing the same work Etty’s attendants do a century earlier: carrying the real subject inside a socially acceptable frame. He vacations with Cecil Beaton, Stein, and Toklas in Bilignin that year, and the assembly genre becomes his permanent alibi — paint the room, paint the patron, and let the men in the margins hold what can’t go in the center.

1951 — Jess Collins, Mousetrap (paste-up)

Jess Collins spends this year building a household. He lives with the poet Robert Duncan from 1951 until Duncan’s death in 1988, and his collages start doing what his paste-ups always do: pulling fragments from scientific treatises, muscle magazines, art history books, cartoons, and popular periodicals like Life and Time into staggeringly intricate symbolic narratives. Say that plainly — muscle magazines — and the pretext thins out fast. Under the cover of collage-as-salvage, as archive, as formal experiment, Jess is cutting and reassembling the same physiques Etty painted and Rose sketched, only now the material comes pre-printed, pre-circulated, hiding in plain sight inside a hobbyist’s genre nobody thought to interrogate. The mousetrap springs quietly. Nobody in 1951 is asking what a serious painter is doing with a stack of muscle magazines on the table. Jess never has to answer. The household absorbs the question before it’s asked.

2026 — James Behan, Symposium (collage)

James Behan spends this year assembling the table itself. Symposium is built with Rose’s assembly painting as its foundation, the salon crowd repurposed as a stage. Etty’s painted male figure, once smuggled past the Royal Academy inside Cleopatra, joins the group directly, pulled free of its original myth and set down among the others at last, unhidden. A couple’s portrait of Duncan and Collins sits in the mix too, the household made visible instead of implied. Around them: four contemporary adult film stars, Jupiter 3 overhead, the Blue Moon, and a male model rounding out the full chroma of the piece — bodies from the present standing alongside two centuries of coded ones, no longer needing myth, salon, or domestic alibi to justify being looked at. Behan, an Irish-American dual citizen who found in photocollage a second creative life, works this material as part of The Subdivision — the same practice as the other three, one generation later, minus the pretext.

— Behan

Sources: Lady Lever Art Gallery / Art UK; National Museums Liverpool; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian; England & Co Gallery, London; askART; San Francisco Chronicle; The Paris Review.

Jess & James

Jess and James: Wild Wild West Collaging

The car has always been a closet with wheels.

Untitled (Car and Male Nude) is the work of Jess — born Burgess Franklin Collins, a Cal Tech-trained chemist who worked on the Manhattan Project before he broke with his family, his given name, and his career in the same gesture, and gave the West Coast forty years of paste-ups instead. Jess built his life and his art alongside the poet Robert Duncan, his partner for thirty-seven years until Duncan’s death in 1988, and his household in San Francisco’s Mission District became, by every account, a workshop for two men who treated collage and companionship as the same discipline. He called himself, simply, Jess. San Francisco called him, at his death, its essential artist.

This particular paste-up mounts a black-and-white photograph inside a convertible’s steering wheel: a shirtless man caught in three-quarter profile, his companion pressed close behind him, both faces angled toward the camera and toward each other at once. The car’s dashboard mirror doubles the intimacy it frames. It is unmistakably a Jess — the antique chrome, the salvage-bin tenderness, the same instinct that filled Pauline Kael’s Berkeley walls with fantastical murals and populated a hundred collages with clippings rescued from thrift stores and muscle magazines alike.

Call the newer piece James. The Hookup borrows the same ground, an automobile’s interior, but does almost everything else differently, and the difference is the argument — one queer collagist answering another across sixty years and an entire technological revolution in how the answer gets made.

Jess is a closed circuit. Two men, one gaze exchanged through a mirror rather than face to face, the dominant figure positioned in front, weight forward, the companion folded slightly behind and beneath him. The black-and-white palette does what monochrome always did for Jess and his generation: it flattens the erotic into the classical, the pin-up into the sculpture, the risk into something a viewer in 1960-whatever could plausibly call art history and mean it as cover. This is a couple, private by necessity as much as by choice. The car itself, its wheel, its window, its parked twin idling in the background, reads as a vessel built to seal exactly two men inside it, safely, from a world that had not yet made room for them anywhere else.

James steers away from this closed circuit toward the polyamorous pursuit of pleasure. The three figures in the foreground repeat Jess’s dominant-submissive architecture almost exactly, two men flexed and lit and facing outward, the other folded into his chest, head bowed in worship, seen only from behind. And a third element enters through the side window: two more men, small, distant, dressed alike in red, watching from what might be a beach or might be nowhere at all. The car that once sealed a couple inside it now has an audience. It is a stage; the fulsome relationship no longer bound by the frame.

This is the whole distance travelled between the two pieces. Jess documents desire as containment, an act performed where it can be private, historically because it had to be. James documents desire as visibility, an act performed where it can be seen, because in 2026 the getting-caught is no longer the danger. Color does this work as much as content does. Where Jess drains the image of hue to grant it the alibi of art history, James floods the image with a heat-lamp palette that refuses any alibi at all. Nothing here is trying to pass as a Wesselmann. It knows exactly what it is.

The dominant-submissive pairing survives the trip across sixty-some years intact. What changes is the room around it: two becomes a suggestion of many, private becomes witnessed, earthbound becomes interplanetary.

Jess and James parking. It tracks.

— Behan

What Would Jess Do?

Hide the Body

The Gay Gaze | The Subdivision | digital photocollage | 2026

Folk collage has always been the closet’s native medium. Long before digital tools, gay artists were already doing this work with scissors and rubber cement — Ray Johnson mailing fragments of desire disguised as correspondence, Jess pasting men’s magazines into altarpieces nobody in 1955 was allowed to call altarpieces. The genre survived because it could say the unsayable in pieces. A photograph alone is evidence. A hundred photographs cut and reassembled is folklore.

Hide the Body borrows that same domestic scrappiness — the scale of a scrapbook page, the DIY seams left visible on purpose — and crowds it with the ordinary bodies of ordinary men: shirtless in driveways, adjusting waistbands, caught mid-laugh at somebody’s wedding reception. Jupiter 3 hovers above them, unbothered, doing what it always does in this work: witnessing without judgment. The flying saucer beneath drifts through the composition like a rumor nobody can quite pin down — is it comic relief, or is it the getaway vehicle every closeted man of a certain generation kept idling in his head, just in case?

Artist Focus: Jess

Jess Collins spent the back half of the twentieth century building “Paste-Ups” out of found magazines and domestic ephemera, a body of work that reads today as its own private grammar — meaning smuggled in through juxtaposition rather than stated outright. He came up through the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance circles, which gave his collages a mythological density most folk assemblage of the period didn’t bother with. He wasn’t interested in shock. He was interested in accumulation, the way a hundred small images can say what one image can’t afford to.

For thirty-seven years he was partnered with the poet Robert Duncan, a relationship that ran from 1951 until Duncan’s death in 1988 and that neither man treated as a secret, exactly, so much as a fact that didn’t require an announcement. That distinction matters here. Jess didn’t make coded work because he was hiding. He made coded work because coding was simply the native language of collage — the same language Hide the Body is speaking in, decades later, with a digital set of scissors.

The Blue Moon overhead is doing quiet work too. It’s the moon of memory here, not threat — the moon under which men found each other before there was a word for what they were finding. Against it, the astronaut figure in his blue jumpsuit looks almost bureaucratic, a company man sent to file a report on a species that was never actually hiding, just filed under the wrong heading.

This is a piece about evidence. About how many bodies it takes, stacked one against another, before a culture stops being able to pretend it didn’t see them.

The Gay Gaze does not ask permission to look. It has already been looking the whole time.

— Behan

Warhol Etty and Behan

The Nude and the Chair

The Gay Domestic — The Subdivision

Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair series, ten screenprints made across the 1960s, shows an empty room and an empty chair — no prisoner, no execution, just the machine itself, lit in colors that have no business being there. Acid green, lavender, teal. The palette actively works against the horror of the image, and that friction is the whole point: cheerfulness laid over catastrophe, so the viewer has to do the work of holding both at once. The chair is a stand-in for a body that isn’t shown, an absence doing the emotional labor a figure normally would.

William Etty’s nudes work the opposite direction — full bodies, exhaustively present, and yet the man himself disappears behind them. Etty never married, kept a private life so secluded that art historians still debate what it concealed, and was known to frequent public bathhouses specifically to recruit men to model nude for him. His most acclaimed, publicly exhibited work drew outrage for “indecency.” His private, uncommissioned studies — quiet, unglamorous, academic in title only — are the ones that carry the real charge, men alone, turned away, offered up under the cover of life-drawing technique. The body is on full display. The man behind it stays hidden. That’s not incidental. That’s the whole survival strategy: paint desire disguised as pedagogy, because pedagogy was permitted and desire wasn’t.

James Behan’s two collages put these two vocabularies in the same frame, and in Warhol’s own palette — monochrome blue, the whole scene drenched in a single cold cast the way the Electric Chair prints are drenched in wrong-feeling color. On the right, the chair: not Warhol’s original, but the same ornate barber chair from the previous piece, empty now, thrown into Warhol’s blue and given his gravity. It’s not a barber chair anymore. It’s a throne with nobody sitting in it, echoing an execution device with nobody strapped to it — both waiting, both charged precisely because they’re vacant. On the left, an Etty figure, seated, turned inward, alone on cracked pavement in front of a building falling apart — a crumbling arcade that could be a resort, a bathhouse, a piece of the old world going under. Jupiter 3 idles between them. The Blue Moon watches from the corner, patient, the way it always is in this work.

What connects them is what both artists had to leave unsaid. Warhol’s chair speaks about death and disaster in a country that punished, executed, made spectacles of bodies it didn’t want — and he coded that horror in candy colors so it could be shown at all. Etty’s bodies speak about desire in a country that would have destroyed him for saying so directly — and he coded that desire as anatomical study so it could be shown at all. Both men built entire careers on the same maneuver: say the true thing by making it look like something else. A disaster becomes wallpaper. A love becomes an art class.

— Behan

Sources: Yale University Art Gallery, catalog entry for Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair (1971); Tate, William Etty biography; Art UK, William Etty overview

Man’s Men

He’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s Man’s Man

Compare two compositions, five hundred years apart.

Pontormo’s “Deposition from the Cross” breaks every rule of the scene it depicts — no cross, no ladder, figures floating in an airless, color-drenched cluster that shouldn’t hold together and somehow does. Mannerism uses that kind of compression to signal crisis a normal composition can’t carry.

This collage borrows the same architecture. Bodies pressed together in a barbershop that has nothing to do with grief, staged with the same claustrophobic intimacy — one man cradled, another looking straight into the lens, a Blue Moon and Jupiter 3 presiding overhead. Where Pontormo’s figures mourn a body coming down, these figures are holding each other up inside a room explicitly built to insist they never would.

That room is real. At the beginning of the Trump era, a D Magazine feature on Dallas men’s grooming quotes a barber who “politely barks from the back of the shop, ‘Sorry. This is a gentlemen-only establishment,’” whenever a woman opened the door by mistake. Women weren’t welcome. That wasn’t a question — it’s stated plainly, treated as charm. The article never says whether an obviously gay man would be welcome in that chair either, but it’s not hard to guess.

The real question is pure business: why would anyone build a model that excludes women and possibly gay men — historically the two demographics that spend the most on hair, grooming, and personal care — in favor of a customer base that has, for decades, spent the least? That’s not tradition. That’s leaving money on the table on purpose.

The answer isn’t economics. It’s Texas politics over the last thirty years. This is a state that had Ann Richards in the governor’s mansion within living memory — a genuinely blue Texas. What’s replaced that is a hard turn into Orthodox-adjacent Christian-right territory, where masculinity isn’t just performed, it’s policed, and the barbershop door is one small outpost of a much larger project.

And the tell is what that culture now tolerates in its own leaders. A sitting president, a darling of the Christian right, with a long, well-documented history of affairs, and a Texas Republican Senate nominee whose campaign has weathered a widely reported alleged affair, winning his runoff in a landslide. The Christian right isn’t holding its nose through this. It’s celebrating it. Adultery, once disqualifying, now reads as proof of a certain kind of manliness— an appetite for authority as evidence of power, with infidelity as a credential.

D Magazine published this piece in September 2017, several months into a new political era, hostile to women and gay men, and that’s troubling in my view. Pontormo’s Deposition is a painting of desperation — a body taken down in the middle of catastrophe, mourners holding each other up because there’s nothing else left to hold. This collage borrows that gravity on purpose, because Texas right now is not a metaphor. Women are dying from restricted access to reproductive care. Gay men are facing real harassment in a state that has grown openly hostile to them. Some sort of acknowledgement from a publication would be welcome if it hasn’t already been made.

Ultimately this collage isn’t about a chair so much as who Texas has decided is worth protecting — and right now, the seat is getting smaller, not wider.

— Behan

Go Team

The stereotype is gay men aren’t sports fans.

That’s a dirty lie.

Here are the real numbers: a 2021 survey of nearly 4,000 people found 30% of gay men and 40% of lesbians identify as passionate sports fans. Only 16% of gay men report zero interest in sports at all — meaning almost twice as many gay men call themselves passionate fans as those who tune out entirely.

The stereotype isn’t data. It’s a locker-room ghost story that outlived the evidence.

And it’s not random which gay men opted out. People who grew up playing sports and thinking of themselves as athletes were more likely to become big fans as adults, and those who were bullied or mistreated in youth sports lost interest later in life.

Fandom isn’t hardwired — it’s built, and it can be broken by exactly the kind of hostility a lot of gay kids grew up absorbing in gym class. As one researcher put it: nobody is born a sports fan. Fandom is produced socially and culturally, and it can change.

Which is the real story here: not absence, but redirection. This collage says it plainly — Jupiter 3 and the Blue Moon parked over an AFL sideline, gay attention landing exactly where it always could have, if the field had let it in sooner.

The collage follows a traditional format of non-narrative layers with an emphasis on the current FIFA games.

So Gays do love guys fighting over a hard ball. Go figure. Find out more at outsports.com.

— Behan

Source: Buzinski, “30% of gay men and 40% of lesbians are passionate sports fans, survey says,” Outsports.com

Pool Gaze

Comedian extraordinaire Michelle Wolf has a bit: the difference between the straight beach and the gay beach is the difference between a dog park and a dog show.

That’s the reason behind gays moving to the suburbs. Once gay men trade the bodega for a yard, it’s all about the backyard pool.

The numbers back it up — gay men and lesbians own homes at the highest rate in the LGBTQ+ community, and they’re consistently the heaviest buyers of pool floats and outdoor leisure gear each summer. Not because they need a pool. Because they know exactly what to do with one.

This is The Gay Domestic and The Gay Gaze, under The Subdivision — the backyard as resort, the outdoor kitchen and hot tub cranked to full volume. In these collages, nobody’s cooling off. The tattooed figure poses at the edge. A man freezes mid-dive at the showiest possible instant. Another flexes waist-deep like he’s in the ring.

Fifty years earlier, Hockney painted the same scene in quiet blue restraint — one clothed man watching one submerged swimmer, held apart by distance. This collage crashes that restraint into a loud gaze having a party. Everyone here is both watching and being watched, in the same water, at the same time.

Maybe that’s the real discomfort. Plenty of people made peace with the gaze so long as it stayed at Hockney’s distance. This gaze isn’t asking permission anymore.

— Behan

Glamping Forward

The gay outdoors is not a metaphor.

It’s a measured phenomenon: LGBTQ+ people are the most active outdoor recreation cohort in America, outpacing every other group by a wide margin. Sixty percent of gay men are out there — hiking, camping, running the trail nobody marked.

Personally, I love the outdoors behind a gorgeous plate glass window, but okay.

The Subdivision packs a bag and heads for the trees.

Is there a hot tub somewhere?

Jupiter 3 hovers over the campsite the way it always does — not a sighting, just a fact of the sky here. Two men glow orange in a forest lit like a postcard from 1962. A VW bus, a water bottle, a Blue Moon standing guard over all of it.

Outdoor AC should be a thing.

Dream Time

On Dreams and Gay Life

If you can dream it, it’s real, right?

The word does double duty. There is the dream that arrives uninvited at 3 a.m., built from whatever the day left lying around. And there is the dream a person carries on purpose, for years, sometimes for a lifetime, toward a life not yet built. The Gay Gaze treats both as the same material.

Sleep researchers have noted that gay men’s dreams largely mirror the general population’s — the same anxiety dreams, the same domestic clutter — but skew toward a higher ratio of male figures and romantic or sexual content, a fairly literal instrument reading of waking life back to the dreamer. Before a person comes out, that instrument sometimes does the coming out first. The dream arrives as rehearsal, or confession, or both, before the waking mind is ready to file the paperwork.

Then there is where the aspirational dream takes over from the sleeping one. The generation that first imagined public safety for queer people wasn’t working from evidence. They were working from dream — the stubborn, unreasonable kind, held before there was any proof it was owed to them.

The Subdivision’s own dreamscape runs on the same fuel. Jupiter 3 sits in the frame of every piece — not a rescue, not a threat, just the fact of escape being available, or at least imaginable, in the same sky as the pool party or the parking lot or the boat.

The Blue Moon keeps its own accounting nearby: memory, and what it costs to hold onto a dream long enough to build it.

Gay Landscape

The Closet, Underwear Models, and Paint by Number Backdrops

Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital photocollage | 2026

Paint by number arrived in postwar America as a promise. Stay within the lines, fill in the numbered sections, and a masterpiece appears.

Critics called it assembly-line French Impressionism. The Smithsonian eventually gave it a show. It fell neatly within the paradigm of conformity perpetuated by the Cold War. Everybody did it because everybody else was doing it. The landscape was predetermined. The colors were assigned. You painted what you were told.

Into that landscape, The Subdivision places the underwear model. Which raises the question, is a landscape, or a painting, or a culture, gay only when gay people are there?

These seven collages place that figure into paint by number landscapes to ask that question and its reflection: is a culture, painting, or landscape not gay if the gay people in it are pretending to be straight?

The paint by number backdrop holds its numbered fields, its assigned colors, its pastoral calm — mountains, pools, cherry blossoms, water lilies, Mediterranean coastlines. The male figure walks into the frame uninvited, nude or near-nude, heavily tattooed or classically proportioned, mirror in hand or backpack on shoulder, looking at or being looked at. Gay? Straight? Straight playing gay? Gay playing straight?

The collision is the point. And boy does it collide.

The paint by number promises a world that stays where it is put. These figures do not stay put. They never do. The Subdivision continues building the Gayborhood infrastructure — one interrupted landscape at a time.

— Behan

Sources

“Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s.” Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. americanhistory.si.edu

“Do It Yourself, Like Everyone Else.” US History Scene, 2015.

Cole, Shaun. “Klein, Calvin.” glbtqarchive.com, Victoria and Albert Museum.

“Pride Through Fashion: How Calvin Klein Revolutionized Gay Men’s Underwear.” studmeup.com.au, 2024.

“Coming to Terms With Queerness in the Men’s Underwear Section.” Literary Hub, June 2020.

The Pleasure of Your Company

Pleasure is not the byproduct of sex. It is, increasingly, the reason for it.

The traditional story has the body wired for reproduction, with pleasure as a kind of bribe — a reward the species offers so the organism keeps doing the thing evolution needs done. But the body does not behave like an organism that only wants offspring. Most human sexual activity happens when conception is impossible.

This is not a new observation, though it gets discussed like one. Sexologists working at the turn of the twentieth century were already arguing that non-reproductive sexuality — homosexuality included — reflected an instinct in service of human development, not a deviation from it. The argument that pleasure is legitimate on its own terms predates Stonewall by sixty years. It predates Lawrence v. Texas by a century. It was available, on the record, while the culture spent that same century insisting otherwise.

In this collage, male gay figures engaged in sexual pleasure are inserted into a 1930’s beach scene where the male figure is included as an object of sexual desire. The conflation of these figures underscores the timeless need for human connection of many varieties including gay romance.

Gay culture’s relationship to pleasure, then, is not an exception to how the species behaves. It may be closer to the rule. A practice built around sex that cannot reproduce, openly, without the cover story available to straight sex, has simply been honest about what the body was already doing everywhere else.

The Subdivision continues building the Gayborhood infrastructure.

— Behan

Sources

“‘All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex’: Development and the social function of the sexual instinct in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexology.” History of the Human Sciences, 2023.

Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).

You’re so Big

Giant Films Presents: A Legal History in Four Collage Panels

Four panels beginning a title card announcing itself without apology:

GIANT FILMS PRESENTS.

A blue moon hangs over a man’s shoulder before he’s even named. The second panel is all surrender — eyes closed, mouth open, Jupiter 3 drifting past like it knows what’s missing in the frame. The third is two men sharing a breath, with Jupiter 3 hovering between them like a chaperone that gave up chaperoning. The fourth panel breaks into text mid-sentence — “…ggest One I Ever Saw!” — a review fragment doing double duty as punchline and proof of life. This is gay culture advertising itself to itself, decades before it was legal to do so without consequence.

The Mail Wouldn’t Carry It

Before “Giant Films Presents” could exist as a genre instead of a crime — someone had to win the right to put gay content in an envelope. In the 1950s the U.S. Post Office routinely intercepted early gay publications like ONE magazine under obscenity statutes, treating queer existence in print as contraband by default. The case that broke that default, ONE, Inc. v. Olesen, reached the Supreme Court in 1958 and established that gay publications were entitled to First Amendment protection — a ruling that let activists connect with each other nationally for the first time without the government opening their mail first.

Sitting Down to Be Served

Free speech got you the publication. It didn’t get you the seat at the table. The Mattachine Society staged “sip-ins” at New York bars like Julius’ in 1966 — ordering a drink, announcing you were gay, and waiting to see if you’d be refused — to force the legal question of whether simply existing in public as a gay man constituted disorderly conduct. It took organized, repeated, acts of assembly to establish that the answer was no.

The second panel’s surrender — head back, eyes shut, utterly unguarded — is only possible in a space where someone already fought to make such comfortable unguardedness survivable. Vulnerability is the privilege earned by the sip-in, not the starting condition.

From Riot to Institution

Stonewall, 1969: a routine raid met with several days of refusal to disperse, and a localized homophile movement detonated into mass-liberation. A year later, Christopher Street Liberation Day became the template for every Pride march since. The shift the Subdivision keeps tracking:

—“behavior is identity” transitioning to “behavior is NOT identity” —

has a hinge date, and this is it.

The Classroom and the Clinic

The 1970s and ‘80s turned the First Amendment toward two new fronts. California’s Proposition 6 in 1978 tried to ban gay people from teaching in public schools outright; it was defeated using First Amendment arguments about academic and political freedom, which is a polite way of saying gay teachers won the right to exist in front of a chalkboard by arguing free expression rather than by begging for tolerance. Then ACT UP, through the AIDS crisis, weaponized that same expressive freedom — provocative demonstrations, graphic art, die-ins — to drag a government that preferred silence into addressing an epidemic it was content to let burn through a population it considered disposable.

The fourth panel’s review fragment, mid-sentence and unbothered — “…ggest One I Ever Saw!” — sits in that lineage whether it knows it or not. Advertising your own gay culture, in your own confident fragment of language, is a direct descendant of a movement that had to argue, in court and in the street, for the right to be loud about its own existence at all.

The Closet, Legally Speaking

Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 decriminalized gay intimacy nationwide, retiring the anti-sodomy statutes that had kept every panel of this collage technically illegal in the states that still enforced them. Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 extended the same equal protection and due process logic to marriage. Between them, the legal architecture that made “Giant Films Presents” a punishable offense was dismantled — not all at once, not generously, but completely.

This collage set is documentation of a moment when documentation itself was the crime, and the moon was already there, watching, waiting for the law to catch up to what the camera already knew.

Jupiter 3 isn’t surprised. It’s been hovering in the frame since before the frame was legal to film.

— Behan

Take Me

The Full Moon presides.

Ten digital photo collages from The Gay Gaze, part of the Subdivision Development.

Groundbreaking.

The moon holds its position. Jupiter 3 makes its rounds.

Gay men do what all men do — just backwards and in fishnet.

Take me to the river.

Pricing available on request.

We All Fall Down

We All Fall Down | The Closet | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

Pastor Ted Haggard:

“I did not have a homosexual relationship with a man in Denver.”

“There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I’ve been warring against it all of my adult life.”

“The reason I would teach that is that was reflective of my struggle.”

“Some of us church folks have implied to our kids that God loves only straight people.”

Escort Mike Jones:

“Why am I not shocked? During the 1990s, when I worked as an escort in Denver, Colorado, I estimate at least 15 percent of my clientele were clergy or connected with the church in some way.”

Pastor Ted Haggard:

“I think that probably, if I were 21 in this society, I would identify myself as a bisexual.”

The Blood Moon has seen it all.

False Prophet

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.” — Matthew 7:15, King James Bible

Every closet is unique. Some are built from fear. Some from shame. Some from the cold arithmetic of survival. Ted Haggard’s closet was built from condemnation.

Haggard founded New Life Church in Colorado Springs in 1984, growing it into a congregation of 14,000. By 2003, he was president of the National Association of Evangelicals, representing thirty million parishioners and forty-five thousand churches across the United States. He advised the White House. He was named one of Time magazine’s twenty-five most important evangelicals in 2005. From that height, he preached against homosexuality with the certainty of a man who believed his own sermon. In 2006, he actively campaigned for Colorado Amendment 43, seeking to enshrine a ban on same-sex marriage in the state constitution.

That same year, Mike Jones — a Denver male escort — came forward to report that Haggard had been paying him for sex once a month for three years, and purchasing crystal methamphetamine. Haggard’s initial denial was swift and specific: “I did not have a homosexual relationship with a man in Denver.” Within days, the board of New Life Church declared him guilty of sexually immoral conduct and removed him. A second victim, a young male volunteer at the church, later received a settlement of $179,000.

The architecture of Haggard’s closet is not unusual in its dimensions — a man at war with his own desire, using the nearest available weapon. What is particular to Haggard is the scale of the weapon. He did not merely suppress himself. He organized. He legislated. He stood at a pulpit before tens of thousands and told gay men they were an abomination — while being one himself, by his own definitions.

The Blood Moon hangs behind him in this collage not as glory, but as inversion. The halo earned by a false prophet. The classical figure beside him is desire itself — unashamed, ancient, ungovernable. The young man at the fortress door is someone else’s story — one of the men who came forward, who stood at the threshold of Haggard’s world and paid a price for it. The tiger is the threat Haggard represented to anyone who might expose him — the power of a man who advised presidents, commanded thirty million, and could end a career with a phone call. Grant Haas waited a year before coming forward. That fear was rational. The tiger had real teeth. Until it didn’t.

The Closet Series has documented men who hid to survive. Haggard hid to rule. That is a different kind of closet — one whose walls were built from other people’s lives.

The fruit, as the scripture says, is how you know the tree.

The Subdivision | The Closet Series | The False Prophet | Blood Moon

Cam

Chapter 1: The Meet Up

Chapter 2: Texas Tails

Chapter 3: The Boyfriend

Epilogue

What Cam doesn’t think about — what he keeps carefully at bay — is what the research already knows. LGBT+ older adults are 30% more likely to experience loneliness than their non-LGBT+ peers. Gay men who remain unpartnered and disconnected from community are among the most at-risk. Four out of five older LGBTQ+ adults report concern about having enough social support as they age. The closet, it turns out, is not a sustainable living arrangement. It is a holding pattern with a predictable destination.

Cam is 32. The math is not in his favor.

Sources: AARP Dignity Survey, 2024 | National Institutes of Health, 2025 | Brumfield & Dahlenburg, Journal of Homosexuality, May 2025

The Subdivision | The Closet Series

Behan

Deriving Desire

Derivative Desire

The Gay Gaze | The Subdivision

Digital Photo Collage, 2026

Using homoerotic energy to generate engagement while maintaining plausible deniability is manipulation. It is also, to borrow a culinary metaphor, melted ice cream — desire served once removed from itself, at the wrong temperature, with a fork.

Researchers at Routledge identified this practice in 2025 as part of what they call the online sexual economy — content that deploys sexualized imagery as currency while obscuring its own terms. The influencer industry has built a multibillion dollar ecosystem on exactly this ambiguity. The homoerotic charge drives engagement. The hashtags provide cover.

Consider the original image. A man in a shower. Hashtag sport. Hashtag gym. Hashtag motivation. Hashtag viral. He is laughing, water running down his chest, showerhead held aloft like a trophy. 554 likes. Tagged as fitness content. It is also, unmistakably, a thirst trap — and its subtext is homoerotic. The coding is deliberate. The deniability is the point.

In the resulting collage, the figures who were always implied are brought into the frame. The gaze that was always present is now validated rather than hidden. Jupiter 3 drifts into the scene and the Aquarian Moon rises above it, adding a layer of transcendence to what began as an ordinary bathroom moment. The beauty of the male form is acknowledged rather than disguised. The meaning has not changed. It has simply been fully realized.

This is the purpose of the work — to take subtext and transform it into context. To finish the sentence that was always being spoken.

The Subdivision | The Gay Gaze

What’s Possible

What’s Possible | The Closet | The Subdivision

| Digital Photo Collage | 2026

One is gay. One is mostly gay. One is straight. One is mostly straight.

Who is who?

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is three out of four are queer.

Let us meditate on that.

Behan