The Closet, Underwear Models, and Paint by Number Backdrops
Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital photocollage | 2026
Paint by number arrived in postwar America as a promise. Stay within the lines, fill in the numbered sections, and a masterpiece appears.
Critics called it assembly-line French Impressionism. The Smithsonian eventually gave it a show. It fell neatly within the paradigm of conformity perpetuated by the Cold War. Everybody did it because everybody else was doing it. The landscape was predetermined. The colors were assigned. You painted what you were told.
Into that landscape, The Subdivision places the underwear model. Which raises the question, is a landscape, or a painting, or a culture, gay only when gay people are there?
These seven collages place that figure into paint by number landscapes to ask that question and its reflection: is a culture, painting, or landscape not gay if the gay people in it are pretending to be straight?
The paint by number backdrop holds its numbered fields, its assigned colors, its pastoral calm — mountains, pools, cherry blossoms, water lilies, Mediterranean coastlines. The male figure walks into the frame uninvited, nude or near-nude, heavily tattooed or classically proportioned, mirror in hand or backpack on shoulder, looking at or being looked at. Gay? Straight? Straight playing gay? Gay playing straight?
The collision is the point. And boy does it collide.
The paint by number promises a world that stays where it is put. These figures do not stay put. They never do. The Subdivision continues building the Gayborhood infrastructure — one interrupted landscape at a time.
— Behan
Sources
“Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s.” Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. americanhistory.si.edu
“Do It Yourself, Like Everyone Else.” US History Scene, 2015.
Cole, Shaun. “Klein, Calvin.” glbtqarchive.com, Victoria and Albert Museum.
“Pride Through Fashion: How Calvin Klein Revolutionized Gay Men’s Underwear.” studmeup.com.au, 2024.
“Coming to Terms With Queerness in the Men’s Underwear Section.” Literary Hub, June 2020.
