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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Same Suppression, Updated for 2026

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

1. Legislation that names its target as contagion

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

2. Conversion therapy and information suppression — the modern quarantine

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

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

3. Healthcare suppression

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

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

4. Moving to rescind an already-established right

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

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

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

Appendix: A Documented Record, Not a Rumor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

• “1986 California Proposition 64.” Wikipedia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• “Policy Tracker: Youth Access to Gender Affirming Care and State Policy Restrictions.” KFF, May 2026.

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

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

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

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

• “LGBT Tech Joins Amicus Briefs Challenging State Social Media Age Verification Laws.” LGBT Tech, June 2026.

• “Florida’s Proposed Cuts to AIDS Drug Program Threaten Patient Care and Public Health.” Clinical Advisor / The Conversation, February 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• “Political Scandals.” Encyclopedia.com.

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

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

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

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

Whose Content Survives: AI Moderation and Who Gets Silenced

The baseline that received more lenient treatment in every case was standard English, male-coded, white, and conventionally gendered. We all know who that is, even if AI will not admit it.

When people post on social media, most assume their content will be treated the same as anyone else’s — that the same words, images, and topics get the same treatment regardless of who posted them. The documented record shows that assumption is false. AI content moderation systems flag, remove, demonetize, and shadowban content from people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ users at higher rates than comparable content from other users, for reasons tied to who they are rather than what they posted.

People of Color

AI hate-speech detectors misread African American English (AAE) as hostile. A 2019 University of Washington study tested several detection tools, including Google’s Perspective, against 5.4 million tweets where the authors’ race was known. The tools were one-and-a-half to twice as likely to flag posts by users who identified as African American as toxic. [1] The cause was traced to the training data itself: human annotators had disproportionately labeled AAE tweets as offensive, and that bias carried into the algorithms trained on their labels. [1]

Later research confirms this wasn’t a one-off. A Carnegie Mellon study found a high correlation between annotators’ perceptions of toxicity and markers of AAE, causing AAE text to be mislabeled as abusive at a high false-positive rate. [2] A more recent benchmark of a widely used toxicity model found it scored AAE text as 1.8 times more toxic on average, and 8.8 times higher specifically for “identity hate.” [3] The practical result is content removal, shadowbanning, and demonetization of Black creators for ordinary language.

Women

AI moderation systems over-flag women’s bodies and women’s health content. Advocacy groups report that educational posts about breastfeeding, menopause, fertility, or sexual assault are removed or restricted, while comparable posts using male anatomical terms remain visible. [4] Clinical terms like “vagina,” “breast,” “menstruation,” or “cervix” are frequently misread as sexual content rather than health information. [4]

The clearest documented case is Instagram’s repeated removal of a photo of Nyome Nicholas-Williams, a plus-sized Black woman, covering her breasts with her arms — while comparable images of thin white women stayed up. The case became a public campaign (#IWantToSeeNyome), and researchers who studied it concluded the pattern reflected what they called a “pervasive platform policing of the female body,” with platform guidelines effectively inviting users to flag other women’s bodies as violations. [5]

LGBTQ+ Users

GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Index has repeatedly found platforms under-enforcing against anti-LGBTQ hate speech while over-enforcing against ordinary LGBTQ content — removing, demonetizing, and shadowbanning it without meaningful transparency. [6] YouTube creators have reported videos demonetized simply for containing “gay” or “lesbian” in the title. [7] Instagram has been found to police transgender-body content more aggressively than comparable cisgender content. [8] The Electronic Frontier Foundation and GLAAD have documented AI moderation systems flagging LGBTQ+ content as sexually explicit when no explicit material was present at all. [9] A 2024 USC study found posts using non-binary or gender-nonconforming language were flagged as “toxic” significantly more often than comparable posts using conventional gendered language, even when the content was harmless. [10]

Who Isn’t Being Flagged

If certain groups are over-moderated, the comparison built into these same studies shows who isn’t. Each study above measured the flagged group against a baseline that was treated more leniently by the same system, using the same criteria:

• Standard American English was the baseline against which AAE was found 1.5 to 8.8 times more likely to be flagged. [1] [3]

• Male-coded anatomical language was the baseline against which women’s health terms were found more likely to be flagged as sexual content. [4]

• Images of thin white women were the baseline against which the photo of a plus-sized Black woman was repeatedly removed. [5]

• Conventional gendered language was the baseline against which non-binary language was found more likely to be flagged as toxic. [10]

References

1. Futurism / Forbes, reporting on University of Washington study by Maarten Sap et al., “Google’s hate speech-detecting AI is biased against black people,” 2019.

2. Xia, Field, and Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University), “Demoting Racial Bias in Hate Speech Detection.”

3. “How AI Fails: An Interactive Pedagogical Tool for Demonstrating Dialectal Bias in Automated Toxicity Models,” arXiv, 2026.

4. Healthline, “The Shadow Banning of Women’s Health Content.”

5. Frontiers in Communication, “Algorithmic agency and ‘fighting back’ against discriminatory Instagram content moderation: #IWantToSeeNyome,” 2024.

6. GLAAD, “Fourth Annual Social Media Safety Index.”

7. ArXiv, “Examining Multimodal Gender and Content Bias in ChatGPT-4o.”

8. Tech Policy Press, “The Censorship of LGBTQ+ Content Online Corresponds with Declines in Freedom for Everyone.”

9. UCLA eScholarship, “Algorithmic Bias in LGBTQ+ Content Moderation.”

10. USC Viterbi School of Engineering, “Flagged for Being Queer,” 2024.

Gays on the Titanic!

April 12, 1912 is a wonderful first full day at sea for the Titanic, following her stop in Queenstown, Ireland the day before. The weather is calm and clear, and Titanic moves along at a good speed, settling comfortably into the rhythm of the voyage.

Passengers explore the ship’s many amenities, enjoy good meals, and socialize with fellow travelers. First-class passengers make use of the gymnasium and the reading and writing rooms, while second and third-class passengers enjoy their own lively, dedicated spaces.

That same evening intrepid gay time travelers Biff, Gil, and Chuck drop in, and the Titanic does not disappoint for a night of frivolity and fun.

Biff makes out with a dashing young officer near the grand staircase, Gil finds himself under the tablecloth between two wealthy gentlemen in first class, who insist on buying round after round while Gil works wonders below. Chuck, ever the social butterfly, made fast friends with a group of cheerful stokers fresh off their shift, and the group end up hooking up in one of the lounges.

Handsome men turn up everywhere that night — rich and poor, crew and passenger alike — and romantic liaisons abound as Biff, Gil, and Chuck make the most of every knowing glance.

The evening wound down with a riotous, no-holds-barred bacchanal in the Turkish bath, where men from first, second, and third class alike — married and single — mingle freely long into the night.

It is, by all accounts, a delightful evening of newfound pleasures Biff, Gil, and Chuck are happy to provide.

Go Gays!

JUMPED

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Happy Happy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beefcake and the Collar

Two Symbols of the Male Figure Juxtaposed

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

The Icons

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

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

The Conflict

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

The Convergence

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

The Accents

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

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

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

Billy Joe and Bobby Lee

Oh Billy Joe

Ode to Billy Joe at 50: Three Scenes snd a Collage for the History Books

When Bobbie Gentry’s song “Ode to Billie Joe” hit the radio in 1967, it created a genuine cultural phenomenon built entirely around one unanswered question: why did Billy Joe McAllister jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge? Gentry never explained it, in the song or in interviews, and the not-knowing is what made the song famous. People wanted the answer for a decade.

By the time Warner Bros. made the film version in 1976, they had a decision to make: give the audience an answer. The screenwriter, Herman Raucher, later said the choice he landed on — that Billy Joe’s death followed a sexual encounter with another man — was picked mainly because it was novel, not because anyone involved was trying to make a statement about homosexuality. It was a plot device, pure and simple.

That’s what makes what actually ends up on screen so strange, and so worth revisiting fifty years later. Whether they meant to or not, the filmmakers put something on screen that mainstream American film had essentially never shown before: a young man in the specific moment of realizing he’s gay. Not through attraction to another man. Through the absence of attraction to a woman.

The Scene

At the town jamboree, a makeshift brothel is set up in a building behind the main event. Billy Joe, drunk, is escorted through it. The film shows this in a series of distinct vignettes: a young man with a woman, a middle-aged man with a woman, an older man — the town sheriff — with a woman. All of them are enjoying themselves. Billy Joe is walked past it, toward a stall of his own, where he finds a woman waiting for him.

His face, in this scene, is the whole point. Robby Benson plays it with almost no dialogue, and what’s on his face is shock.

Up to this point in the film, Billy Joe has romanticized the idea of being with a woman, and so has Bobbie Lee, the girl he loves. They’re both young, and they’ve both imagined this the way young people do. So when Billy Joe is confronted, in plain and repeated terms, with actual heterosexual sex happening around him, and finds that it does nothing for him, the shock is real. He expected to want it, the way he’d imagined wanting it with Bobbie Lee, and instead he feels nothing. The gap between what he expected to feel and what he actually feels, in that moment, is the recognition — the recognition that he wants to be with men the way others want to be with a woman. He recognizes that he is gay.

The Unseen Scene

The second most important scene in this film is a scene that was never shot, and it happens immediately after the one above — no time passes on screen between Billy Joe’s recognition in the brothel and what follows from it. The story doesn’t pause, doesn’t cut away to anything else. It moves straight from the moment he understands himself into the moment he acts on it.

What happens between Billy Joe and Dewey Barksdale that night is never shown. We only get it secondhand, afterward, in what characters say about it. And I think it’s the smartest decision anyone involved in this film made, whether they understood what they were doing or not.

Here’s what we can piece together from what is said. Within what seems like minutes of walking through that brothel, Billy Joe is with a man. It suggests something people now have a casual name for — gaydar— the ability to recognize another gay man almost immediately, without either party saying anything explicit. Barksdale, for his part, sounds almost thrown by it. In the dialogue that survives in the film, he tells Bobbie Lee he doesn’t know that it will happen again, which reads less like a plan and more like a man startled by how quickly it happened. And in a line that was written but cut from the final film, Billy Joe says it outright: he liked him. He wanted to be with him, and he’d be with him again.

When a person finally understands what they don’t want, they understand, in the same instant, what they do want. And once someone knows what they want, they usually go after it. Nothing about that is troubling or unusual — it’s normal, and it’s the same thing anyone does the moment real clarity arrives after a long stretch of confusion. Billy Joe had been ready for romance the entire film. He and Bobbie Lee had both been imagining it. What he hadn’t had, until that night, was an accurate understanding of what he was actually ready for. The brothel scene gave him that understanding. And once he had it, he didn’t just recognize it — he was finally able to have it. Who happened to be there when that recognition arrived is at best incidental. The fact is, he was there.

As if two scenes weren’t enough

There’s a third, and it follows the second just as directly as the second followed the first. Nothing sits between this scene and the encounter with Barksdale — no other plotline, no time skip that isn’t accounted for. One recognition leads straight into one act, and that act leads straight into this: Billy Joe disappears after the jamboree, hiding out for days in the wilderness, sustaining himself on wild mushrooms and onions.

Bobbie Lee finds him in that wilderness. And what happens between them there is, for a boy in 1950s Mississippi, close to a miracle in its own right: he tells her the truth.

She responds the way people in that time and place would have been trained to respond. She offers him a way out of it — he was drunk, it was an accident, he didn’t fully know what he was doing. It’s a generous thing to offer, and she means it kindly. He refuses it. He tells her he knew exactly what he was doing, and that he wanted it. He won’t take the exit she’s offering him, even though it would be so much easier for both of them if he did.

Then she goes further. She tells him they can still have this — still have a life together, still have what they’d both been imagining before that night at the jamboree. He pulls his hand away and tells her no. He doesn’t want it.

He turns Bobby Lee down because he understands that it wouldn’t be fair to either of them. She deserves the chance at real love, the same as he does. Taking what she’s offering would cost her that chance, and it would cost him the truth he’d just found.

What he couldn’t survive

So Billy Joe learned who he was. And based on the cut dialogue — the lines that didn’t survive into the final film — he liked who he was. He says so plainly: he liked the man, he wanted to be with him. That’s not shame. That’s clarity, arrived at and accepted, at least in that moment, in that room.

What follows in the film isn’t Billy Joe failing to understand himself. It’s Billy Joe understanding himself completely and then being told, by everything around him, that what he now knows is unacceptable. When he finally speaks about it to Bobbie Lee, in the woods, he doesn’t describe a person he loved or a feeling he trusted. He describes a sin against nature, a sin against God. That language isn’t his own discovery. It’s the culture’s verdict, handed to him fully formed, and he applies it to himself the moment he tries to say the truth out loud a second time.

But I don’t think shame is the whole story, and I don’t think it’s fair to the character to leave it there. Look at where and when this film is set. In 1950s Mississippi, it wasn’t only that Billy Joe would have been condemned for being gay. It’s that there was no visible path in front of him toward an actual life — a partner, a home, a future built on honest terms. That possibility simply didn’t exist yet, not in any form he could have seen or reached for. So alongside the shame, there’s a second thing working on him: despair, of a different and in some ways heavier kind. Not the fear of being punished for who he was, but the sense that even without punishment, there was nowhere for him to go.

That combination — inherited shame, a genuinely closed future, and the sheer size of the time he thought he’d have to spend alone in it — is what he couldn’t survive. He knew who he was. He liked who he was. He simply could not hold onto that, against the weight of what he’d been taught to believe about it, and against a future that offered him nothing to hold onto instead.

The Collage

This digital photo collage is built entirely from the one scene where Dewey Barksdale and Billy Joe McAllister actually share space on screen — a small exchange, but a significant one, since it’s here that their relationship is first established. The collage is kept stark: just the film stills themselves, with minimal accents, arranged in strict alternation down a vertical strip, their sense of light (color and value) heightened for dramatic effect. That repetition mirrors the structure of the scene itself, a question posed and an answer given, so the collage reads less like a set of screenshots and more like a compressed record of the exchange, focused just on the mechanics of the scene. Dewey and Billy Joe never appear in the same frame together, but the back-and-forth rhythm of the panels stands in for that shared moment, keeping the focus on the two men and the small, early exchange between them. It imagines what that unfilmed scene might have looked like.

The Film

Is it a good film? My take, no.

As a whole, Ode to Billy Joe leans on a cliché that has done real damage: the troubled gay teenager who can’t handle what he’s feeling and ends with his demise. That’s a straight person’s idea of what being gay means — that it’s a kind of sickness, an instability, something a person might not survive finding out about themselves. The film never questions that premise. It just uses it, as the answer to a decade-old pop song mystery, and moves on.

That’s the larger arc of this film, and it’s a thin one — a country ballad stretched into a plot, built mostly as a novelty. But inside that thin arc is a much smaller one, made of three scenes, that has nothing shallow about it at all. A boy realizes, watching heterosexual sex play out in front of him, that it isn’t for him. What happens next isn’t shown at all, and is stronger for it. And when the girl he previously pursued offers him a way to avoid the truth, offering to build a life with him anyway, he turns her down, on the grounds that they both deserve better. These three scenes aren’t scattered across the film — they run one immediately into the next, an unbroken sequence with nothing else allowed to interrupt it: a young man comes to understand who he truly is, acts on that understanding, and is briefly, genuinely happier for it, before the world closes back in around him.

I don’t know a better word for that than miracle. Filmmakers who, by their own account, were reaching for nothing more than a novelty twist somehow produced a continuous, unbroken account of a person coming into the truth of who they are — clear-eyed, unashamed for as long as it lasts, filmed and with more precision than the rest of the movie earns. That this startling clarity happened here, made by people who don’t seem to have known what they were doing, is close to inexplicable, arriving from people with no apparent reason to produce it.

That’s a miracle.

Taken together, those three scenes are about as clear and unsentimental an account of gay self-recognition as American film had produced up to that point, and maybe for a while after.

Final Thoughts

Ode to Billy Joe is a film worth watching for what happens inside it, almost by accident, in those three scenes — and that alone earns it a place in the history of how gay lives have been shown, or failed to be shown, on American screens.

And, btw, Robby Benson is hot. That’s another reason to watch it.

That’s not a metaphor for anything. It’s the actual, ordinary content of a gay man’s attention, and it’s exactly what the culture around Billy Joe refused to let him have in peace. Saying Robby Benson is hot is a small, honest example of the same thing this whole piece has been about — attraction that doesn’t ask permission and doesn’t need explaining, because it was never a choice to begin with.

On Nike, the Field, and Gay Athletes

A Queer Timeline of US Athletics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Collages

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

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

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

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

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

From Inside

Artist Timeline

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

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

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

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

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

The Collages

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

Following a sabbatical in 2016, digital photo collage began as an informal practice on a newly purchased iPhone, often worked out while hanging out in gay establishments around Dallas — a way to practice art making and pass time creatively. Over the next several years it grew more frequent, and in 2023 became the primary medium.

This is work in the folk tradition: self-taught, outside any formal training, made principally on the iPhone and supplemented by various apps and the wider internet. That lineage matters.

Artists like David Wojnarowicz worked in photo collage and mixed media through the 1980s and into the ’90s, often without formal training or institutional recognition of their own, insisting on gay presence in a culture that refused to recognize it — underscoring the essential reality that gay people exist, and have a right to exist.

My own work is now an homage to their visual successes, and a continuation of that same understanding: the validity of gay presence in the world. Through this new purpose, this new medium, and this new work, a new subject has emerged: the swan made human.

Black swans mate for life. And within the species, that lifelong bond is often between two males — two black swans committing to each other, raising a family, and doing so with a strength and capability that rivals, if not exceeds, that of a male-female pair. A black swan, or a pair of black swans, appears within these collages for exactly this reason — a reminder that just as this species includes gay pairs among its own, so does the human species, and that presence is an essential, positive force within culture when it is allowed to simply exist.

Documenting the positive force that gay culture provides for the larger society is the force being my studio practice. And we are beginning to see what that looks like at scale: stable relationships, families raised well, people who are honest and open about who they love, contributing fully and openly to the world around them. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s already visible wherever it’s been allowed room to exist — in nature, and increasingly, in us.

The swan made human. Not a metaphor stretched to fit an argument, but an observation about what nature already does, plainly and without controversy, when left alone to do it — and a claim that the world is better, not worse, for making room for it.

The Naked Gunner

The Naked Gunner

Actually, in one of nine universes, he was The Naked Gay Gunner.

Why does this matter? Why would we pause to wonder aloud what cannot be answered or make a collage that imagines rather than confirms?

What we do know is that he was a young man, courageous, a man who did not abandon his post. He’s remembered as a hero — an anonymous stand-in for the very best of the American soldier.

Based on population statistics, there was a one in nine possibility that he was gay. That’s a fact.

And this is a real photograph. I’ve embellished it with collage elements to make one point: gay men can be brave, the same as straight men.

We live in a country that still questions the manliness of gay men, their fitness for military service, to the point of testosterone testing.

The hero in this frame could be straight.

Could be.

We know he was brave. And maybe gay.

Neo Neo

Same Sets, Different Story

Seven digital collages

In 1977, Dario Argento built a dance academy out of stained glass, geometric color fields, and walls in impossible red, yellow, and blue — the same year painters were staging their own revolt against Minimalism’s cool detachment, bringing back the figure, the myth, the raw feeling, in colors just as vivid. Suspiria‘s sets belong to that same reaction. Whether or not Argento’s crew ever named it, the instinct is Neo-Expressionist: maximalism as an answer to restraint, the body and the color turned up loud.

This series treats those sets as exactly that — a Neo-Expressionist stage, built for one story and left standing for another. The crew wraps, the coven’s story is told, and a different film moves into the same rooms before the lights come down. Same corridors, same saturated color, maybe a familiar face passing through frame — but this time the story is gay characters, gay storylines, a film Argento never made living inside the one he did. Seven scenes from that unmade movie, staged on a set too vivid, and too Neo-Expressionist, to strike after just one film.

Stay in Your Lane

Fun studio time baking a variety of works based on my morning scroll. Idea: gay men exist. Gay men have a right pursue happiness without any comments from a peanut gallery.

J'accuse

There’s a well-known image of Ronald Reagan as a young man: a lifeguard at Lowell Park on the Rock River in Dixon, Illinois, credited with pulling dozens of people out of the water over his summers there. He liked to tell that story for the rest of his life. It fit the persona he’d go on to build in Hollywood — the soldier, the hero, the steady man who shows up when someone is drowning. His film career ran on that image for years: the uniform, the square jaw, the man other men could count on.

And then his moment actually came, and he wasn’t there.

This is a post about betrayal.

By the time Reagan reached the presidency, a real emergency had already started, and it kept growing through his two terms in office. He didn’t publicly say the word “AIDS” until September 1985, four years into the epidemic. In July of that same year, his old friend from Hollywood, Rock Hudson, collapsed in Paris while trying to access an experimental treatment unavailable in the United States. Hudson’s people sent a telegram to the White House, asking for help cutting through the red tape to get him into a hospital that had turned him away. The answer came back: no. Hudson died three months later. The lifeguard didn’t go in the water for his own friend.

That refusal is small in one sense — a single phone call not made — and enormous in another, because it’s a perfect miniature of everything the administration didn’t do for everyone else. Thousands of men died in the years before Reagan ever said the word publicly. Tens of thousands more died in the years after, while funding lagged and research moved slowly and the disease was still spoken of, when it was spoken of at all, as something happening to other people. The undesirables. God’s rejects.

Running paradoxically with all of it was a culture obsessed with a very different picture of the male body. The garish, inflated, oiled, steroid-built men of eighties action movies and cartoons — Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Lundgren, Van Damme, Tarzan’s and He-Man’s and every animated variant of him — heteronormative on the surface and soaked in homoerotic subtext underneath. Audiences ogled these scantily clad men flexing and grappling and saving each other for two hours at a time, night after night, without ever having to admit what they were looking at. It was permitted, even celebrated, as long as it stayed fictional. The real men dying in hospital wards a few miles away got no such permission, and precious little help.

There were no American heroes in the 1980s. There were no valiant warriors coming in to save the day. There were only play-actors and cartoon villains and cartoon wannabe heroes, flexing on a screen while the real dying happened off it. And at the very top of that heteronormative nightmare food chain stood a man who used to be a lifeguard — who once ran into the water again and again to pull the drowning out by hand — now standing at the shore with his back turned to it, watching the tide come in with bodies in tow, calling it someone else’s trouble.

J'accuse.

Betrayal.

The Breakfast Nook

Les Valeurs Personnelles et la Table à Manger (Personal Values and the Dining Table)

There’s a quiet contest that’s been playing out in American homes since the 1950s: the TV tray versus the dining room table.

The TV tray stand introduced something new. Before it, eating with the family meant sitting together at a shared table. The TV tray offered another option: the same room, the same show on the same screen, each person on their own small surface instead of one shared one. It continued with cable, VHS, and now streaming, all giving people more reasons to eat wherever the screen is — tray or lap or coffee table. As part of the dynamic of a living culture, the last forty years have seen a remarkable change, with the table no longer being the only place dinner happens.

Keeping the Nook

My 1962 ranch rambler on the sunny southern side of Dallas, Texas, is a lot like houses from that era. It came with two distinct eating spaces: a formal dining room up front, and a breakfast nook off the kitchen.

There’s a real renovation trend right now of absorbing the breakfast nook into the kitchen itself — knocking it out for more cabinetry, a baking zone, even a small island. I thought about doing exactly that. But I’ve committed to keeping this nook as a nook, original to the mid-century design of the house, rather than turning it into an extension of the kitchen.

What I let go of instead was the formal dining room. Between two separate dining spaces, I didn’t need both, so the formal dining room became a casual lounge, and the breakfast nook stayed the breakfast nook. To me, that’s the room with the real job to do — the small, human-scaled space that’s perfect for a cozy cup of coffee in the morning, the kind of table that shows up as a central gathering point in classic sitcoms, whether it’s the kitchen table on The Golden Girls or the breakfast nook on Leave It to Beaver. Real estate opinions on breakfast nooks are pretty mixed — some buyers love the coziness and built-in storage, others would rather have the open counter space or an island — but for me, the nook won.

The Cabinet That Changes With the Seasons

The feature that makes this room work for me is the built-in china cabinet, original to the house. Instead of settling on one look, I treat it as a rotating display and swap between two dinnerware collections about every six months.

With fall coming, I have placed the Tienshan Prelude on display — an all-white, untrimmed porcelain pattern with a clean, pared-back look that leans into the stripped-down side of mid-century modernism.

My Brookpark melamine collection, designed by Joan Luntz for the International Molding Company starting around 1950, is now in the kitchen cabinets for daily use. Luntz was one of the few women designing for the plastics industry at the time, and her Brookpark line stood out for its confident use of square forms when almost everything else on the market was round or oval. Her work went on to earn real design recognition, including from the Museum of Modern Art, and it’s now considered a meaningful chapter in the history of American melamine dinnerware.

Twice a year, the two collections trade places — one moves into the glass-front display cabinet, the other into everyday storage — along with a rotation of the artwork on either side of the cabinet and a smaller decorative dishware display I keep above the refrigerator.

Why Collect the Whole Line

For some, the question might be: why does a single gay man need two complete dishware collections? Well, any well-equipped home has both casual and formal dining options, so it’s really a matter of the nature of the home itself. Also, you never know who’s going to show up, and it’s always good to be prepared.

But finally, and this is what matters most to me as an artist, it’s about seeing the complete vision of the designer — how they addressed the salt and pepper shaker, how they handled the salad plate versus the soup bowl versus the cereal bowl versus the dinner plate. Seeing the full expression of a design helps you understand not just the designer, but the era they worked in.

That’s the appeal for me — not owning a few nice pieces from each pattern, but assembling the whole line as completely as I can: the teapot, the sugar and creamer, the bowls, the mugs, the salt and pepper shakers, whatever that pattern originally offered. It’s about honoring the full design intention behind each collection, not just a curated fragment of it.

My hope is that someday each one lands with someone who wants a complete set of their own — one more way of keeping this design history in circulation instead of letting it sit in storage.

Setting the Tableau

Beyond the cabinet, the room itself is deliberately staged. The seating is an Eames chair paired with a white garden stool, pulled up to an IKEA tulip table — all white, all clean lines. Wicker shows up twice, in quiet conversation with itself: the woven pendant light overhead, and a woven basket to the right of the table. On the left, living plants are the one unstyled, organic element in the room — proof of life against all that white and wicker. And at the center of the table sits a modern, almost sculptural take on the traditional fruit bowl, standing in for the bowl of fruit you’d expect on a breakfast table without actually looking like one.

I can’t set up a room like this without thinking of René Magritte’s 1952 painting Personal Values (Les Valeurs personnelles). It’s a bedroom with the walls papered in blue sky and clouds, where a handful of ordinary objects — a comb, a shaving brush, a wine glass, a bar of soap — are blown wildly out of scale, dwarfing the actual furniture around them. I love that painting — it’s such a wonderful play on scale — but what really draws me to it isn’t the surrealism so much as the staging: a small room where every object has been placed with intention, so the whole thing reads as one scene rather than a collection of furniture.

That’s the instinct I was chasing here. The Eames chair, the garden stool, the tulip table, the wicker pendant and basket, the plants, the fruit bowl — none of it is incidental. Every object in this nook is doing double duty as furniture and as part of a small, deliberate scene. That’s what sets the tone for the room, and honestly, for how I think about the rest of the house.

Poor Buster, Maybe.

Buster Crabbe had it all: Olympic gold-medal swimmer, matinee idol, straight, with a wife and three kids, living the technicolor dream in sunny Hollywood.

But what it had been different? What if Buster had been gay, and, miraculously, it was ok to be gay in 1930’s America? What would life had been like for him?

In this alternate 1930s — this imagined timeline, Hollywood in the golden age didn’t just tolerate a gay leading man. It fell head over heels for one.

A Paradise for an Olympic Champion

If the culture had simply let him be, Buster’s life would’ve been a dream.

• Body Culture — No hiding behind “athlete” as a cover story. He was proud of the body that won him gold, and nobody batted an eye.

• Poolside Parties — His Hollywood Hills house became legendary for pool parties that ran till sunrise, guest list a who’s-who of the era’s brightest names.

• Fashion Freedom — Skin-tight swimwear, open collars, tailored linen suits — he wore what looked good, and the papers loved him for it.

• Public Romance — He walked every premiere red carpet arm in arm with whoever he was seeing, flashbulbs popping like it was the most natural thing in the world.

The Ultimate Eligible Bachelor

Buster wasn’t just accepted — he was the catch of the decade.

• Social King — The most sought-after bachelor in a town built on sought-after bachelors.

• Famous Peer Circle — He ran with the era’s other openly gay icons, no whispers, no code words needed.

• No Fake Marriages — The studio never once floated a sham engagement to “clean up his image,” because there was nothing to clean up.

• Fan Adoration — Millions of fans — of every stripe — idolized him precisely as he was.

Career Boost Instead of Ruin

The thing that could have ended a real career instead built his.

• Tailored Roles — Studios wrote parts for him, not around a secret.

• No Blackmail — The tabloid vultures who thrived on threatening actors had nothing to hold over him.

• Authentic Living — He spent his energy on stunts and scripts instead of managing a double life.

The Movies of a Gay Action Star

His filmography looked different, too — bigger, bolder, a little more romantic.

• Reimagined Sci-Fi — His signature space-serial franchise gave him a male co-lead as his romantic interest, turning ray-gun battles into genuine swoon-worthy adventure.

• The “Beefcake” Hero — Directors leaned into it. Lingering shots of Buster emerging from the surf sold tickets to everybody, no apologies.

• Co-Star Dynamic — Instead of the damsel-in-distress formula, his pictures gave audiences a hero who rescued — and fell for — his equally dashing male co-star.

• Subverting Genre — Even his westerns got the treatment: two ranch hands, one shared horizon, and audiences ate it up.

How the Culture Around Him Shifted

Buster wouldn’t have just lived in this world — he helped shape it.

• Men’s Fashion Revolution — Suddenly every young man in America wanted to dress like him: colorful, close-cut, a little daring.

• Redefining Masculinity — “Man’s man” got a lot bigger as a category. Turns out you could win Olympic gold, punch out movie villains, and be openly gay — who knew.

• Open Nightlife — L.A. and New York sprouted upscale, legal gay clubs and resorts, A-listers included, no back doors required.

• Media Representation — Life and Look ran glossy spreads of Buster and his partner at home, rivaling their friends Cary and Randolph, treated with the same warm, glamorous coverage as any other Hollywood couple.

Of course we know none of this happened, and if Buster had been gay, he would have kept it a secret, and married his wife, had his children, and lived a lie his entire life. Because that was what was only available to men, gay, bi, or straight, in 1930’s America.

Because gay men weren’t free to be gay, straight men weren’t free to be straight either — not really. Everyone performed the one script allowed. It’s just for some it was an easier part to play. But everyone played. That’s the real cost of the closet: not just the lies it forced some men to tell, but the freedom it never let anyone experience.

So for a moment, these collages reimagine a film Buster made, and instead of chasing the girl, he’s chasing the guy. Sure looks happy to me.

64

When I’m Sixty-Four

A new photographic series

There’s a moment, right after a shower, that might be the best moment of the day — clean, warm, hopeful. Then you catch yourself in a full-length mirror. That the two happen back to back, every time, is a cruel irony, and this new series lives in the irony between the two.

These new works are self-portraits, shot on iPhone, taken moments after a shower, day or evening. A towel, most often, will be included. It is straight photography, single frame, no collaging, no compositing, no full moons added to the scene. The editing stays within iPhone tools, and it’s one exception from reality: it leans into heightened, saturated color — a Willy Wonka bright palette used not for performance, but to carry the interior emotion of the moment.

The premise is documenting an aging, queer body as it actually is, in that specific moment — clean and guarded, caught between motion and pose.

The title comes from the obvious place — the Beatles line about being needed, being fed, growing old. There’s an Irish gloom underneath this project — that is countered by my French ancestors’ determination to remain as beautiful as possible. I’m working with a trainer. I’m paying attention to my skin. I’m thinking about facelifts I can’t afford. None of this is separate from the project.

It is the project.

Enter Laughing

The New Gay Panic: Straight Men Are Jealous

There’s a bit going around in stand-up right now — straight male comedians riffing on gay men having better sex, better friendships, better closets, better everything. It plays as flattery. It gets laughs from straight audiences who’d never sit through an actual “gay panic” bit, but will happily laugh at “gay men are just living better than us.”

Jeff Dye is a useful case study. He’s built a recurring bit around the “I could be gay” premise — it’s even the title track of one of his stand-up albums, and he’s got a companion bit called “I’d Make a Great Gay Man.” It’s faux envy in its purest form: not hostility, just a comedian wishing out loud that he had it as good as gay men supposedly do. What makes it worth naming is where that material travels. Dye is also a recurring guest on The Greg Gutfeld Show, a Fox News comedy program built for a conservative audience — the same circles where an “I could be gay” bit lands as harmless self-deprecation, but where actual gay rights, marriage, or visibility are frequently treated as up for debate. The envy bit is portable in exactly the rooms where a slur wouldn’t be. That’s the safer packaging doing its job.

It’s a clever end run. Ten years ago the joke was built on disgust or fear. Now it’s built on envy — which lets a straight comedian talk about gay men, gay sex, gay culture at length, without ever having to examine why he’s so fixated on it. Envy reads as generous. Disgust reads as bigoted. Both are obsessive. Same subject matter, safer packaging. Same obsession.

Here’s the part the bit skips: actual research shows gay men report more specific, comfortable sexual communication, and it predicts their satisfaction more strongly than it does for straight men. That’s not “gay men have better sex.” That’s “men who talk about sex have better sex” — and this bears repeating: men who talk about sex, who engage in discussion and conversation about sex, report higher levels of satisfaction regarding sex. Period.

So why do gay men communicate better? Because they have to. Coming out means naming desire explicitly — first to yourself, then to everyone else — before any sex happens at all, while straight men get to assume their way into it. Gay male dating also doesn’t inherit the traditional script of heteronormative behavior: who asks whom, what it means, when sex happens. So specificity is required — what you’re looking for, what you’re into, whether it’s casual or not. Absence of a script necessitates negotiation. Add in a generation that had to discuss health status openly just to stay alive, and you get a culture that treats direct sexual communication as baseline, not bonus.

Now, let’s take a look at Jeff Dye’s bit again. Picture it performed differently — not to a room where gay men are the subject being discussed from a safe distance, but with gay men on the stage itself, part of the scene rather than the audience. Does the joke survive that? A bit built on “I could be gay, look how good you have it” assumes a one-way gaze: the comedian looking out at a world he’s imagining, not being looked back at by the people he’s imagining about. Put actual gay men in the frame with him — not laughing along from the dark, but present, visible, part of the composition — and the safety of the distance collapses. The bit was never really about gay men. It was about a straight man’s freedom to talk about them without them talking back.

What, Me Worry?

The Platforms Changed. Quietly.

Since January 2025, several major social media platforms have rolled back protections for LGBTQ users — and it’s worth knowing exactly what changed, because most of it happened without much fanfare.

Meta led the way. In January 2025, the company rewrote its community standards to allow more hostile language toward LGBTQ people and other groups — a change widely read as a move to get in step with the incoming administration. The new rules explicitly permit users to call being transgender a mental illness. They also now allow content arguing that certain jobs — military, law enforcement, teaching — should be off-limits based on gender. At the same time, Meta scaled back content moderation broadly and ended its U.S. fact-checking program.

YouTube made a smaller but telling change: it quietly removed “gender identity” from the list of protected characteristics in its hate speech policy.

GLAAD’s annual Social Media Safety Index — which tracks TikTok, YouTube, X, and Meta’s platforms — found that the political climate has shifted sharply since January 2025, with coordinated anti-LGBTQ campaigns intensifying while these platforms scaled back or eliminated safeguards for LGBTQ users. The report notes the changes echo language from Project 2025, which explicitly called for removing the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from official use.

None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened everywhere at once. It happened at specific companies, on specific dates, right after a change in Washington. That’s worth a worry.