The Man Left Behind — San Francisco
The Man Left Behind — New York City
Digital Photo collages | 2026 | James Behan
Francisco de Goya’s The Third of May 1808 is built around a man standing at the center of the composition, arms raised, in a white shirt, facing the firing squad. The white shirt draws the eye. Goya understood that the state’s power to render a verdict on a single human being — to decide what a person is and what they deserve — is one of the oldest forces in human history.
The Man Left Behind — San Francisco and The Man Left Behind — New York City are inspired by that compositional logic. At the center of each, a male figure in a white shirt draws the eye. His back is to us. Like Goya, Behan’s focus is the devastating injustice of what happened to that man.
During and after World War II, the United States military discharged gay servicemen using what was called a blue discharge. It was neither honorable nor dishonorable. It was designed to occupy a space where no rights applied. There was rarely evidence. There was no appeal.
What it cost him was everything. The blue discharge disqualified him from the GI Bill — no tuition, no vocational training, no home loan. Whatever skill the military had been teaching him was gone. He had been fired from his job and expelled from his school in a single document. Because discharge records were public, civilian employers could see it. Most wouldn’t hire him.
He was dropped at the port cities — San Francisco. New York. Far from home, without income, without his unit, without the men he had served beside, slept near, and in some cases loved. Set down in a city he may never have visited and told, in effect, to disappear.
These two collages are about that moment. Not what came after. Just that moment.
The man in white in Behan’s collages represents all the men who were unjustly discharged through the blue discharge system. We remember them — if not their names.
Sources
• National Park Service: Blue and Other Than Honorable Discharges — nps.gov
• The National WWII Museum: The GI Bill and Planning for the Postwar — nationalww2museum.org
• George Mason University Veterans Legal Clinic: The Blue Ticket Discharge — mvets.law.gmu.edu
• Francisco de Goya, The Third of May 1808, Museo del Prado, Madrid, 1814
Facebook hashtags:
#TheClosetSeries #BlueDischarge #WorldWarII #GayHistory #QueerHistory #Goya #ThirdOfMay #LGBTHistory #DigitalCollage #Behan
