Courage

The Courage They Had, Briefly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Behan

The Moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Carrington gets his moment in this collage:

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

— Behan

Sources: Wikipedia, ABC News, LGBTQ Nation

The invisible (Gay) Man

An Invisible Life

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

1954 — He is born.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Behan

Stitch in Time

On Cloth and Armor

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

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

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

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

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

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

CIS VS TRANS

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

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

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

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

The objection was never medical.

Stop the nonsense.

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

Same Toys New Families

Same Toys, New Families

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

New Neighbors Up Ahead

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

Waco’s Tragic History

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

A New Start

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

Are more families moving in? Stay tuned!

— Behan

Birds of a Feather Flocking Together

Two New Arrivals: The Black Swan and the Purple Finch

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

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

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

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

Birds of a Feather Redux

Flock Together: Two Piece Set Plus Diptych Featuring Gay Adult Film Star Brandon Anderson | Gay Gaze | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

Why are black swans gay? It’s the exact same question most gay men and women have had to answer at some point in their life, aimed at a bird instead of a person. And the truth is the same truth: why aren’t they? Why is heterosexual the default that never has to explain itself?

An estimated one-quarter of all black swan pairings are male-male. Two males bond, sometimes for life, take over a nest or borrow a female just long enough for an egg, then raise the cygnet together. And they’re better at it than the straight pairs — fledging their young roughly eighty percent of the time, against thirty percent for male-female pairs, because two males can hold more territory and split the work more evenly. Being gay isn’t a deviation here. It’s the strategy that wins.

The swan doesn’t carry the burden of the question. It just does what works.

— Behan

Sources: Australian Museum, “Diversity and same-sex pairings in birds”; Wikipedia, “Black swan”; Braithwaite, L.W. (1981), “Ecological studies of the Black Swan III.”

Birds of a Feather

A Purple Finch on Katy Trail | Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026.

Meet Adam and Steve. They both live in Dallas, and both run the Katy Trail every morning like clockwork. Two single, thirty-something gay men, each married to a career that leaves little room for much else. Adam jogs south from his bungalow off Monticello Drive. Steve jogs north from his high-rise near the American Airlines Center.

This morning, at exactly 6:25, sunrise, both men will be distracted by the same warbling Purple Finch. Adam and Steve will collide on the trail. They will laugh, watch the finch fly off, and end up at the Starbucks on Henderson Avenue, coffee in hand, no longer strangers.

Ten years on, their daughter will be born. They will name her Melody. And one day she’ll hear the story of how a Purple Finch brought her two dads together.

Boone Loves Chad

A man stands over Versailles, arms braced. Beneath him, another man lies in a canopy bed, propped on one elbow, watching. A moon hangs to the side. A spacecraft drifts past, indifferent. The scene borrows its architecture from history and its posture from something much less dignified: a sitcom bedroom, and the joke that lived in it for two seasons.

The joke belonged to Boone Clemens and Chad Radwell, fraternity roommates in the 2015 Fox series Scream Queens. Boone is written as gay. Chad is not, and says so often, usually right before letting Boone back into his bed anyway, on the condition of no touching — a condition Boone tests once, and a condition a girlfriend later walks in on and reads exactly as it looks. Late in the show, Boone turns out to have been performing his gayness all along, as cover for something else entirely. The bed joke survives the twist either way: something is always being performed in that room.

Boone is played by Nick Jonas, Chad by Glen Powell — both straight, by every public account. Which means the entire gay half of this joke, the longing, the crush, the mannerisms coded as desperate-for-approval, was built by a straight man’s idea of gay behavior and handed to another straight man to reject on camera. It’s a quieter cousin of gay for pay: an industry casting straight actors to originate the gay performance itself while gay actors wait for the same shot at playing anything. But maybe it runs the other way too — the gay role as the one place a straight leading man gets to be soft, scared, wanting, without having to be the hero about it. Theft or permission is somebody else’s question to answer.

That’s the collage, too. A body above, unreachable, lit by a moon and a ship that won’t stop. A body below, close enough to touch, told not to. Approximate symmetry: two men in the same bed, on terms that were never built to hold them both.

— Behan

Sources: Scream Queens (Fox, 2015–2016), created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan

On Time

Early 1700s — 1800s. America.

The limner — an itinerant, largely self-taught artist — travels town to town serving middle class families who want portraits and household art. They work for room, board and small payment. They make their own pigments from crushed walnuts, ground bones, blueberries and local clay. They paint two or three portraits a day. Most never sign their names.

1718. Paris.

Edme-François Gersaint opens a shop on the Pont Notre-Dame. He is among the first to create detailed catalogs positioning the dealer as expert and intermediary between artist and collector. The commercial gallery system begins.

1748. Paris.

The Paris Salon begins selecting work by jury. The Salon’s acceptance determines an artist’s professional reputation and access to patrons. The Salon now controls who is seen and who is not.

1863. Paris.

The Salon jury rejects so many works that Napoleon III intervenes and creates the Salon des Refusés — a separate exhibition for rejected work. If you are not selected by the official jury you effectively do not exist as an artist.

1874. Paris.

The Impressionists — rejected repeatedly by the Salon — organize their own independent exhibition. Dealer Paul Durand-Ruel begins building a market for them outside the official system.

1886. New York.

Durand-Ruel takes the Impressionists to America. The dealer system is now international. Gallery representation has become the primary path between artist and collector.

1890. Auvers-sur-Oise, France.

Vincent van Gogh dies of a gunshot wound at 37. In his lifetime he sold one painting. His brother Theo was himself an art dealer. In a letter Vincent had written to him directly:

“You have never yet sold a single thing of mine — not for a lot or a little — and IN FACT HAVEN’T TRIED TO YET.”

1920. Paris.

Amedeo Modigliani dies of tubercular meningitis at 35, impoverished. His paintings sold for a few francs when they sold at all. A landlord once confiscated his canvases in lieu of rent and used them to patch mattresses.

Hours after his death dealers crowded the hospital to acquire his work. Gallery prices rose tenfold overnight. Forgeries flooded the market. His family in Italy never received a penny.

In November 1997 a Modigliani portrait sold at Sotheby’s for $31.3 million. His daughter died broke.

1937. Munich, Germany.

The Nazi government organizes the Entartete Kunst — the Degenerate Art exhibition — displaying over 650 confiscated works by artists including Paul Klee, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Ernst. The works are crowded together, deliberately mislabeled, mocked with slogans painted on the walls.

Over two million people attend.

The concurrent official Great German Art Exhibition attracts less than a quarter of that number.

Most of the remaining confiscated works — over 21,000 objects — were later destroyed.

1970. New York.

Mark Rothko dies at 66. His gallery Marlborough was subsequently found by a court of law to have committed fraud against his estate — selling works at artificially deflated prices for its own financial benefit. His estate sued and won. The case became landmark art law.

2010. All Artists Go Global.

Instagram launches. Artists begin posting work directly to followers. Buyers respond through direct message. By 2017 documented cases emerge of artists generating significant sales entirely through the platform. By 2021, 40% of art buyers report social media has increasing influence on their purchasing decisions.

2016. The Algorithm Goes Global.

Instagram shifts from a chronological feed to an algorithm-based feed. The platform now determines what gets seen and by whom. Artists seeking direct access to buyers find themselves subject to a new selection process. Instagram, in effect, reasserts the gallery model — controlling visibility, access and audience — through the mechanism of the algorithm.

2024-2025. The Galleries Future Undetermined.

The global art market falls 12% in 2024. Major galleries close — Blum in Los Angeles, Kasmin and Venus Over Manhattan in New York among them. Approximately 60 younger galleries disappear largely unnoticed. New collectors, particularly younger ones, increasingly acquire work directly from artists rather than through galleries or auction houses.

Why Tatum and McBride Sound Like a Buddy Cop Script

Tatum Comes out as Bisexual; it is the Best of Times. McBride Writes a Book on Contemporary Masculinity; it is the Worst of Times | The Closet | The Subdivision | 2026 | Digital Photocollage | James Behan

Is Tatum a bottom? Is McBride’s book on contemporary masculinity fiction or nonfiction? And that scene in This Is The End — was it the start of something beautiful or merely tawdry? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Blue Moon isn’t saying. 💙

What we do know is this: two men, two very different relationships with masculinity, two excursions into territory the culture is still trying to map.

Channing Tatum came out as bisexual. The universe exhaled. Somewhere a million gay men who had quietly suspected as much since Magic Mike simply nodded. One man opened a door.

Danny McBride wrote a book about contemporary masculinity. Given his body of work the line between fiction and nonfiction feels blurry at best. One man wrote a book about the door without quite walking through it.

Two men. One cultural moment. The conversation about masculinity, desire and what lives between them has never been louder — or more unresolved.

There’s a whole lot going on in this collage, because there is a whole lot going on in the world.

The times? Mix and Match!

Gay Pieta

Gay Pietà | The Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

Grief is grief, whether it’s 1481 or 1981.

Michelangelo’s Pietà holds a strange fact at its center: Mary is young. Not aged with sorrow, not weathered into the decades a mother of a grown, crucified man should logically carry — she looks barely older than her son, sometimes younger.

Michelangelo’s own mother, Francesca, was seventeen when she married, often ill, often pregnant, and he was sent almost immediately to a wet nurse, a stonemason’s wife, whose family he’d return to for comfort throughout his life. Francesca died in 1481, when he was six — a mother-son relationship ended years before it should have, before he was old enough to remember her face with any clarity. His father, undone by grief, was in no state to raise the children she’d left. Michelangelo grew up largely alone, and carved his most famous mother having barely known his own: a woman frozen at the age she actually was, 23, when he lost her.

Five hundred years later, almost to the year, a different kind of ending arrived for a different set of mothers. By the close of 1981, 130 mostly young men in the United States had died of AIDS. 130 mother-son relationships, ended the same way Michelangelo’s was — sooner than they should have been, before either party was finished needing the other. The mothers often arrived at hospital bedsides to learn, in a single conversation, that their son was gay, that he was dying, and that he needed her now more than he ever had — and they stayed, whatever they’d imagined for him, whatever they were still working through.

Mary came to the cross. These mothers came to their sons’ version of it.

They came not because the situation was easy, not because they had made full peace with everything it meant, but because the son in the bed mattered more than the discomfort of the moment.

This collage takes its structure from Michelangelo’s marble and its subject from that history. The mother figure has a son who is alive but in borrowed time, the pose repeating the Pietà’s essential grammar: a seated maternal figure, a son’s body offered up for her to hold, a verdict rendered somewhere just outside the frame. Behind them, two 21st century men share a moment of intimacy in a 1700’s collapsible canopy bed previously owned by George Washington. The Aquarian Moon hangs blue-green above them, the moon of witness and truth, watching rather than judging. And across the bottom, a sales banner cuts through the composition like it belongs there: ENDS SOON. TOO LATE. Not a sale. The relationship. Both of them — Michelangelo’s and his mother’s, five hundred years ago, and every one of the mothers who arrived in time in 1981 and the years after. All of it ending sooner than it needed to, whether the ending came from a fever in 1481 or a virus in 1981 — but not before she came.

This artist believes Michelangelo made the loss of the mother-son relationship the emotional entry point of his Pietà, sculpted when he was twenty-three — seventeen years after his mother’s death, and close to her own age when he lost her. It would not have been lost on him that he was a similar age as his mom when she passed, and when he started sculpting western civilization’s most famous mom.

This collage pauses in honor of Michelangelo’s mom, Jesus of Nazareth’s mom, and all the moms’ left behind by AIDS.

— Behan

Soft Landing

Soft Landing recreates the harem — in contemporary terms of American masculinity — as a study in containment.

Where Ingres’ bathers are attended to and observed by a gaze positioned entirely outside the frame, the man in this collage is staged in a similar fashion, dressed in the branding of a different century’s silk.

The comparison is about a culture, like Ingres’ world, where in this case straight and queer men alike are held captive inside the same structure, the closet, neither one built, nor can fully escaped.

— Behan

Sweet Sweets

Sweet Life and Sweet Treats | Merged Diptychs | The Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

There’s always a sweet side to life — if you can get to the center of the Tootsie Pop.

A diptych is two panels connected thematically, not physically — two images that sit side by side, related but separate, each still its own frame. A merged diptych takes that space away. It brings the two together and makes them one instead of two — the seam disappears, or stops mattering. The two collages in this post take the architectural structure of merged diptychs in their own unique candy coated fashion.

The subject of these two works, Sweet Life and Sweet Treats, is the true story of Roman Emperor Hadrian and his lover Antinous, considered the most well-documented gay romance in Western history. Hadrian never recovered from losing Antinous. All of his efforts after — the city, the cult, the coins, all to his memory — trace back to the tragedy of a man losing his other half and staying broken by it for the remainder of his life. Two people had become one, and when the seam reopened, it didn’t heal.

These merged diptychs forever reconnect these two lovers and put them inside a confectioner’s window — brownies stacked like masonry, heart-shaped lollipops keeping watch, marshmallows crowding a hot-pink cup, Jupiter 3 hovering at a statue’s hip like it’s always been there. History treats men like Hadrian and Antinous coldly — dates, titles, a paragraph reducing grief to political theater. But they were human, not historical. They ate, they touched, they got lost in each other the way any couple does. The marble is a reality. The softness around it is the correction — flesh where the history books left only stone.

The sweet life, and sweet treats, if the phrases mean anything, mean wanting someone in the open, the way Hadrian wanted Antinous, without translating it into something smaller first. Most of the world still can’t. As of 2026, roughly 63 to 66 countries criminalize homosexuality outright, and in about a dozen of them the penalty on the books is death. Even in the United States, where the law mostly stopped policing the bedroom decades ago, national surveys still find somewhere between 39 and 46 percent of LGBTQ+ workers closeted on the job — not out of shame, necessarily, but out of a cost-benefit calculation made fresh every morning. That’s the same tension the candy is built on: human, not historical, plays both ways here too — the tenderness is real, and so is the risk.

Here, for one merged diptych at a time, the risk gets suspended. The sweetness holds. The two stay merged.

— Behan

Sources: ILGA World Database on criminalisation of consensual same-sex acts (2026); Human Dignity Trust, Map of Jurisdictions that Criminalise LGBT People; Human Rights Campaign, “Equality Rising: LGBTQ+ Workers and the Road Ahead” (2026); Stonewall UK workplace research (2025).

Under The Ozone Sky

Dive in—The Sunscreen’s Fine

Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

Being Gay is Often an Outdoor Sport—Stay Alert and Protected

Poolside light does the flattering work: it catches oiled shoulders, blue Speedos, a hand raised into an umbrella’s shade. It is the most forgiving light there is, which is precisely the problem. The ozone layer thins every year, and the sun that made these bodies desirable is quietly becoming the thing that will age or endanger them.

In the open air jeep a blue moon hovers overhead, tattooed chest turned toward the rear — decoration competing with exposure, clocking the cop on the motorcycle a short distance behind.

At the pool, a group of men towel off under a red umbrella while a saucer drifts past, unbothered, as if surveillance from above comes as expected as the cabana boy. “Dive in,” the image insists in its corner text, half invitation and half dare.

The tag for this diptych — Being Gay is Often an Outdoor Sport — is not an observation about athleticism. Gay social life has long happened outdoors: beaches, pool decks, cruising grounds, backyard parties, all spaces built around visibility and exposure by necessity as much as choice. That exposure was once mostly social risk. Now it is also literal — skin held up to a sky doing a worse job protecting it than it used to. The ozone layer’s decline is not new information, but it is easy to file away as abstract, a problem for polar ice and satellite data rather than a Saturday afternoon outing. Bottom line: stay protected, and eat your greens.

Now about the cops and outings. Outdoor exposure has always carried a second kind of risk for a targeted class, and the numbers back up what the figure on the motorcycle represents rather than invents. LGBTQ+ people are arrested at nearly 20% over their lifetime compared with roughly 13–14% of non-LGBTQ+ people, and transgender people are arrested at closer to 30%. Gay and bisexual men are reported to be roughly 30% more likely to be arrested than straight men, and one national analysis found LGBTQ+ people overall arrested at more than double the rate of straight people in a given year. LGBTQ+ people are also more likely to be stopped, searched, and held in custody than their non-LGBTQ+ peers — and, as a result, are less willing to call police for help when they need it.

Bottom line: cops historically have loved outing gay people, despite the closet’s social contract always being narrow but clear: no public displays, and the dominant culture leaves you alone. In 1953, seventy men gathered for a wedding inside a private home in Waco Texas— no street, no park, no public square. Police broke down that door anyway, arrested the men on vagrancy charges, and printed their names and addresses on the front page of the local paper. The state did not enforce the closet’s terms—it violated them — publicizing what had been kept private, costing these men not just their jobs but the protecting lie the culture demanded they live.

None of that is abstract to a body in a Speedo on a public pool deck. It’s always important, wherever you are, to stay aware and protected—like light chain mesh armor — from the sun, and from anyone else assigned to watch you.

— Behan

Sources: American Civil Liberties Union / NORC survey analysis (2024); Williams Institute, UCLA (2025); Prison Policy Initiative (2021); Safety and Justice Challenge (2025); general atmospheric science reference on ozone depletion and UV exposure.

Gay, Carefree, and Everything Between

The Subdivision returns to 1921, when a black cat with a permanent grin stars in a short film called Felix the Gay Dog — “gay” then meaning a carefree night out, and Felix’s crime is slipping away from his wife to enjoy a burlesque theater. The word survives into the 1959 television theme, where Felix is introduced as “gay and carefree,” wandering with his little bag of tricks. By the 1990s the joke sharpens into something closer to camp: a flamboyant, gay-coded bulldog named LeadFanny stands in for the character’s old antagonist, modeled loosely on Harvey Fierstein.

This triptych takes Felix at his most literal — the “official queer merchandise” nobody sold — and drops him into a mid-century living room already crowded with the cast of the Gay Gaze: men in briefs and tube socks, a UFO idling over a bowl of marshmallows, a moon standing witness the way it always does in this series. The bodybuilder ad in the first panel is not a joke at Felix’s expense. It is the ad that history almost let him make.

Hadrian Loves Antinous 4Ever

Hadrian never let the world forget Antinous. He built him a city, made him a god, and carved his face across an empire. Two thousand years later, the marble is still looking for its flesh.

Marble Into Flesh: Hadrian and Antinous | Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

Antinous drowns in the Nile in October of 130 CE, not yet twenty years old, and Hadrian — emperor of Rome, master of an empire that stretches from Britain to the Euphrates — does something no emperor does for a private citizen. He weeps, openly, reportedly “like a woman,” and then he acts. He has Antinous deified. He founds a city on the riverbank where the boy died and names it Antinoöpolis. He commissions statues, coins, and temples across the empire — all more surviving portraits of Antinous exist today than of almost any other non-imperial figure from antiquity. Archaeological evidence of his cult turns up in at least seventy cities, from Alexandria to Delphi. This isn’t a private grief kept behind closed doors. This is a Roman emperor turning his mourning into public architecture.

The paintings and busts of Antinous — the curled hair, the heavy-lidded, slightly melancholy eyes, the mouth set somewhere between calm and grief — became a template so consistent that later sculptors could copy it for centuries without ever having seen the boy. He is Bithynian, Greek, young, and beautiful, and that beauty is the entire reason any of this survives: Hadrian didn’t just love him, he made sure an empire looked at him and kept looking.

This new work sets those two-thousand-year-old faces — cast from the busts that survive, rendered as they were rendered then — beside contemporary men: gym bodies, beach bodies, a mustache and a bare chest lifted from the visual language of modern gay desire. The marble doesn’t get replaced. It gets accompanied. Hadrian’s grief built temples; this collage builds a bridge instead, letting the cold permanence of stone sit next to something warm-blooded and current, because the ache Hadrian felt in 130 CE isn’t actually that far from what gets photographed at a pool party in 2026. Same longing. Different material. The moon watches both.

— Behan

Sources: National Museums Liverpool; Encyclopaedia Britannica; TheCollector; Roman Empire Times; Prism & Pen (Medium).

Incline

Inclination is Flattening

Digital Photocollage

2026

The inclination to love is natural, unwavering. It moves beyond calculation — an impulse, a natural act of self preservation and self actualization combined. It is the foundation of civilization, of romantic love, the giving of oneself to another. It is what makes us human.

For gay men, while this impulse is no less real, no less urgent, no less necessary, the obstacles set in place by an intolerant dominant culture to flatten it are formidable. A complex system of strategies — social, political, religious, cultural — designed to keep gay men separate and silent. Alone. This is what happens when inclination is flattened. It will not hold.

On Dinner Etiquette

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Gauguin, 1898

Where Do We Come From? What Are We Having For Dinner?

Behan, 2026

Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti in 1891 convinced he could recover something primal and uncorrupted — that he could arrive in another culture, look at its people, and understand them. His monumental 1898 painting arranges bodies along a long horizontal plane, figures at rest and in motion, asking the largest questions a human being can ask: where do we come from, what are we, where are we going. It is a magnificent painting and a deeply complicated one. Gauguin was the outsider looking in — the Western eye trained on an “other” culture, certain of its own capacity to comprehend what it was seeing. Gay culture has always known that position from the other side. They are the ones perpetually examined, explained, and theorized about by those who have never lived inside the life being described.

The horizontal arrangement found in Gauguin’s work is reflected in Behan’s collage — gay men spread across a sun-drenched domestic interior landscape, going about the vivid, ordinary business of living — reading, exercising, dressing, existing —bodies serving as the argument. Behan’s collage argues the working out of the everyday is the answer to the cosmic questions humans like to ask, and it turns out the answer almost always includes “what do you want for dinner?”

Humor is not a retreat from seriousness. It is one of the most serious responses available to a human being. To laugh at our own fragility — at the gap between the questions we ask and the lives we actually live — is to hold both things at once without being destroyed by either. It is, finally, a form of hope. Cindy Sherman has described seeing humor in almost everything, treating her work as a one-person mischievous show. Her clown series uses garish color and deliberate artifice to expose the fabricated nature of social roles not to mock but to liberate. When the construction is exposed, we are free to laugh at it. And when we laugh at it, we are free.

Gauguin asked where we are going. Sherman shows us the costume we are wearing while we figure it out. The Closet Series suggests we stop and have a bite first.