The 1970s: A Decade of Promise, a Decade of Harsh Reality

In 1970, three musicals were made for the new decade: Pufnstuf, Scrooge and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Their storylines ended with hope and anticipation of good things to follow. The 1960s preceded with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the new decade promised a fresh start. The films offered a talking dragon, singing ghosts and a river of chocolate, along with the promise that kindness and honesty would always be its own reward.

That promise carried a deeper meaning for one part of the audience. For gay men, these three films hold special attention. Each tells the ballad of an outcast: Jimmy, a lonely boy whose only friend is a talking flute; Charlie, the poorest, loneliest child in town; Ebenezer, a man who has been shut out from the world. Each is carried into a fantastic world. Jimmy goes to Living Island and its population of lovable creatures, Charlie to Willy Wonka's factory and its singing Oompa-Loompas, and Ebenezer to a realm of chain-rattling spirits. In each of these places, difference is the rule. All made in 1970, these three family musicals told the story many gay men lived: rejection, a transformational journey and redemption.

And for gay men, in each storyline the link between fantasy and reality is clear: Anita Bryant becomes Witchiepoo, the Oompa-Loompas and their moralizing songs become the Moral Majority, and AIDS becomes the third ghost, the specter of death.

The children who enjoyed these films came of age during a decade that brought a presidential resignation, two oil crises, a staggering 13 percent inflation, a political realignment called the Southern strategy, and a militant right-wing religious political movement organized against marginalized communities, including Black, Hispanic and gay Americans. Many of the gay men of that generation died young in the AIDS crisis, which began in the early 1980s and continues today.

The Timeline: 1969–1985

• 1969 — Robert Rayford, 16, dies in St. Louis of an illness his doctors cannot identify. In 1987, tests on his preserved tissue find HIV. He is the earliest known AIDS case in the United States, twelve years before the disease had a name.

• 1970 — Pufnstuf premieres in San Antonio on June 3, then opens in Los Angeles on August 19. It is based on Sid and Marty Krofft's H.R. Pufnstuf, which ran 17 episodes on NBC in the fall of 1969. Jack Wild stars with Billie Hayes, Martha Raye and Mama Cass, who sings "Different," a song about the loneliness and the value of being different, which speaks directly to gay listeners. Universal co-financed it with Kellogg's, the show's sole advertiser, in the cereal company's first film. Mixed reviews and small box-office returns.

• 1970 — Scrooge opens on November 5, with Albert Finney as Scrooge and Alec Guinness as Marley. Leslie Bricusse wrote the screenplay and songs, and Ronald Neame directed for CBS's film division, Cinema Center Films. It cost under $5 million, reached No. 1 in Variety's weekly box-office sample in December, and earned four Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe for Finney. It still earned only $3 million in North American rentals. Cinema Center closed in 1972 without ever turning a profit.

• 1971 — Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory opens from Paramount on June 30, with Gene Wilder as Wonka and 12-year-old Peter Ostrum as Charlie. Quaker Oats paid the $3 million budget to launch a Wonka candy bar. Bricusse and Anthony Newley wrote the songs, which earned the film's one Oscar nomination. It grossed about $4 million, and the candy bar failed. The film found its audience later, on television.

• 1972 — In June, five burglars are arrested inside Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex. In November, Nixon is reelected with 49 states, including every former Confederate state. The Southern strategy, built on coded appeals to white voters about "law and order" and "states' rights," completes the South's move to the Republican Party.

• 1973–74 — Arab oil producers impose an embargo after the U.S. supports Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Oil prices quadruple. Gasoline prices rise 40 percent in November 1973 alone, and stations post "No Gas Today" signs.

• 1974 — On August 9, Nixon resigns over Watergate to avoid impeachment, the first U.S. president to leave office this way.

• 1977 — Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign, which cast gay people as a threat to children, persuades Dade County voters to repeal a gay-rights ordinance. Similar repeals follow in St. Paul, Wichita and Eugene. Historians connect the campaign to the organized entry of conservative Christians into politics.

• 1978 — On November 27, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California, is shot dead at San Francisco City Hall with Mayor George Moscone. Three weeks earlier, voters had defeated the Briggs Initiative, which would have barred gay people from teaching in public schools.

• 1979 — The Iranian Revolution sets off the second oil crisis. Gas lines return, inflation passes 13 percent, and unemployment rises to 6.1 percent.

• 1979 — In June, the Rev. Jerry Falwell founds the Moral Majority, a political organization that unites conservative Christians against gay rights, abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. It becomes a major force in electing Ronald Reagan the following year.

• 1979 — On July 12, Disco Demolition Night at Chicago's Comiskey Park admits fans for 98 cents with a disco record. The records are blown up between games before about 50,000 people, thousands storm the field, and the White Sox forfeit the second game. It is a racist and homophobic backlash against music made popular by Black, Latino and gay audiences.

• 1979–81 — On November 4, 1979, Iranian students seize the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Fifty-two Americans are held for 444 days and released on January 20, 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan is sworn in.

• 1981 — On June 5, the CDC reports a rare pneumonia in five young gay men in Los Angeles, the first official report of the AIDS epidemic. By the end of the year, 337 cases have been confirmed and 130 people have died.

• 1985 — The Iran-Contra affair begins with secret U.S. arms sales to Iran, intended to win the release of American hostages in Lebanon. Profits from the sales are later sent to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, in violation of a congressional ban.

The films still show what 1970 expected the decade to be. The timeline shows what it became. The children who watched them lived through the difference.

The accompanying collage places a young gay man of 1983 inside the worlds of the three films. The collage brings the two halves of the essay together: the boy who watched these musicals, grown into the generation that the decade would test. At its center is Damian Guy, the first cover model of the Australian gay magazine OutRage. He would have been a child when these films were released in 1970 and 1971. Around him are the creatures of 1970: Witchiepoo and H.R. Pufnstuf and a chorus line of Oompa-Loompas. Behind him rises the third ghost, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. He looks back over his shoulder, an outsider in the collage itself. In the foreground, a young man of today smiles with his eyes closed, at ease where Guy is wary. The saturated colors of the collage are inspired by the unique palettes of the three films.

Postscript

The children who acted in these films came of age in the same decade as the children who watched them. They lived through the same years the timeline describes. More than 50 years on, rest in peace to those who have passed on:

• Jack Wild (Jimmy, Pufnstuf) — March 1, 2006

• Denise Nickerson (Violet Beauregarde, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory) — July 10, 2019

• Richard Beaumont (Tiny Tim, Scrooge) — April 26, 2022

Nine

9 Collages Built in 24 Hours

These nine collages are not a set or a series. Each one stands on its own. Yet all nine come from the same artist, the same algorithm and the same social media feed, in the same 24 hours.

What they share is their subject. Each one reflects contemporary gay life openly, without apology and without censorship.

Each takes its own setting. A high-rise kitchen. A bedroom on a slow morning. A mountain lodge with a lit fireplace and snow at the window. A parking lot of pickup trucks. A lake where men stand on each other's shoulders. A log cabin below mountain peaks. A painted Italian lakeside town with a speedboat.

Nine unique visual moments entering art history.

Amid the Ruins, Amid the Fog, Amid War: Love

Love doesn’t wait for a perfect moment.

These three digital photo collages combine the 1970s, the early 2000s, and today to create reverberations of love and desire. The settings are a war zone, a foggy day in San Francisco, and soldiers from the Vietnam era.

The constant is an embracing couple from the early 2000s. The couple appears in all three works, unchanged. All the settings around them evolve.

In the first work, a contemporary figure extends across the frame, suspended above a city reduced to rubble. The couple embraces below him. Desire continues amid the ruins.

In the second work, the couple stands before the Golden Gate Bridge, obscured by the fog. Across the frame is a contemporary reclining figure, head back, with a second man pressed to his chest. In February 2004, around the time the couple was photographed, San Francisco began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The California Supreme Court voided those licenses that August.

In the third work, the couple stands in front of a unit of shirtless soldiers in the jungle. The soldiers look at the camera. During the Vietnam era, gay service members served under threat of discharge, and the ban on openly gay military service did not end until 2011. Here the couple embraces in front of the unit, in plain view.

Two symbols appear in all three works. One is the Jupiter 3, which stands for freedom, deliverance, and witness. The other is the blue moon, which stands for love and desire.

Each collage places three periods on one surface. Love and desire continue amid the ruins, amid the fog, and amid war. Love is the redeeming factor in any circumstance.

Digital photo collage.

— Behan

From the Feed: Spilt Milk, Jack Kerouac Was a Self-Loathing Bisexual, and Muscle T's

Three subjects come from the feed this week, and all three concern what men show and what they hide. Today, men on social media show their bodies, their desire and each other openly. Seventy years ago, one of America's most famous writers could not.

Jack Kerouac had sex with men. Allen Ginsberg confirmed their sexual encounters in later interviews. Gore Vidal wrote that he and Kerouac spent a night together at the Chelsea Hotel in 1953. Joyce Johnson, Kerouac's girlfriend and later biographer, called him bisexual: mostly attracted to women, with some sexual relationships with men.

Kerouac wrote his life into his novels, but he left that night out. When he fictionalized the evening in The Subterraneans, the sex was missing. Ginsberg's explanation was that Kerouac was afraid of his mother. Kerouac lived with her most of his life, drank heavily, and died in 1969 at 47. The writer celebrated for telling everything kept this part of himself hidden.

The muscle T shows what Kerouac's generation concealed. The white crewneck began as U.S. Navy regulation underwear in 1913. Marlon Brando wore it tight in A Streetcar Named Desire, washing and drying each shirt repeatedly to shrink it to his body. In the 1970s, the tight white T became part of the gay clone look. It is underwear worn as outerwear, built to display the body.

In the first collage, a man in a muscle T faces a mirrored copy of himself. The second collage places men in the leaves, one covering his face with a towel, while a group stands in the background.

Spilt milk began as a joke. In 2012, students in Newcastle, England, filmed themselves pouring milk over their heads in public places, and the stunt spread online as "milking." In the third collage, milk runs down a shirtless man's chest while a man in white briefs stands under a chandelier and another raises a finger to his lips. The joke has become display.

There is no use crying over spilt milk. What men hid in Kerouac's time, they now post. The Blue Moon and the Jupiter 3, longing and escape, appear in all three collages.

— Behan

Sources

• Gore Vidal, Palimpsest (1995)

• The Rag Blog, Jonah Raskin, interview with Joyce Johnson (2012)

• Mental Floss, "Jack Kerouac Writer Facts"

• Mental Floss, "A Brief and Incomplete Timeline of T-Shirt History"

• ASKET, "The Rebellious History of the Plain White Tee"

• Know Your Meme, "Milking"

Elders

The Mormon missionary is one of gay culture's most recognized figures of desire. These two collages place him and other gay men at the temple of a church that accepts gay members but not gay relationships.

The church teaches that same-sex intimacy is a sin and classifies same-sex marriage as "a serious transgression." It declared members in same-sex marriages apostates in 2015 and reversed that in 2019. In 2022, it supported the federal Respect for Marriage Act without changing its doctrine. At church-owned BYU, heterosexual couples may hold hands and kiss, and gay couples may not. Since October 2025, the church president has been Dallin H. Oaks, a leading opponent of same-sex marriage.

Gay members leave. 4% of current members identify as LGBTQ, compared with 18% of former members. About 23% of Gen Z Latter-day Saint adults identify as something other than heterosexual, and support for legal same-sex marriage among members reached 46% in 2021.

Gay adult film adopted the missionary as a recurring subject in 2010. Most of the genre's directors and performers are former members. Earlier, the film Latter Days (2003), by former missionary C. Jay Cox, paired a closeted elder with his openly gay neighbor.

The appeal comes from the structure of the mission. Missionaries are young men serving two years away from home, living in assigned pairs under a strict chastity code. Their uniform of white shirt, dark tie and name tag is recognized everywhere, and they come to the door. The genre makes the subtext of the mission its content.

In both collages, the temples are paint-by-number paintings, in which every shape and color is assigned in advance. In the first, two men embrace in front of the Manti Utah Temple while two missionaries lean together in the corner. In the second, young men, some in missionary dress, gather in front of the Salt Lake Temple. In each, the Blue Moon, longing, and the Jupiter 3, freedom and escape, are overhead.

The Seen Witness

In these three collages, the viewer is a witness, and the viewer is seen. In each piece, a dark-haired man turns over his shoulder and looks out of the frame, at whoever stands in front of the work.

Every figure comes from the feed. The over-the-shoulder pose is common on social media. It is made for an audience the person posting will never meet. In these collages, that audience is specific: the person looking.

The settings change. The first collage is an open field, where a second man in red trunks walks away into tall grass. The second is the Dallas skyline. The third is a high-rise interior facing the Empire State Building at sunset. The glance repeats in all three.

Two other witnesses are present. The Jupiter 3 represents freedom and escape. The Blue Moon represents desire and longing. Both watch from above, and no figure looks at them. They are unseen witnesses.

The viewer is the only witness any figure acknowledges.

That acknowledgment changes the act of looking. An unseen witness observes from a distance and remains uninvolved. A seen witness has been identified. Once the man turns and looks back, the viewer becomes part of the scene: part of the attention, the display, and the desire between men.

Each piece positions the viewer differently. In the field, a close-cropped face at the right edge also looks sideways, so the viewer stands between two looks. In Dallas, the other two men face forward, and all three look at the viewer. In New York, a silver-haired man photographs himself in a mirror, and the glance is the only look directed out of the frame.

My work takes subtext and makes it context. Here, the subtext is the viewer's own looking. The glance makes it part of the picture.

Today's Feed = Today's Collages

Seven new works built from social media, algorithms and hefty scrolling to build gay-positive representations

Each collage here comes from one day's feed. The figures, the grounds and the combinations all arrive through social media, sorted by the day's algorithm. The goal is gay-positive representation built from what the scroll delivers.

Two men in army fatigues carry over from yesterday's collages. Today they stand beside a Freedom Elite motor home, its floor plan laid open below them: a dinette that converts to a bed, a wet bath, a cab-over bunk. They appear again inside a church, near a crucifix and a miraculous staircase behind a foreshortened figure.

Elsewhere, two wrestlers stand under a large blue moon with a new Veronica veil. A mid-century ranch house frames a lawn full of men at dusk, one holding a snake. A grid of OnlyFan selfies sits beside a White Star Line crew photograph and a smiling man in a 1950s plaid shirt. Contemporary figures share an AI representation of an ancient Greece exercise court. In a mall food court setting, gay men react to a chiseled torso at the center of the frame. Time for snacks!

Jupiter 3 appears in all seven. It stands for freedom, escape and witness.

Social Media Meets Gay Culture

The source material reflects how central social media is to LGBTQ life. A 2024 national survey by LGBT Tech and Data for Progress polled 1,304 LGBTQ adults and found that 96% use the internet at least once a day. Nearly 80% use social networking platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn or X, and 78% use video platforms such as YouTube or Twitch. Social media is super gay.

The purpose is connection and expression. At least 77% of LGBTQ adults use the internet to express themselves creatively, explore new ideas and connect with friends and family. 57% report often using social platforms to connect with friends or family.

This is not limited to the young. A 2025 study found that LGBTQ adults 55 and older were significantly more likely than younger LGBTQ adults to use social media for social bonding.

Sadly, the same platforms carry hostility. Half of LGBTQ adults report anti-LGBTQ bullying or harassment online, and more than a third have seen anti-LGBTQ misinformation shared online.

The feed supplies both the images and the conditions. These collages take what it offers and assemble it in support of gay life.

— Behan

Sources

• LGBT Tech and Data for Progress, "ctrl+alt+lgbt: Digital Access, Usage, and Experiences of the LGBTQ+ Community" (2024): dataforprogress.org

• LGBT Tech, survey release: lgbttech.org

• Statista, LGBTQ+ adults using social platforms to connect with their communities (April 2024): statista.com

• "Intergenerational Differences in Social Media Use Among LGBTQ+ Adults," Innovation in Aging (2025): ncbi.nlm.nih.go

Received, Gathered, Reconstituted

These seven collages were made today, from today's feed. They have one purpose: to make gay life visible in a culture that largely remains either intolerant or unaware of it.

The grounds and the figures both come from the stream of social media. The day's algorithm decides what arrives. I receive it, gather it, and reconstitute it. Nothing is planned in advance. The combinations come from what the feed delivers.

In the reconstitution, narratives form. Each one is meant to affirm and support gay life.

Today's sources range widely. A wrestling arena backdrop. A locker room. The back seat of a car. A suburban backyard where men in 1899 suits sit near a Ken doll at a pink grill. A pool party. A subdivision corner at S Dewberry Pl. And Velázquez's Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Paul the Hermit, now set behind two men in army fatigues.

Two elements appear in every piece: Jupiter 3 and the moon. Jupiter 3 stands for freedom, escape and witness. The moon, shown blue in most of today's work, stands for longing and witness. What they share is witness. Each scene is marked as seen and recorded.

The feed changes daily, and so does the work. Tomorrow's collages will come from tomorrow's feed.

The Social Desert: Gay Men, the Closet and the Hermit's Life

I’m A new collage places a community of men in the hermit's cave

A culture hostile to gay men pushes them back into the closet, a social desert where they are expected to live as celibate hermits. Velázquez painted two hermits meeting in the Egyptian desert. My new collage places a community of men in the same kind of cave.

The Painting and the Collage

Velázquez painted Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Paul the Hermit around 1634. It hangs in the Prado in Madrid. The subject comes from the 13th-century Golden Legend: the aging Anthony travels into the desert to find Paul, the first Christian hermit.

Anthony appears five times in the painting. He walks the path in the distance and knocks at Paul's door, and Paul at first refuses to open it because he is unaccustomed to visitors. In the foreground, the two men talk as a raven arrives with bread. For sixty years the raven brought Paul half a loaf each day. On the day Anthony arrives, it brings a full loaf. At the lower left, after Paul dies, two lions dig his grave.

My collage follows the structure of the painting.

In the upper left, Velázquez's raven descends past the rock with bread, a provision sent from God. In the collage, the Jupiter 3 takes the raven's position. It represents freedom and deliverance. A boxer stands on the rocks above the cave.

Below, a cave arch frames a Blue Moon, which represents desire. In the painting's distance, Anthony walks toward Paul. In the collage, two men walk in through the arch.

In the foreground, Velázquez's two old men sit apart, hands raised in prayer. In the collage, a group of men rest together and tend to each other beside a fire.

At the lower left of the painting, the lions dig a grave. At the lower right of the collage, a dog sleeps by the fire. The painting's animals mark a death. The collage's animal marks a home.

Called to Chastity

The Catholic Catechism describes homosexual acts as "intrinsically disordered" (§2357) and states that homosexual persons are "called to chastity" (§2359).

The Church provides two sacraments that give grace for a state of life: matrimony and holy orders. Gay people are barred from both. Same-sex couples cannot receive matrimony, and a 2005 Vatican instruction, reaffirmed in 2016, bars men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" from the seminary.

Gay Catholics are held to the same standard of chastity as married couples and priests, without the sacraments given to help them meet it. Paul at least receives bread from the raven each day. Gay Catholics are left on their own.

The Retreat

The pressure is measurable. In the Human Rights Campaign's most recent annual survey, 47.5 percent of LGBTQ+ adults report being less out somewhere in their lives over the past year, including at work, in healthcare and in public. Just over half report being less visible than the year before.

Public support is declining. Gallup's May 2026 survey found 65 percent of Americans support legal same-sex marriage, six points below its 2022–2023 peak. Among Republicans, support fell from 55 percent to 37 percent.

Concealment extends beyond home. In Booking.com's 2026 survey of 13,300 LGBTQ+ travelers, only 31 percent say they are fully out when they travel. Worldwide, a Yale study estimates that 83 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual people conceal their sexuality from most people in their lives.

The president of the Stonewall National Museum describes the result plainly: in hostile communities, LGBTQ+ people are either moving away or going back into hiding.

A Family in the Cave

The hermit chooses the desert. The closet is imposed. Paul waits sixty years for a single visitor.

The men in my cave do not wait. They have found each other.

— Behan

Sources

• Museo del Prado, Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Paul the Hermit, catalog entry (via Dickinson College Commentaries)

• New Liturgical Movement, "An Altarpiece of St Anthony Abbot," 2019

• Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2357–2359

• Congregation for Catholic Education, Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with Regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies, 2005; Congregation for the Clergy, Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis, 2016

• The Advocate, report on the Human Rights Campaign Annual LGBTQ+ Community Survey

• Gallup, Values and Beliefs Survey, May 2026 (via Fox 4 News, June 3, 2026)

• myGwork, "Most LGBTQ+ Travelers Go Back into the Closet When They Travel, Study Finds," June 16, 2026

• New Security Beat, "Most LGBTQ+ Individuals Remain in the 'Global Closet'"

• Baller Alert, report on Talker Research survey and Stonewall National Museum comments, 2026

Unders a Painted Sky: Bunkers, Gay Culture, and Why Gay Theory Is Bucking Bunkers

A new collage places a family of choice inside the luxury bunker

Bunkers are a popular subject in social media reels. The shelters are well appointed and well stocked, and the people in them are almost always a heterosexual family: a mother, a father, a son and a daughter, like the Fisher-Price play sets of the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

My new collage shows a luxury bunker that centers on a pool and a lawn beside a mid-century house, under a painted sky. A mushroom cloud represents the breakdown of society outside. Inside is a family of choice: a group of gay men who are safe and happy together.

The bunker in the reels protects the family society expects. Mine protects the family these men chose.

Why Gay Theory Is Bucking Bunkers

While the bunker remains an option for many people, gay theory currently rejects the private bunker in favor of communal survival.

Survivalism usually centers on preserving the nation, race, gender or the existing social order. Gay theory questions who survives and how.

Post-apocalyptic stories also repeat eugenic ideas of survival of the fittest. Queer survival includes people outside the standards of fitness and health, and queer kinship organizes survival around the collective rather than the individual.

This position comes from experience. During the AIDS crisis, when families and government withdrew, gay men built their own networks of care.

The practice continues. In Houston, the Montrose Mutual Aid Coalition maintains solar-powered charging stations in members' homes. Researchers find that LGBTQ+ communities are largely invisible in disaster planning, and they recommend that LGBTQ+ community centers qualify as emergency shelters. A recent essay identifies small, self-sufficient communities as the strongest defense against collapse.

A bunker determines who gets in. Gay theory asks how many people can be cared for.

— Behan

Magic 8

Eight from Today

The goal is direct: take what the feed provides on a single day and use it to build representations where gay men are present, open and at ease.

These eight collages follow that method. Every ground and figure comes from the same day and the same scroll, and each was collected with the intent of putting it to work in a new composition.

— Behan

The Seven

These seven digital collages mark an advance in my art making. The compositions are more complex, the narratives are clearer, and the gay experience is presented without fear. No figure hides and no desire is disguised. As such there is no lewdness in the representation of the male figure, candor in nature.

The first advance is depth. Earlier collages often place figures side by side on a single plane. Here, figures stand at different distances within one space. A hallway recedes from a partly dressed man in the foreground to two men in briefs behind him. A diner holds a uniformed worker mid-kick, shirtless men at the edges, and faces looking out from the bottom of the frame. Each figure comes from a different source, but each one occupies a believable place in the room.

The second advance is narrative format. One episode is a four-panel sequence of a nude man at a bathroom window, turning and gesturing from frame to frame. Another is a diptych built on two Manshots covers from the era of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." A third places a framed picture of two embracing men on a bathroom wall, so the room contains its own history of gay imagery. These formats let a single episode show time, sequence and memory.

The third advance is candor. Men undress, look at each other, touch and are aroused. A beach scene shows intimacy in open daylight with other men present. A hallway scene shows a man exposed and unashamed. These images are not coded. The subtext of earlier gay art, which hid desire inside bathers, myths and nude studies, is now the context.

The recurring icons connect the seven. The Jupiter 3 appears in every episode as freedom, escape and witness. The moons change color across the set. Pale moons recall invisibility and forced secrecy. Blue moons stand for longing and desire. Their placement beside men who are no longer hiding shows the distance between the life gay men were made to live and the life they live now.

These are gay men in interiors and landscapes living their best lives, free from discrimination, harassment and religious intolerance. The seven collages set the standard for the work to follow.

The Lingering Shot

In a scene from the 2024 series Earth Abides, Alexander Ludwig slowly undresses. The narrative pauses, the camera holds an inverted full shot, a peekaboo framing that film has usually reserved for women.

The original dark ground is kept. It reads as flat space and infinite space at once. This simultaneous compression and extension produces ambiguity, and with it, unease.

The natural color of the darkened shot is heightened into a palette reminiscent of Matisse's Blue Nude. The questions asked of Matisse apply here: is this a new understanding of beauty, or a distortion of the human form?

The collages extend the 3-second shot with multiple views of the scene, combined, inverted, overlaid, and repeated, to ask the question: if this scene had been filmed for a male audience instead of a female one, would it have been called inappropriate?

Other questions follow. How does this scene serve the narrative? Viewers interested in Ludwig capture the moment and repost it, which drives views and revenue for the series. Is the scene only about money?

Compare the nude bathing scene in the 2021 film The Power of the Dog. That film drew criticism, including from actor Sam Elliott, for its homoerotic content. Ludwig's slow strip passed without apparent objection. The only difference is the implied audience, women for one, men for the other.

This returns to the long debate over the naked and the nude. What counts as appropriate is often decided by the intention behind an image, not the image itself. That judgment usually rests on one assumption: heterosexual attraction is acceptable, homosexual attraction is not.

The objection, then, is not to the nude body. It is to LGBTQ+ people.

Singularity

A singularity is a point at which known rules stop applying.

The two collages below are built around that point.

Both began as advertisements. A mid-century Masonite ad that sold aspiration: a home and a room built by hand. A 2001 Italian shower gel ad selling desire: the body, a scent, and the company of men known as "the boys."

Into each space I added men from different times to compliment those from the original ads. Within this compression, the rules that separated one period from another necessarily stop applying. The experience of being human becomes all present, all at once.

Two separate collages, one of aspiration and one of desire, each compressed and combining to complete the other.

Symbiosis.

Fall and Winter 1974

In the 20th century, gay men had almost no way to see themselves in publications or in print. When they did appear, they were shown in the most negative light.

One source of positive male imagery was the department store catalog of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Within those pages were images of men together, presented as subtext. For gay men, seeing those images was powerful.

These three digital collages use the actual Fall and Winter 1974 catalog covers of JCPenney, Sears and Montgomery Ward, and make the subtext context.

Since 1974, Montgomery Ward has closed, Sears is down to five stores, and JCPenney survives as part of a larger company. Perhaps if they had published covers like these, all three would still be thriving today.

Very Good Friends Digital Collage

1958: Jack and Jill meet in high school in New Rochelle, New York. He carries her books. Everyone agrees they make a handsome couple.

1959: They go steady. Jill wears Jack's class ring on a chain. Her mother calls him the most respectful boy in town. He never pushes for anything.

1960: They enroll at the same college. Jill joins the glee club. Jack joins a fraternity and spends most weekends with his brothers.

1961: Jack proposes at Christmas. Both families are relieved.

1962: They marry in June at St. Absalom Church in New Rochelle. They have waited until the wedding night. Jill finds the wait romantic. Jack is in no hurry to see it end.

1963: Katie is born. For Jack, it is one and done.

1964–1968: Jack sells insurance, plays golf on Saturdays, and hosts card night with the men from the office. Jill keeps the house. Katie starts school.

1969: Jack takes a new job in Phoenix. While Jill and Katie unload boxes, Jack hops the fence to meet the new neighbor, Tyler. Both men know immediately. Jack knows it is time to have a new best friend. He hasn’t had one since his roommate in college.

Girls Night In

The ground of this collage is a jigsaw puzzle of a 1950s bedroom. Floral wallpaper, oval portrait frames, a vanity mirror, and dresses hanging in the open.

In the 1950s, this room belonged to the woman of the house. It is where she dressed, rested, and kept her private life.

Five men now occupy it. One sits and scrolls his phone. One flexes in front of the hanging dresses. Two kiss. One tips his head back with his eyes closed.

"Girls night" names a gathering of women. Gay men have long used "girls" for each other. The title applies the phrase to them and places them in the room the phrase came from.

The puzzle lines run across the entire image, including the figures. Room and men become one surface, cut from the same pieces.

The blue moon, for desire and transformation, sits in the vanity mirror. The Jupiter 3, for freedom and movement, hovers over the room.

Kittens a Go-Go

Three new collages bring together kittens, an atomic mushroom cloud, and a man flexing his bicep.

The kittens come from paint-by-number canvases. The hobby began in the early 1950s and filled American homes with sentimental, domestic images..

The mushroom cloud comes from the same decade. It is the defining image of the Cold War, the threat that existed alongside postwar comfort.

The flexing man comes from social media today. He displays his strength in front of the blast.

Two recurring symbols complete each piece. The blue moon stands for desire and transformation. The Jupiter 3, the next version of the Jupiter, built for gay people, stands for freedom and movement.

Together the five elements form a sequence: comfort, threat, strength, desire, escape. The 1950s told men to protect the home and to fear what could destroy it. These collages place a contemporary gay man at the center of that picture and give him a ship to leave in

Is it Live or is it Memorex?

In the 1970s, a blank cassette tape asked America a question. Ella Fitzgerald sang a note so high that she shattered a champagne flute, but the voice that broke the glass was a recording on Memorex audiotape, which produced the tagline "Is It Live, or Is It Memorex?" In a 1974 spot, Count Basie sat with his back to a recording booth, trying to tell Fitzgerald's live voice from a tape of it. Fifty years later, the question has moved from sound to faces. Is he real? Is he AI? How do we know for sure?

Mostly, we do not. In a study at Lancaster University and UC Berkeley, 315 people sorted 400 AI-generated faces from 400 real ones and were right less than half the time, 48.2 percent. A second group trained to spot synthetic faces reached only 59 percent. The same researchers found that people rated the AI faces 7.7 percent more trustworthy than the real ones. A 2023 study went further. Participants judged AI faces to be human about 65 percent of the time, while correctly identifying real faces as human only about 51 percent of the time. The people fooled most often were also the most confident in their answers. Even experts fall short: "super recognizers," who identify human faces with over 90 percent accuracy, managed only 57 percent with AI faces.

The examples are already in the culture. In 2023, an image of Pope Francis in a white designer puffer coat circulated as a real photograph before it was traced to an AI image generator. In June 2025, a band called the Velvet Sundown appeared on Spotify out of nowhere and drew more than 500,000 monthly listeners. On social media, the group denied using AI. It later revised its Spotify bio to admit that the music was composed, voiced, and visualized with AI under human creative direction. That fall, an AI "actress" named Tilly Norwood debuted at a film conference in Zurich, and her creators announced that talent agencies were competing to sign her. With her polished Instagram feed and comedy sketches, she could easily pass for a rising star.

Which brings us to Petyo Pramov. His images circulate widely across YouTube, X, Tumblr, and Pinterest, always credited to the same name. His TikTok calls itself his official account and lists his work as fitness modeling and fashion. His accounts are new, and new accounts fit both explanations: a real model starting over, or a persona built from scratch. The best tests are the old ones. Does he move on video? Does he appear in photos taken by other people? Do the tattoos and scars stay put?

"Stallions" does not wait for the answer. These collages set his figure among horses: a chestnut at his shoulder, two stallions nose to nose above his raised arms, a pink unicorn behind a man scrolling his phone, a carousel horse in roses beside a man in eggplant-and-banana shorts. The stallion has stood for male power in art for centuries. Here it shares the frame with a man who may or may not exist. The blue moon rises, and the Jupiter 3 hovers, as always.

Collage has always been an honest fabrication. The artist cuts, combines, and shows the seams. The new question is whether the source material was ever live at all.

— Behan

Citations available on request.

Balla Duchamp Behan

Duchamp in 1912, Balla in 1912, Behan in 2026: three artists, more than a century apart, working on the same question: how to show the figure in motion on a two-dimensional surface.

Behan, Leg Day (2026). The repeated legs fan out in arcs that echo the dog's feet in the Balla. Duchamp and Balla painted their motion studies in muted tones from an observed or imagined model. Leg Day builds its motion from a photograph in the feed, in full color, with the figure a man at the gym.

Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). A single figure broken into overlapping planes as it moves down the stairs. The painting caused a scandal at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where one critic mocked it as an explosion in a shingle factory.

Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). Painted the same year, it shows motion as repetition: the dog's feet, the tail, the leash, and the walker's skirt all multiply into blurred arcs. Both painters drew on the chronophotography of Muybridge and Marey.