Pool Sides

Poolside becomes the whole argument. Three men, three states of undress, one inflatable pool too small for anyone’s ambitions — this is where gay culture actually lives in summer, in the ordinary theater of backyards and borrowed sun. The Pink Moon watches from the corner, pleasure and joy, unbothered by scale. Jupiter 3 drifts overhead, doing what it always does: witnessing, not intervening. Nobody here needs saving. The season does the work — heat, skin, the small vanity of a good thong — and for once nothing has to be hidden to be enjoyed.

The Subdivision | The Gay Gaze | Digital Photocollage | 2026

— Behan

A Place to Call Home

A Place to Call Home

I think about who buys this house after me. For years the picture defaulted to what I was taught to picture: a wife and husband, 2.5 kiddos. This morning the picture changed. Why not a queer family? Why not two dads, or two moms, or a transgender couple building something in the same rooms that I’ve built in?

This triptych imagines three versions of that family, each on the ends holding an ultrasound, a transgender couple in the center experiencing the joys of pregnancy, all under the same Jupiter 3 protecting the scene, and the same Aquarian Moon that bodes well for everyone in the home.

Sadly, the math still runs against these potential home owners. Urban Institute research puts the LGBTQ+ homeownership rate at 51 percent, against 71 percent for straight, cisgender people — a twenty-point gap that survives even after adjusting for age, income, and marriage. Legal marriage has been slow to deliver the same financial lift for queer couples that straight couples enjoy.

The house, the yard, the ultrasound in the front lawn: still a lift. Still a dream for many queer families. Let’s change that.

So call this a small piece of manifesting. Not a policy fix, not a study. Just me, loving this house on purpose — fixing what breaks, updating what’s tired, filling it with good vibes — the kind of special care only a gay man can bring to a house, and I’m bringing mine now so it will be there for when that queer family walks up the zigzag sidewalk.

— Behan

“A Place to Call Home” | Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage Triptych | 2026

Real Unreal

Real and Animated

No one knows what’s real anymore. Not online, not in a photo, not in a profile that might be a person or might be a prompt. These three collages push that uncertainty as far as it goes — real men and drawn men together in the same frame, the same light, the same Jupiter 3 and Blue moon overhead, with no tell for which is which at a glance. The real and the unreal. The true and the not true. That confusion isn’t a glitch in these pieces. It’s the subject.

— Behan

Creating Content

From Wink to Eyebrow Rise

The source clip is ordinary enough: a content creator, in a car, suggesting a romantic meetup with someone he’s been talking to. On camera, it plays as a wink — coy, deniable, made to be read however the viewer needs to read it.

This collage takes that wink and raises it. Literally. The eyebrow rise replaces the wink as the gesture, and everything shifts with it. A wink performs interest while keeping an exit open. An eyebrow rise doesn’t offer one — it’s closer to an actual reaction than a performance of one, something happening rather than something staged.

That’s the ongoing work here: taking the subtext already sitting inside films and social media and moving it, plainly, into context.

— Behan

Happy Hills?

Dystopia Suburbia | Gay Domestic | The Subdivision |

Digital Photocollage | 2026

From the 1930s to the 1960s, federal housing officials insured home mortgages only in white neighborhoods, and pushed banks to lend only to white married men with white children.

From the beginning, suburbia was its own type of dystopia, engineered as a white heteronormative paradise, a manufactured Eden, double plastic wrapped, excluding anyone who did not align with that precise paradigm.

— Behan

The New Hadrians

The New Hadrians

Jordan Firstman, Omar Apollo, Zane Phillips, Jeremy Pope

The Subdivision | Merged Diptych | 2026

These are the New Hadrians.

Four men — Jordan Firstman, Omar Apollo, Zane Phillips, Jeremy Pope — stand where an emperor once stood, claiming what Hadrian claimed: love between men is not a secret to keep but a fact to declare. They live free, love free, marry free. No closet holds them.

Behind them, marching men still cross the frame in formation, disciplined and unmoved. The same forces that built closets are organizing again — rolling back the medications that keep gay men alive, working against gay marriage, trying to fit the door back onto the room these men just walked out of. They believe themselvesyy ascending. Two black swans stand for what nature already settled.

At the center of this new universe sits Walt Whitman. He was an aesthetic Hadrian of his time — bravery worthy of an emperor. He wrote what he could not say outright, and left the rest for men like these to say without disguise.

“A youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand.”

That’s the whole ask, then and now — someone to hold your hand in the open, in the light.

— Behan

Footer: Walt Whitman, “A Glimpse,” Leaves of Grass (Calamus).

The Bathhouse

The closet was not built to withstand history.

For over twenty-four hundred years, public bathhouses have been a place for male intimacy — an unbroken line from the Greco-Roman world to a bathhouse in Dallas today. Different centuries, different cities, different men. The same walls, in a sense, serving the same purpose.

The one real interruption came in the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis closed bathhouses across the country almost overnight. Even that pause couldn’t hold. The line picked back up, because it was never really about the buildings.

This diptych sets the two ends of that line side by side — the same figures, the same closeness, a few thousand years apart.

— Behan

Jack and Peter

What Happens in Act II

Jack Straw and Peter Ochello have last names. Skipper does not.

That small asymmetry is where this piece starts. Of the three men Cat on a Hot Tin Roof marks as gay or gay-leaning, two are already dead when the play opens and the third exists only as a story other characters tell about him, in a room he isn’t in. Straw and Ochello get a shared bed, a shared history, decades on the land. What they don’t get is a scene. Williams gives them the fact of a life together and withholds the sight of it.

This triptych of diptychs stages the scene the play never wrote. Scene One, an ordinary day in the 1930s, in the bedroom that will later belong to Maggie and Brick. Same bed. Same house, modeled on Robert Louis Stevenson’s home in Samoa, itself the source for the play’s Victorian setting. Jupiter 3 hovers overhead, visible only to whoever is looking at the image — not a prop the men could see, but a witness standing in for the audience, the way Straw and Ochello themselves have always stood in for something the play refuses to look at directly.

Each pair of men is a different casting choice, a different answer to the same audition: who plays Jack, who plays Peter, what does this ordinary day look like across three attempts at the same two people. Each diptych runs the same idea twice — once with the ambiguity intact, once with it removed. Left panel, suggestion. Right panel, the thing suggested. That’s the entire method here: subtext moved into context, nothing invented that the play didn’t already imply.

If Williams had opened his play this way — a quiet, unremarkable morning between two men who loved each other without incident — Act Two would have landed differently. Brick’s collapse, Maggie’s hunger, Big Daddy’s fury at his own son’s silence: all of it would have played against a real image of what intimacy between men could look like, instead of against nothing. The contrast was always there in the writing. It just never got staged.

Given a production, Straw and Ochello wouldn’t leave the room. They’d stay through Act Two, silent, watching Brick fail to become what they already were.

The bed is the same bed. Someone was happy in it first.

— Behan

Brick + Skip 4Ever

What if Tennessee Williams had written a different play?

Skipper isn’t dead. He turns up, and Brick doesn’t have to carry a grief he can’t name — he just gets to have him back. In front of the whole house, they say it to each other. That’s the story. No one flinches.

MGM buys it, and the town runs a screen test that becomes the talk of Hollywood — not for Brick this time, but for Skipper. Every actor wants the part. Dozens of them pass through the same green bedroom, under the same moon, hoping to be the one who walks back in and gets loved in front of everyone.

The picture sweeps the awards that year. Best picture, best director, every acting category.

It could have happened. The tragedy is that it didn’t.

— Behan

As We Are

This triptych’s got moon phases running across all three panels — different colors, different symbolism, but the same idea underneath: these men are just there. Not hiding, not performing, not making a statement. Present.

That’s the whole job some days. Not a parade, not a manifesto. Just showing up in your own skin, in a car, on a couch, in a bedroom, under whatever moon happens to be watching. Comfortable as we can manage. Visible as we can stand.

The rest takes care of itself.

— Behan

To Post or Not To Post

A social media post is easy and fun. Not so fast.

For a straight artist, a photo goes up and it stays up. For a gay one, the same photo goes up and it becomes a decision. Crop the kiss or keep it. Caption the couple as “friends” or say what they are. Post the diorama of two men raising a family in a plastic Fisher-Price house, or wait, because the algorithm that flags nothing when a man and woman hold hands has a different threshold when the hands belong to two men.

This is the actual terrain gay artists work on. Not canvas, not code, but a shifting set of invisible rules that platforms enforce unevenly and explain never. A ban arrives with no citation. An account disappears with no appeal that goes anywhere. The artist learns, the way a person learns to avoid a bad neighborhood, which images survive and which get quietly buried, and starts editing before the platform ever has to.

That editing has a name in every closeted life: anticipatory obedience. Gay men have been trained for a century to sand down the parts of themselves that make other people uncomfortable, and social media has simply built that training into its infrastructure. The suits marching across the top of a painting, faceless and identical, are not a metaphor invented for effect. They are Instagram’s community guidelines given a body. They are the algorithm’s idea of how a man is allowed to look.

What makes this stranger than ordinary censorship is the audience it is aimed at. A shirtless man selling underwear survives. A shirtless man loving another man does not, or survives only after the love has been cropped out and the desire relabeled as fitness content. The platforms are not squeamish about the male body. They are squeamish about what the male body might mean to another man. Desire is fine as commerce and dangerous as connection.

So the work adapts. A caption gets softened before Facebook. An image goes to the website instead, where there is no algorithm to negotiate with, only the front door and a warning on it for anyone who wants to look. Two platforms become a strategy, one for what survives moderation and one for what does not need to. This is not paranoia. It is logistics, the same kind of logistics closeted men have always practiced: know which room is safe, know which room is not, and never confuse the two.

None of this stops the work from getting made. It changes where it lives. A body of collage that documents queer domestic life, queer historical erasure, queer men buying lakefront houses on television that never shows them, ends up scattered across a website, a shorter Facebook post, a TikTok clip with the edges filed down, each platform getting a different, incomplete version of the same argument. The full picture only exists in one place, and it is not owned by anyone with a terms of service.

The suits in the painting keep marching. They do not know they are being watched back.

— Behan

Enter Laughing

After The Long Goodbye

Robert Altman’s 1973 film buried a strange scene inside a fairly ordinary detective plot. A gangster, trying to intimidate Philip Marlowe, orders his own henchmen to strip naked — among them a young, uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger, reigning Mr. Olympia at the time, silently flexing for the camera while the scene’s actual menace quietly evaporates. Marlowe stays unbothered. The muscle, the machismo, the whole staged threat collapses into something closer to spectacle than intimidation — noir posturing that trips over its own hidden wiring.

The ground of this collage is that scene itself — a sequence of stills lifted directly from the strip sequence, dialogue fragments still legible across the surface, Schwarzenegger and the room of half-dressed men laid out almost like a contact sheet. Onto that ground, actual gay figures are added — not commenting on the scene from outside it, but standing inside it, completing a picture Altman filmed but never quite let himself finish.

The original scene worked because everyone in it insisted it was something else. This collage removes the insisting.

— Behan

To Live and Die in (Gay) LA

A film sequence is remade.

Earth to HGTV

Do Gay People Not Buy Lakefront Property?

Four episodes of a lake house-hunting show, back to back. Four straight white couples living the lakefront dream. Diversity? Don’t ask HGTV.

The subdivision reimagines those episodes as the network never quite manages to. Same format, same captions, same real estate agent with the same easy smile — just populated with the couples HGTV keeps finding reasons to leave out. Tom loves Dick. Chuck meets Jeremy while house-hunting with his wife. It could happen. It should have happened already.

— Behan

Order Up

Easy Bolognese Bow Tie Pasta

A simple weeknight spaghetti riff — caramelized red onion, Rao’s Homestyle Bolognese, and a balsamic finish over farfalle.

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1 box farfalle (bow tie) pasta

• 3 red onions, coarsely chopped

• 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, divided

• 1 jar Rao’s Homestyle Bolognese sauce

• 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar of Modena

• Salt, to taste

• Black pepper, to taste

Instructions

1. Boil the pasta. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the farfalle and cook until al dente.

2. Soften the onions. While the pasta cooks, heat 2 tbsp of the olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft and lightly golden.

3. Build the sauce. Stir the Bolognese into the pan with the onions. Add the balsamic vinegar, then season with salt and pepper. Let simmer to bring the flavors together.

4. Drain and toss the pasta. Drain the pasta, then toss it with the remaining olive oil to keep it from sticking.

5. Serve. Spoon the pasta into a large, low bowl, top with the onion-Bolognese sauce, and serve.

Adjust balsamic and seasoning to taste — the vinegar cuts nicely through the richness of the sauce.

Cooking for One

There’s a version of this recipe that serves four, and there’s the version most closeted men actually cook: the same pot, the same care, portioned down to a single bowl.

Cooking for two is a different act entirely from cooking for one. It carries negotiation — what someone else likes, what they’ll eat again, the small adjustments made without thinking because another person is at the table. Cooking for one carries none of that. It’s just the recipe and the man who made it, eaten standing at the counter or alone in a low bowl, exactly as planned and exactly as expected. As Behan put it: cooking for two, or shared cooking, is a much different experience than cooking by yourself for yourself. The difference isn’t in the ingredients. It’s in who the meal was for.

For generations, the kitchen was one of the few places a gay man’s private life could hide in plain sight. The professional culinary world was full of closeted men who shaped what America eats — James Beard, whose name now sits on the country’s most prestigious food award, foremost among them. The writer John Birdsall has traced how gay food figures like Beard treated cooking as pleasure taken seriously, an end in itself, at a time when almost nothing else in a gay man’s public life was permitted to be. Cooking became the one skill that could be displayed without suspicion, sometimes even praised, while everything underneath it stayed hidden.

That’s where the gaze comes in. A man learning to smoke meat, master a grill, or run a competitive barbecue circuit could wear those skills as armor — a hyper-masculine, technically rigorous hobby that deflected the kind of scrutiny an interest in fashion or design might invite. A man who hosted well, who kept a beautiful home and a full table, built a kind of smokescreen out of hospitality: the visible markers of a successful, conventional life, arranged carefully enough that no one thought to ask about the rest of it. Under public gaze, cooking could be turned into camouflage. Alone, away from that gaze, it could just as easily become something closer to relief — a tactile, private hour where a man didn’t have to perform anything for anyone, including himself.

Both of those things can be true of the same pot of pasta. What they share is an audience of one. That’s the quieter cost of the closet, the one that doesn’t show up in the history books next to the famous names — not the fear, which gets most of the attention, but the accumulation of small acts, meals included, that were built for a table that never had a second chair. It’s worth saying plainly, too, that this isn’t only history. The closet still exists, and men are still cooking dinner for one tonight for the same reasons men cooked dinner for one fifty years ago.

So: cook the recipe above. Cook it for yourself first, if that’s where you are. Notice what changes the day it’s for two.

[Image: “naked cooking in an apron”]

Giants and Monsters

Giants and Monsters

Giants

Scale does something a caption never could. Make one body enormous and everyone smaller than it changes how they stand — closer together, easier with each other, unbothered by what looms over them.

There’s an old kind of scene buried under this one: a huge man planted with his legs apart, an army passing underneath, looking up without quite meaning to, finding “opportunities for laughter and admiration” in what they see. Nobody in these four collages says that out loud. Nobody has to. The looking is doing the same work it always did — half comedy, half something more private — while the small figures below just keep talking, keep posing for a photo, keep being ordinary in the shadow of something extraordinary.

That indifference is the whole point. The giant isn’t a threat to the people underneath him. He’s just the landscape — a mountain, a fact of the terrain, something you build your afternoon around without a second thought. Being gay was never the problem for gay people. It was only ever the backdrop of an ordinary life.

After Swift

Jonathan Swift wrote this scene three hundred years ago and didn’t fully know what he’d written. In Gulliver’s Travels, the giant Englishman stands “like a Colossus,” legs spread as far apart as he can manage, while the entire Lilliputian army marches underneath him — and because his breeches are torn, the soldiers get a clear look straight up. Gulliver reports, with a straight face, that this affords the men “some Opportunities for Laughter and Admiration.”

Scholars have been unpacking that line for decades. A body turned into spectacle. Thousands of small men gathered to look up at one enormous one, laughter and admiration arriving in the same breath, the giant both exposed and completely in command of the room. It’s voyeuristic. It’s frankly phallic. Swift almost certainly meant it as a joke about vanity and empire — and it works as that — but the image itself doesn’t stay contained to the joke.

These four collages take that image and turn its attention around. Swift’s soldiers can’t stop looking up. The figures here barely look at all. Whatever anxiety the giant might stir up belongs entirely to whoever’s doing the staring — not to the people standing calmly underneath him.

That’s the real subject. While straight culture keeps circling the question of what to do about gay people — how to name it, manage it, legislate it, look away from it and then look back — gay people are simply over here living, openly, honestly, unremarkably. That openness is what actually unsettles the culture that built the closet in the first place. It was never built to punish gay people for existing. It was built to make sure no one had to watch them exist in the open. The old preferred outcome was always the same: the closeted politician, married to no one, quietly finding himself through men who could be paid and dismissed, appetite intact and reputation untouched. Silence was the deal. What these collages show instead is the deal broken — the mountain simply standing there, indifferent, permanent, unbothered by who’s uncomfortable looking at it.

Call it a giant if the size is what unsettles you. The real monster is the one who decides another person’s way of living is unacceptable — unacceptable enough to erase entirely. That decision forever earns the name monster.

— Behan

Leaning Ambient

A Reflection on Reflection

This collage looks at composition. In particular it was a compositional exercise. For me as an artist, a compositional exercise is like an athlete doing cardio. Composition is my cardio.

What we have here is an examination of space and perspective, created primarily in this case with the three grounds: background, middle ground, foreground. Those three zones are exaggerated in this composition to create a maximum expression of the illusion of space.

My goal — always the prima facie goal with all my work — is to create a visually interesting image or object. That’s the first goal, the first fact, and then everything else — the subject, the idea, the message — moves from that.

This piece, being an exercise in composition, my cardio, is focusing on the concept of space being created through light. The fact that we can see the figures on a ground is because the figures contained within the ground are all ambient or reflective of light. And the word reflection, of course, can also mean to think, to meditate, to ponder. Likewise, my idea for a title, if I were to give it one, is something a little cheesy, but it gets the idea: Reflecting on Reflection. Or Reflections of Reflection. I think I like that one better.

I hope everyone enjoys this digital collage, because in the end, my goal is to create a visually interesting image or object, whether or not you like it.

— Behan

Sweetie

The Sweet Life

In To Kill a Mockingbird, a plate of roast beef mashed potatoes and vegetables is covered in thick maple syrup.

In La Dolce Vita, Fellini creates a wandering film classic, anything but sweet. Maybe syrup? Idk.

In two new merged diptychs, digital photo collages, Behan looks for that same sweetness — the sweet life that everyone dreams of, hopes for, gay or straight, and everyone deserves a shot at, win or lose.

Surely Fellini and Atticus would agree, syrup and all.

— Behan

The Calamus

Walt Whitman lived and wrote as a man who loved men, openly, in his own time and on the page. These thirteen collages carry the calamus alongside him, as tribute.

A Glimpse

Walt Whitman

A glimpse through an interstice caught,

Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner,

Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,

A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest,

There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.

Orders

Marching Orders

In and among the content creators featured in these four collages is one historical figure of note—Sean Flynn. The son of Errol Flynn — movie star looks, a famous last name, a straight shot into filmmaking if he wanted it. Instead, he spit out the silver spoon, picked up a camera, photographing a war nobody at home wanted to look at. Then he vanished into Cambodia in 1970 and was never seen again.

That’s one particular American man who rejected the script he was handed. Which is really the whole subject here.

Stand like this. Move like this. Want this, in this order. Follow it long enough and it stops feeling like an instruction — it feels like personality, like nature, like who you always were.

Straight men have carried that weight for a long time. Gay men got something heavier: the closet, built specifically to keep an entire population quiet and out of sight. It held for centuries, and it held well.

All four collages share one detail — a line of men in suits marching across the upper right corner, in step, going nowhere in particular. Think of them as the escort that walks beside every man, pointing at the line and what happens if he steps off it. Flynn stepped off it, camera first, and a purple moon hangs behind him here — the color this work saves for queer allies. Given what’s known of his politics, he’s earned it.

Marching orders, plural, then: the ones issued to everyone, and the harsher second set issued to some. The men in these four collages are still here to receive them.