Mirror Time | Digital Photocollage | 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan
Nick Adams — born Nicholas Adamschock on January 10, 1931 — was a diminutive, blond actor who worked the edges of mid-century Hollywood with considerable skill and considerable hunger. He played neurotic types, aggressive types, comic sidekicks. He starred in the ABC television series The Rebel. He showed up in successful films throughout the 1950s and 1960s and made himself indispensable to the people who mattered.
He was also, by most accounts, bisexual — and operating in a Hollywood that had no tolerance for that information becoming public.
He shared an apartment with James Dean when both were young and broke and trying to break in. What exactly happened between them depends on who is telling the story. Sal Mineo told a biographer in 1972 that Nick had confided in him about a significant affair with Dean. John Gregory Dunne confirmed that Dean was bisexual, as were Adams and Mineo. Biographers noted that Adams was one of many studio-era stars who dated women or entered sham relationships to cover their true sexualities — the standard operating procedure of the time.
His friendship with Elvis Presley was equally intense and equally subject to rumor. Biographers noted they may have “swung both ways” together. Elvis’s former fan mail secretary and multiple other sources made similar observations. Adams later overdubbed some of Dean’s lines in Giant after Dean’s death in 1955, and dated Natalie Wood — which one historian drily noted was roughly equivalent to being “a good friend of Liz Taylor’s.”
At the time of his death in 1968, Adams was thirty-six years old. He was, at the time, rumored to be the lover of a fellow movie actor.
His story is, as one historian wrote, a virtual template of mid-century Hollywood closeted life.
This collage puts him in the bathroom with Elvis — domestic, intimate, ordinary. Two men jostling over the mirror. The blood moon watches from the corner, small but present. Jupiter 3 hovers, patient as always.
The closet engulfs everyone—-straight, bi, or gay. And that’s terrible.
