2 by 4 | Quartet
Digital Photocollage Series, Four Works, 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan
Being gay in 2026 means navigating a world of startling contradictions. Nearly 9% of American adults now identify as LGBTQ+, a figure that has more than doubled since 2012. One in five adults under thirty identifies as queer. Gay marriage is considered among the most stable of all marriages. And yet ninety percent of LGBTQ+ young people report that recent anti-LGBTQ+ laws and political debates have caused them stress or anxiety. The unemployment rate for gay and bisexual men is nearly double that of heterosexual men. This is the world these four collages inhabit — expansive, joyful, erotic, playful, and under constant pressure from an uncaring culture.
The Playful
Chess in Speedos. Three figures repeated across the panel, Jupiter 3 hovering overhead, the aquarian moon watching from the upper corners. The repetition is the joke and the argument simultaneously — look again, and again, at men at play, at ease, at home in their own skin. Gay men have always known how to play. The world has not always let them.
The Revealed
Richard Chamberlain, disrobed, in chiaroscuro — the warm browns, blacks, and whites of the composition spreading across the panel like light finding its subject at last. Paired with a figure flexing on the left, the collage is about the act of revealing oneself. Chamberlain played Father Ralph de Bricassart in The Thorn Birds (1983) — a priest torn between God and forbidden desire, the closest he ever came on screen to playing his own interior life. But this image goes further. Here he is unclothed, present, fully himself on camera — and for a gay man who spent decades hiding, that has a particular weight. He wrote in his 2003 memoir: “I disliked myself intensely and feared this part of myself intensely and had to hide it and became ‘Perfect Richard, All-American Boy’ as a place to hide.” He came out near the end of his life. He died in March 2025 at ninety. This collage is about what it costs to hide, and what it means to finally be seen.
Expression and Suppression
One diptych, two registers of desire. On the left, two men making love — fully present, surrounded by an edenic garden in full flower, the aquarian moon overhead, Jupiter 3 at the periphery. Frank, unhurried, given space and light. On the right, Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant at dinner in North by Northwest, Hitchcock’s most elegant exercise in suppressed desire. Hitchcock famously ended the film with a train entering a tunnel — his own winking shorthand for what the censors would not allow him to show. The erotic is present in both panels. On the left it is expressed. On the right it is encoded, sublimated, buried inside the grammar of a genre that could only speak in metaphor. Expression and suppression. The same desire, two different worlds. What The Closet Series has always been making: the missing photographs.
Straight Men Know a Good Thing
Straight men have always known where the money is. Gay male content on OnlyFans expanded 40% in revenue between 2022 and 2023 alone. Gay audiences subscribe at a 68% retention rate and pay premium rates. Straight men figured this out fast. Sites like OnlyFans and JustForFans made it straightforward for straight men to upload content explicitly marketed to gay followers, collecting checks while making sure everyone knows they are, in fact, straight. Gay baiting as economic strategy. The seductive pose, the shirtless selfie, the swim week caption — performed for a gay male audience and a straight female audience simultaneously, with one hand always on the exit sign that reads: not gay, just entrepreneurial. Gay culture created the market. Straight men monetized it. This collage puts twelve of them in a single frame. The boys love swim week. The boys know a good thing.
As of 2026, the number is growing. The acceptance is growing. The legislation against that acceptance is also growing. Gay men are chess players and priests and swim week regulars and lovers in gardens. They are all of these things at once, in a world that still cannot quite decide what to do with them.
Sources
• Gallup: LGBTQ+ Identification in U.S. Rises to 9.3% (2025)
• The Trevor Project: 2025 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People (2026)
• WorldMetrics: Gay People Statistics (2026)
• Mental Health Stats: LGBTQ+ Mental Health Statistics (2026)
• Hollywood Reporter: Richard Chamberlain Advises Other Gay Actors: Stay in the Closet (2010)
• Windy City Times: Gay Actor Richard Chamberlain Dies at 90 (2025)
• Gitnux: Male OnlyFans Statistics (2026)
• EDGE Media Network: Straight Men Are Profiting from Gay Fans on OnlyFans
