Surplus Reincarnation

Surplus Reincarnation: What the Ranch Rambler Inherited

There is a temptation to think of mid-century modern design as an invention — a clean, sudden break from everything that came before it. Low-slung rooflines, walls of glass, the studied plainness of a post-and-beam frame: it reads, at a glance, like something new under the sun. But the Ranch Rambler I live in isn’t new. It’s a reincarnation. It belongs to a lineage that stretches back through two thousand years of people figuring out the same basic problem — how to let the outside in, and let a house become a place instead of just a container.

Go back far enough and you find the Roman atrium: a house built around an open center, sky visible overhead, the family’s daily life arranged around a court instead of sealed off from it. Go back further and there’s the Egyptian courtyard house, oriented to catch the one breeze worth catching, its rooms wrapped around open air the way a hand wraps around something it intends to keep close. Look south instead of east and you find Mesoamerican builders working almost entirely in what the land gave them — adobe, stone, timber pulled from nearby, nothing shipped in from anywhere — because the material at hand was also, not incidentally, the material that made sense.

None of these were poor solutions waiting for modernism to arrive and correct them. They were the same idea, tried and re-tried, in different climates and different centuries: that a house works best when it doesn’t fight the land it sits on, and that a family’s well-being has more to do with light, air, and gathering space than with how much square footage you can wall off and call “more.”

The Ranch Rambler — my 1962 home here in Dallas included — is simply the most recent incarnation of that idea. The vaulted ceiling, the low roofline reaching out toward the yard instead of away from it: these aren’t ornament. They’re the same argument the Romans and the Egyptians and the builders of Mesoamerica were making, translated into a mid-century American accent.

Which brings me to the phrase that, for me, best fits the midcentury moment: surplus reincarnation.

Every design era has its own idea of surplus — its own answer to the question “once basic needs are met, where does the excess go?” Plenty of eras before this one poured that surplus into ornament: more carving, more gilding, more square footage, more stuff, as a way of visibly announcing wealth.

Mid-century modern took the same surplus and reincarnated it into something else entirely — not more material, but more relationship. More light. More connection between the room you’re standing in and the tree outside the window. More time and attention available for the people in your life, because the house isn’t asking you to maintain, polish, and account for a pile of ornamentation.

That’s the real inheritance here, more than the roofline or the fireplace. Surplus reincarnation is the idea that a household’s wealth is better measured in emotional terms than material ones — in the quality of your relationships and your groundedness in a place, not in the size of a bank account or the density of what you own.

Simplicity of form

Honest, low-cost materials used well instead of expensive materials used to impress. A blurred line between indoor and outdoor that keeps you tethered to the land rather than sealed off from it. None of that is new to 1962. It’s just the version of a recurring idea that happened to land in my neighborhood.

When I work on this house — pulling cottagecore textures into a mid-century frame, resetting a room, deciding what stays and what goes — I try to keep that lineage in view. I’m not restoring a decade. I’m tending to something a lot older than that: a house’s relationship to the land it inhabits, and to the people who gather in it.

Sources

Sources

There’s a moment on the facade of my 1962 ranch rambler where a stone wall meets a length of manufactured brick planter, and I keep returning to that seam. The wall is Austin Stone — a yellowish-white Cretaceous limestone quarried from the earth beneath the home’s footprint, common in South Dallas masonry precisely because it’s local, durable, and irregular by nature. No two pieces are the same color or shape, laid by hand so the mortar lines wander wherever the stones told them to. The planter beside it is uniform block, cast from a mold, identical to every other length of the same product sold in 1961.

That question — handmade or manufactured, original or curated — turns out to be the whole argument buried underneath the two styles I orbit: mid-century modern and cottagecore.

Mid-century is, at its root, a celebration of the factory. It came out of the post-war American boom, when wartime advances in molded plywood, fiberglass, steel, and vinyl suddenly became available for furniture and homes instead of aircraft and splints. Designers like the Eameses took materials built for mass production and made them beautiful. Suburbs filled with tract housing — open floor plans, glass walls, flat roofs — because mass production had made good design affordable to a growing middle class for the first time. The style doesn’t apologize for being manufactured. It’s proud of it. Clean lines, repeatable forms, the machine’s precision as an aesthetic virtue in itself.

Cottagecore is the opposite instinct, and it’s older than its 2018 Tumblr christening suggests. Its lineage runs through the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800s, which was explicitly a revolt against mass production — designers like William Morris rejecting the factory in favor of hand-thrown ceramics, hand-loomed textiles, natural wood worked by a person rather than stamped by a machine. Before that, it runs through the Arcadian ideal in ancient Greek writing — the fantasy of rural simplicity as an escape from the corruption of the city. Every iteration is a reaction to something: industry, wealth, hustle culture, whatever the busy world of the moment happened to be. The style’s whole appeal rests on the idea that no two handmade things are ever quite alike.

So when the two sit in the same space, they’re not just mixing colors and textures. They’re putting two competing philosophies of how a thing should be made into the same square footage. One trusts the machine. One trusts the human hand.

For me, the interesting part is the seam itself — the space between the two. A stone wall built stone by stone, no two alike, backed by a manufactured edge that repeats itself perfectly down the length of a garden bed. Original presentation against curated presentation. Both win. And as a species, we tend to like a win-win.

Maybe that’s the real inheritance from both movements, not the aesthetic vocabulary but the underlying question they were each trying to answer in their own era: what do we want made by a hand we can trace, and what are we glad to let a machine do perfectly, every time? The rooms and gardens that hold both without smoothing over the difference are the ones that feel most satisfying to live in.

Sequence

Sequence

A story rarely moves in a straight line. It circles. It leaves something unresolved in the first frame and asks the rest of the piece to carry that weight forward, panel by panel, until the thread finally closes — or doesn’t.

These two works operate the same way medieval church cycles did: a sequence of images meant to be read in order, each one returning to the same figures, the same gestures, so that meaning accrues through repetition rather than through a single decisive image. You didn’t need every panel of a fresco cycle to tell the whole story. You needed the rhythm of coming back to it.

Here, the recurring figures are a suited man and a bare-chested one — the same pairing lifted from a run of romantic comedies built around a woman standing between them. In those films the two men were rivals, foils, comic obstacles to a heterosexual ending. But the camera lingered on them anyway — the scheming, the physical closeness, the tension that the plot kept explaining away. That unnamed current is the loop this piece keeps returning to. Remove the third figure who was always the official reason for their proximity, and what’s left is the thing the story circled around without ever naming: desire, held at a distance, arriving again and again in a different room, a different light, a different color field, never quite landing, never quite leaving.

That’s the nature of a loop. It isn’t stasis — it’s an orbit. A planet doesn’t return to the same point in space each year; it returns to the same relationship, changed by everything that happened in between. Conversation works this way too — like planets we circle back to the same subject, the same unresolved question, and each pass changes slightly what we’re able to say. The loop isn’t a failure to move forward. It’s how understanding and apprehension builds, not in a single moment of arrival, but in the accumulation of returns.

Sequence asks the same question a stained-glass cycle asks, and the same one an unresolved scene in an old comedy asks without meaning to: what happens to longing when it’s never allowed to resolve, only repeated.

Golden Ticket

Forever in the Boom Boom Room: Generation Jones, Gay Culture, and the Face That Won’t Grow Old Without a Fight

There’s a memorable scene in 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory: Mike Teavee, obsessed with television, shrinks himself down to fit inside the screen. The Oompa-Loompas cart him off to the taffy-pulling machine to be stretched back to normal size — except normal can never be normal again. He comes out a little too tall, too thin, warped by the process of trying to be restored to what he was.

If you were born between 1960 and 1965, you were somewhere between six and eleven years old when that scene played out on the movie screen. You’d already sat through the golden goose laying her eggs, Gene Wilder’s flat, unreadable stare, the boat ride through the tunnel that felt less like a fantasy and more like a fever dream.

This group didn’t just watch a movie about candy and consequence. They absorbed, early and indelibly, a set of pictures about bodies transformed, bodies punished, bodies that don’t come back quite right.

A Generation Without a Name

Ask someone born in 1962 what generation they belong to and watch them hesitate. Too young for Woodstock, too old for MTV, they don’t recognize themselves in the Boomer narrative of the Summer of Love, and they’re a full cultural cycle removed from Gen X’s latchkey cynicism. For years this cohort had no name of its own — just an asterisk wedged between two much larger generations.

The label that stuck, coined by the writer and producer Jonathan Pontell, is Generation Jones: the group betwixt and between Woodstock and Lollapalooza. This cohort has a genuinely distinct psychology — one shaped by watching idealism curdle into practicality just as they were old enough to notice, but too young to have been responsible for any of it.

And for gay men in this specific window — born 1960 to 1965 — there’s a second, much darker asterisk attached to that identity. This is the age group that came of age right as the AIDS crisis broke, and it is the cohort that lost the most people to it. Men who were in their late teens and twenties, just old enough to have come out, just old enough to have started building a community, when an entire generation of older gay men who might have shown them how to grow old simply weren’t there anymore.

Missing Elders

This is the part of the story that doesn’t get said often enough: youth obsession in gay culture isn’t vanity, for a huge swath of gay Generation Jones, there was no template. The men who would ordinarily have modeled what it looks like to age as a gay man — to be fifty, sixty, seventy, comfortable and visible — were gone.

So the question isn’t really “why is gay culture so youth-obsessed.” The more honest question is: does this generation actually know how to grow old?

When your cultural elders are erased before they can teach you what dignified aging looks like, youth doesn’t become an aesthetic preference. It becomes the only fluent language you have. You don’t chase youth because you’re afraid of aging in the abstract. You chase it because nobody showed you the beauty of growing older.

The Face as the Last Marker

Plastic surgery culture among gay men — the fillers, the facelifts, the Botox rituals booked as casually as a haircut — gets read from the outside as pure narcissism, a community fixated on the mirror. But look at where the effort concentrates. It’s almost always the face. Not the whole body, not some general anti-aging campaign — the face specifically, the one part of a person that carries recognition, memory, desirability, and belonging all at once.

For a generation that came up watching a candy-colored fantasy about bodies being stretched and warped back into shape, and then spent their twenties watching the men just ahead of them disappear, and then their peers disappear next, the face becomes a negotiable territory.

You can’t get back the decade the epidemic took. You can’t recover the mentors who should have aged in front of you. But you can, perhaps, keep the face looking like it belongs to someone who’s still early in the narrative, still has time, still gets to be looked at rather than looked past.

That’s a different thing from vanity. It’s closer to a coping mechanism dressed up as a cosmetic procedure — an attempt to visually opt out of a timeline that was violently interrupted multiple times.

Not Youth-Obsessed; Just Youth

Maybe that’s the real reframe. It’s not that gay culture, or this generation within it, is uniquely obsessed with youth as an abstract ideal. It’s that a specific cohort of gay men is youth, there by circumstance rather than choice — because the people who should have modeled the next chapter were taken from the story before they could write it.

The Oompa-Loompas sang their warnings as cautionary jingles about a generation who wanted too much, too fast, from the screen and the candy coated wallpaper. But watch that scene again as someone born in 1962 might have watched it: a body sent through a machine designed to restore it, and coming out the other side changed, stretched, not quite the same — but still, unmistakably, there.

A Few Good Men Revisited | Gay Gaze | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

A Few good men is all that is needed

In 1983, a gay adult film called A Few Good Men was released — a series of vignettes set inside an all-male, all-straight military world, built around drill sergeants and recruits, discipline and obedience. Ten years later, in 1993, a mainstream courtroom drama with the same title reached wide release, starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, about two Marines court-martialed for a hazing death at Guantanamo Bay.

Same title. Same institution. Same decade.

Two ideas of manliness

The adult film’s counter-narrative is worth sitting with: that manliness is not the absence of intimacy between men, but the capacity for it. Its military setting strips away the performance of toughness and finds, underneath the uniform and the hierarchy, men reaching for each other. That’s its own argument about what a man is — not the hardened, untouchable figure the culture usually hands us, but someone capable of closeness with other men, even inside the most rigid, rule-bound institution built to prevent exactly that.

The mainstream film runs on the opposite current. Its fictional victim is hazed because he’s weak — physically unable to keep pace, and worse, because he goes around the chain of command instead of enduring in silence. He is punished, in other words, for failing the code. Weakness itself is the offense. The film doesn’t name that failure as anything about sexuality, and there’s no evidence its writers intended it that way. But the coding is familiar to anyone who grew up around locker rooms and barracks: “weak,” “soft,” “not man enough” have long done double duty in American culture, carrying an implicit charge about who is suspected of not really being one of the men — an anxiety about homosexuality riding along under the surface of a word that, on paper, is just about strength.

The man playing that film’s lead carries his own version of this territory. Tom Cruise has never made a formal public statement in support of gay rights, transgender rights, or the LGBTQ community. He has, however, been a member of the Church of Scientology since the late 1980s and is widely described as its most prominent member, having received the church’s Freedom Medal of Valor — its highest honor — in 2004; some reporting indicates he has reached OT VIII, the church’s highest publicly acknowledged auditing level. Former high-ranking Scientologist Leah Remini has said Cruise ranks second only to church leader David Miscavige in internal status. The church’s founding texts describe homosexuality as an “aberration” treatable through its auditing practice, and while church spokespeople state the organization does not discriminate based on sexual orientation, former members and critics have disputed that.

Put the two films side by side and something clarifies: one insists manliness can include physical intimacy between men; the other punishes anything read as insufficiently hard. They’re arguing, a decade apart, about the same space and same time.

What the decade was

That ten years, 1983 to 1993, wasn’t incidental. It was the worst stretch of the AIDS crisis in America — the years before the first genuinely effective treatments arrived, when a diagnosis was close to a death sentence and the country largely watched with hostility or silence. The men hit hardest by the epidemic were the ones born in the early 1960s: still teenagers or barely into their twenties when it began, so that an entire generational cohort was cut down at the age when a man’s public identity — his career, his visibility, his claim to being “a man” in the culture’s terms — was just taking shape.

And behind 1983’s production sits a small, devastating record of its own. Director Steve Scott — born Salvatore Grasso — died September 12, 1987, from complications of AIDS. The film’s producer, Al Parker (born Andrew Robert Okun), died August 17, 1992, at age 40, also from AIDS. Lee Ryder, the film’s lead performer, died of AIDS on July 10, 1991. And Brad Peters, also in the cast, died in 1992, likewise from AIDS-related complications. Four men who made A Few Good Men — its director, its producer, and two of its performers — were dead within five years of the film’s release, all from the same epidemic. The Subdivision honors these lost souls.

By 1993 the country was fighting out, in Congress and in public, what it would mean for gay men to serve openly in the military at all — the fight that produced “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The same institution both films are set inside. The same year the second film reached wide audiences.

So the decade runs: a film that imagines intimacy between men as its own kind of manliness, at the height of a crisis that was killing a generation of men for who they loved — to a film, in the same military setting, that punishes weakness without ever naming what “weakness” has always half-meant — landing in the same year the nation legislated exactly how much a gay man was allowed to be visible inside that uniform.

Digital collages available multiple sizes individually or in combination as diptych, triptych, or multipanel format per patron’s wishes. Contact artist for more information.

Working Hard | Playing Harder

You Think You Don’t Know Many Gay People? You’re Wrong.

Ask the average straight guy how often he interacts with a gay person, and the answer is usually the same: few and far between.

Meanwhile...

The Lawyer. In 2013, Todd Hughes became the first openly gay judge confirmed to a U.S. Court of Appeals — one step below the Supreme Court. NALP has tracked openly LGBT lawyers since 2002, when they were just over 1% of the profession; by 2021 it was 3.7%, and among today’s summer associates it’s 11.7%. The National LGBTQ+ Bar Association had 293 members at its 1989 launch; today it has over 1,700.

The Doctor. Dr. Rachel Levine served as U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health from 2021 to 2025 — the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the Senate. GLMA, founded in 1981, is the world’s oldest and largest association of LGBTQ+ healthcare professionals, representing tens of thousands of members with a standing seat on the American Medical Association’s advisory committee.

The Psychologist. John Amaechi retired from the NBA in 2003, came out in 2007, and went on to earn a doctorate — he’s now a professor of leadership at the University of Exeter Business School. The American Psychological Association has an entire division, Division 44, built around LGBTQ psychology.

The Professor. Judith Butler, one of the most influential philosophers alive, has spent decades as an openly LGBTQ professor at UC Berkeley. Beyond any single name, large national studies have repeatedly found gay and lesbian workers overrepresented on university faculties nationwide.

The Priest. Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa held a senior post at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith until 2015, when he came out as gay and in a relationship at a Rome press conference — the Vatican stripped him of his post immediately. In his resignation letter to Pope Francis, he accused the Church of hypocrisy, saying the clergy itself was “full of homosexuals” even as it publicly condemned them.

The Social Worker. Caitlin Ryan, a clinical social worker, has spent decades pioneering LGBTQ health research as director of the Family Acceptance Project, reshaping how families and providers support LGBTQ youth. The National Association of Social Workers has more than 150,000 members across 55 chapters, with LGBTQ+ caucuses built in.

The Creative — design, art, music. This is the field with the most names to point to:

• Interior designer Jeremiah Brent

• Painter Kehinde Wiley, who painted President Obama’s official portrait

• Musicians Elton John, Frank Ocean, Sam Smith, Ricky Martin, Lil Nas X

• Fashion designer Tom Ford

Maybe it’s not a coincidence — growing up having to read a room and think on your feet builds a resourcefulness that has to go somewhere.

The Public Worker. Kristin Crowley became the Los Angeles Fire Department’s first female and first openly LGBTQ+ fire chief in 2022, leading the department through the catastrophic 2025 Palisades wildfire. About 1 in 10 LGBTQ workers hold a government job — at roughly 9% LGBTQ identification nationally (Gallup), that’s an estimated 1.5 million LGBTQ Americans in public-sector jobs: mail carriers, road crews, firefighters, DMV clerks, teachers, police officers. Until 2003, when Lawrence v. Texas struck down the last state sodomy laws, being openly gay could get you arrested by the department you wanted to join. New York City banned anti-gay discrimination in police hiring in the early 1980s, and NYPD’s Gay Officers Action League has operated openly ever since.

The Soldier. Pete Buttigieg spent eight years as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer, including a seven-month deployment to Afghanistan in 2014 tracking terrorist financing networks, and was honorably discharged as a lieutenant — a career that became the foundation for his run as U.S. Secretary of Transportation, the first openly gay person confirmed by the Senate to a cabinet post. It’s a job too: an estimated 100,000 LGBTQ+ people currently serve in the U.S. armed forces, about 6% of the force, alongside roughly 1.5 million LGBTQ+ veterans. That number only exists in the open because “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed in 2011 — before that, more than 100,000 service members had been discharged since World War II for who they were.

The Sports Player. Jason Collins became the first openly gay active player in a major U.S. men’s pro league in 2013 (NBA). Michael Sam became the first openly gay NFL draft pick in 2014. Robbie Rogers did the same for pro soccer in 2013. Carl Nassib became the first openly gay active NFL player in 2021. Women’s sports tell a different story: Megan Rapinoe and Billie Jean King are among the most famous openly gay athletes on the planet, out for years at the top of their sport. Worth naming honestly: men’s pro leagues remain the most closeted major workplace in America — those “firsts” mean that for decades before each one, the honest answer was zero.

The real picture

The cashier who rang you up at Home Depot this morning. The teacher’s aide in your kid’s classroom. The postal worker who dropped off your package. The driver who delivered your groceries. The flight attendant — or the pilot — on your last trip. The person next to you on the bus. The lawyer handling your divorce. We’re not the exception in your day. We’re woven through all of it.

Fact is, gays work more than straight people do: 65% of LGBT adults reported working in the past week, compared to 57% of non-LGBT adults

The fantasy that gay people can be pulled out of American life — like people of color can be pulled out, like immigrants can be pulled out, like women can be pulled out— is insane. It is, in fact, the unraveling of a cloth (perhaps a flag?), that leaves the whole fabric in tatters.

You don’t want to do that.

So stop doing that.

Just the Facts

Title:

Lest We Forget

Subject:

Male black swans couple pairing for life and raising cygnets together are a positive part of the species.

Cited Documentation:

Roughly 80 percent of gay swan couples successfully fledge their young, compared with 30 percent for straight couples. Up to a third of Black Swans are estimated to be homosexual, and nearly a quarter of all Black Swan pairings are same-sex couples, almost always two males. These cob pairs hold territory, build nests, and raise cygnets — often by driving off a female after mating or taking over a nest outright, then co-parenting the clutch. The higher success rate is attributed to two males sharing incubation duties more evenly and together defending better territory than either could alone. The behavior is stable and recurring, not an aberration but an example of divine design in the positive impact of gay pairing on a species’ reproductive success.

Design features:

Gilded frames are employed to isolate moments in the composition, to provide emphasis. The principle of variety is featured with an asymmetrical balance and the use of elaboration in the layering of imagery to create visual interest. Scale, value and strong color palettes are employed to further increase visual interest.

Lest We Forget | The Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

— Behan

Sources: L.W. Braithwaite, “Ecological Studies of the Black Swan III,” Australian Wildlife Research 8 (1981): 135–46; Raoul Mulder et al., University of Melbourne.

Looky Here

Sometimes accidents happen.

One More for the Road

Keep working. It’s about the work.

Mod Mood

Mood / Doom

Spell mood backwards and you get doom. Same letters, opposite weather. Most days, that’s the whole difference between the two — not what’s in front of you, but where you’re standing when you look at it.

These four collages are proof of that. Same restless bodies, same UFOs, same moons, but the light lands differently in each one. A pool party can read as freedom or as something being watched. A man riding a pterodactyl under his own ship can read as flight or as falling, depending on where your eye lands first. A tornado behind two men holding each other can read as danger or as the only shelter available. A gold mirror doubling three bodies can read as vanity or as the simple relief of finally being seen.

Perspective decides which one you get. And which one you get says more about you than it does about the picture.

— Behan

A Place to Call Home

A Place to Call Home

I think about who buys this house after me. For years the picture defaulted to what I was taught to picture: a wife and husband, 2.5 kiddos. This morning the picture changed. Why not a queer family? Why not two dads, or two moms, or a transgender couple building something in the same rooms that I’ve built in?

This triptych imagines three versions of that family, each on the ends holding an ultrasound, a transgender couple in the center experiencing the joys of pregnancy, all under the same Jupiter 3 protecting the scene, and the same Aquarian Moon that bodes well for everyone in the home.

Sadly, the math still runs against these potential home owners. Urban Institute research puts the LGBTQ+ homeownership rate at 51 percent, against 71 percent for straight, cisgender people — a twenty-point gap that survives even after adjusting for age, income, and marriage. Legal marriage has been slow to deliver the same financial lift for queer couples that straight couples enjoy.

The house, the yard, the ultrasound in the front lawn: still a lift. Still a dream for many queer families. Let’s change that.

So call this a small piece of manifesting. Not a policy fix, not a study. Just me, loving this house on purpose — fixing what breaks, updating what’s tired, filling it with good vibes — the kind of special care only a gay man can bring to a house, and I’m bringing mine now so it will be there for when that queer family walks up the zigzag sidewalk.

— Behan

“A Place to Call Home” | Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage Triptych | 2026

Real Unreal

Real and Animated

No one knows what’s real anymore. Not online, not in a photo, not in a profile that might be a person or might be a prompt. These three collages push that uncertainty as far as it goes — real men and drawn men together in the same frame, the same light, the same Jupiter 3 and Blue moon overhead, with no tell for which is which at a glance. The real and the unreal. The true and the not true. That confusion isn’t a glitch in these pieces. It’s the subject.

— Behan

Creating Content

From Wink to Eyebrow Rise

The source clip is ordinary enough: a content creator, in a car, suggesting a romantic meetup with someone he’s been talking to. On camera, it plays as a wink — coy, deniable, made to be read however the viewer needs to read it.

This collage takes that wink and raises it. Literally. The eyebrow rise replaces the wink as the gesture, and everything shifts with it. A wink performs interest while keeping an exit open. An eyebrow rise doesn’t offer one — it’s closer to an actual reaction than a performance of one, something happening rather than something staged.

That’s the ongoing work here: taking the subtext already sitting inside films and social media and moving it, plainly, into context.

— Behan

Happy Hills?

Dystopia Suburbia | Gay Domestic | The Subdivision |

Digital Photocollage | 2026

From the 1930s to the 1960s, federal housing officials insured home mortgages only in white neighborhoods, and pushed banks to lend only to white married men with white children.

From the beginning, suburbia was its own type of dystopia, engineered as a white heteronormative paradise, a manufactured Eden, double plastic wrapped, excluding anyone who did not align with that precise paradigm.

— Behan

The New Hadrians

The New Hadrians

Jordan Firstman, Omar Apollo, Zane Phillips, Jeremy Pope

The Subdivision | Merged Diptych | 2026

These are the New Hadrians.

Four men — Jordan Firstman, Omar Apollo, Zane Phillips, Jeremy Pope — stand where an emperor once stood, claiming what Hadrian claimed: love between men is not a secret to keep but a fact to declare. They live free, love free, marry free. No closet holds them.

Behind them, marching men still cross the frame in formation, disciplined and unmoved. The same forces that built closets are organizing again — rolling back the medications that keep gay men alive, working against gay marriage, trying to fit the door back onto the room these men just walked out of. They believe themselvesyy ascending. Two black swans stand for what nature already settled.

At the center of this new universe sits Walt Whitman. He was an aesthetic Hadrian of his time — bravery worthy of an emperor. He wrote what he could not say outright, and left the rest for men like these to say without disguise.

“A youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand.”

That’s the whole ask, then and now — someone to hold your hand in the open, in the light.

— Behan

Footer: Walt Whitman, “A Glimpse,” Leaves of Grass (Calamus).

The Bathhouse

The closet was not built to withstand history.

For over twenty-four hundred years, public bathhouses have been a place for male intimacy — an unbroken line from the Greco-Roman world to a bathhouse in Dallas today. Different centuries, different cities, different men. The same walls, in a sense, serving the same purpose.

The one real interruption came in the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis closed bathhouses across the country almost overnight. Even that pause couldn’t hold. The line picked back up, because it was never really about the buildings.

This diptych sets the two ends of that line side by side — the same figures, the same closeness, a few thousand years apart.

— Behan

Jack and Peter

What Happens in Act II

Jack Straw and Peter Ochello have last names. Skipper does not.

That small asymmetry is where this piece starts. Of the three men Cat on a Hot Tin Roof marks as gay or gay-leaning, two are already dead when the play opens and the third exists only as a story other characters tell about him, in a room he isn’t in. Straw and Ochello get a shared bed, a shared history, decades on the land. What they don’t get is a scene. Williams gives them the fact of a life together and withholds the sight of it.

This triptych of diptychs stages the scene the play never wrote. Scene One, an ordinary day in the 1930s, in the bedroom that will later belong to Maggie and Brick. Same bed. Same house, modeled on Robert Louis Stevenson’s home in Samoa, itself the source for the play’s Victorian setting. Jupiter 3 hovers overhead, visible only to whoever is looking at the image — not a prop the men could see, but a witness standing in for the audience, the way Straw and Ochello themselves have always stood in for something the play refuses to look at directly.

Each pair of men is a different casting choice, a different answer to the same audition: who plays Jack, who plays Peter, what does this ordinary day look like across three attempts at the same two people. Each diptych runs the same idea twice — once with the ambiguity intact, once with it removed. Left panel, suggestion. Right panel, the thing suggested. That’s the entire method here: subtext moved into context, nothing invented that the play didn’t already imply.

If Williams had opened his play this way — a quiet, unremarkable morning between two men who loved each other without incident — Act Two would have landed differently. Brick’s collapse, Maggie’s hunger, Big Daddy’s fury at his own son’s silence: all of it would have played against a real image of what intimacy between men could look like, instead of against nothing. The contrast was always there in the writing. It just never got staged.

Given a production, Straw and Ochello wouldn’t leave the room. They’d stay through Act Two, silent, watching Brick fail to become what they already were.

The bed is the same bed. Someone was happy in it first.

— Behan

Brick + Skip 4Ever

What if Tennessee Williams had written a different play?

Skipper isn’t dead. He turns up, and Brick doesn’t have to carry a grief he can’t name — he just gets to have him back. In front of the whole house, they say it to each other. That’s the story. No one flinches.

MGM buys it, and the town runs a screen test that becomes the talk of Hollywood — not for Brick this time, but for Skipper. Every actor wants the part. Dozens of them pass through the same green bedroom, under the same moon, hoping to be the one who walks back in and gets loved in front of everyone.

The picture sweeps the awards that year. Best picture, best director, every acting category.

It could have happened. The tragedy is that it didn’t.

— Behan

As We Are

This triptych’s got moon phases running across all three panels — different colors, different symbolism, but the same idea underneath: these men are just there. Not hiding, not performing, not making a statement. Present.

That’s the whole job some days. Not a parade, not a manifesto. Just showing up in your own skin, in a car, on a couch, in a bedroom, under whatever moon happens to be watching. Comfortable as we can manage. Visible as we can stand.

The rest takes care of itself.

— Behan