Trifecta
James Behan
Digital Photo Collage
2026
Casey Donovan • Tom Chase • Rhyheim Shabazz
1970s • 1990s • 2020s
Fifty years. Three men. One unbroken story.
This triptych from my ongoing series Stories from the Closet presents three figures from gay adult film history as what they truly are — saints, heroes, sacred presences deserving of reverence and remembrance.
Each man is crowned with the moon as halo, placed in a garden of his erar, honored as a figure of cultural significance. Because that is what they are.
Casey Donovan stepped in front of the camera in 1971 and did something that had never been done — he made gay male desire visible. Boys in the Sand was the first gay adult film to receive mainstream press coverage. In an era when gay men were criminals, Donovan said: we exist, we desire, we are beautiful. He built the foundation. He stands in Eden, in the innocent light before the storm.
Tom Chase tested HIV positive in 1989 at age 24. The diagnosis that killed an entire generation. He was supposed to disappear. Instead he built a celebrated career promoting safe sex at Falcon Studios through the 1990s, became the studio’s first lifetime exclusive model, was inducted into the GayVN Hall of Fame in 2004, and is alive today. He did not just survive. He thrived. He stands in the night garden, the blood moon burning behind him, defiant and magnificent.
Rhyheim Shabazz — the ground that was fought for has become the garden he stands in. He is the celebrant, the man whose joy is public. In 2024 he became the most watched performer in gay adult film, GayVN Performer of the Year — existing in a world transformed. The battles fought in shadow and fire have become new soil, rich with possibility — marriage, families, legal recognition. Living loud. Living forward. Living fully.
This is Queer Odysseus in three parts: forming culture, saving culture, celebrating culture, a trifecta of perseverance. The gay hero’s journey across half a century, this is what it looks like to take subtext and make it context.
Stories from the Closet is a daily practice of digital photo collage recovering, honoring, and celebrating the hidden and not-so-hidden history of gay men.
These are our saints. These are our heroes.
