House of Clarke
A Series of Ten Digital Photo Collages, 2026
The walls of Pompeii were covered in graffiti. Male-for-male sexual encounters advertised openly in taverns and public spaces. The frescoes of the great houses depicted every configuration of desire without apology or classification. Two figures found embracing in the ash of Vesuvius — frozen in their final moment together — were labeled The Two Maidens for nearly two centuries. DNA testing recently confirmed they were both biological males, approximately eighteen to twenty years old. The argument about what that means has been going on ever since.
This series is dedicated to those two young men.
The ancient Romans did not organize sexuality around the gender of partners. They organized it around power and social class. The modern concept of being gay did not exist. What existed was desire — expressed on walls, in frescoes, in the graffiti of taverns, in the arms of another person as a volcano buried the city that had never thought to be ashamed of any of it.
When the excavations began in the eighteenth century, the sexually explicit artifacts of Pompeii were so numerous and so frank that archaeologists placed them in secret museums, accessible only to scholars and gentlemen of sufficient moral standing. The word pornography was coined specifically to classify them. The Romans had painted desire on their walls. The moderns invented a word to lock it away.
CJ Clarke is a contemporary content creator and OnlyFans star. Is he gay? Bisexual? Straight? The question follows him the way it follows every man who occupies this visual space — who makes his body the subject, who performs desire for an audience, who lives in the gap between what is shown and what is said. Our culture cannot stop asking.
For the Romans, this was never a question. The question is ours. So is the closet it came from.
House of Clarke places CJ Clarke inside the frescoed rooms and erotic visual culture of Pompeii. Not as a joke. Not as a provocation. As a continuation. A furtherance of the humanity that was sealed under ash.
The bodies on those walls were never lost. They were locked away. They were invented new words to contain them. They were argued about, classified, purified, and explained. And they are still here.
Life is always happening.
This series is dedicated to the Two Unknown Young Men of Pompeii, found together in the ash, who have been argued about ever since. They know what they were.
— Behan
