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.

And Away We Go

Postscript

Three years into this body of work, and it’s almost entirely about other people — men from a hundred years ago, men from twenty years ago, men who barely made it into the historical record at all. It would be easy, doing that kind of work, to end up standing outside it, a historian cataloguing someone else’s desire. That was never really the intent.

The work comes from somewhere. A person still very much in motion, still curious, still open to what might come next — not in a chronicler of what desire used to look like, but someone who still expects to feel it directly, firsthand, again. If there’s one hope threaded through all of it, it’s a straightforward one: a real relationship, romantic and mutual, somewhere up ahead rather than behind.

— Behan

The One In the Middle

The first digital collage starts with a base historical photo, overlaid with a set of figures — the kissing couple and attendant figure— plus a blue moon and a swan added into the frame.

The second image takes that first collage and runs it through a TikTok filter, shifting the whole thing into tiled greens and teals. On top of that filtered base, a new set of figures gets overlaid — the two men gripping and embracing, closer in now, brought forward.

The third collage starts fresh with a new base photo, related to the original historical base from image one, but this time carrying forward the overlaid figures from image two — the same two men, now set against a different scene, with a gold moon and two seated men watching.

Three steps. Base, filter-and-build, then a new base carrying the last layer forward — a stair-step process ending in something different from where it started, one that only makes sense once you’ve seen the step in the middle.

Personally, I’ve always enjoyed most being the one in the middle.

— Behan

The Mountain

Come to the Mountain

Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

Three men, staged in an embrace built for the frame, sit beneath a blue moon and a pink moon — longing and pleasure, both present at once — their skin tones pushed into that heightened, saturated color The Subdivision favors, the Jupiter 3 above them watching as it always does. The trio’s physical ease, the game consoles and screens crowding the room behind them, the anime posters on the wall — this is a set built for a generation fluent in a language older generations never had.

These collages take their shape from new words the twenty-first century has developed for a changing understanding of male intimacy — terms coined not by academics or institutions but by men themselves, working out in real time how to describe what they were feeling and doing with each other. Below are five of those terms, in alphabetical order, with their expanded definitions.

bro job (BROH-job), noun, slang — A sexual act between two straight-identifying men, framed by its participants as outside the bounds of gay identity. The term insists on a separation between act and identity that queer theory has been arguing against for decades — behavior is not identity — but here the insistence runs the other direction, from inside straight culture itself.

bromance (BROH-mans), noun — An intensely close, non-sexual emotional bond between straight men, marked by affection, physical ease, and loyalty that would once have read as romantic. Coined mid-2000s, now fully mainstream.

edging (EJ-ing), verb (gerund) — Deliberately approaching orgasm and repeatedly backing off before climax, solo or partnered, to intensify eventual release or extend arousal. Old technique, new name.

goon room (GOON-room), noun, slang — An online space, usually a voice or video chat, where participants watch adult films together and masturbate in parallel, often for extended sessions built around edging. Communal in structure, anonymous in practice.

manosphere (MAN-oh-sfeer), noun — The loose network of online spaces, forums, and influencers organized around masculinity, self-improvement, and often a grievance narrative about men’s diminished status. Context, not content: it’s the water these other terms increasingly swim in.

A living language is just that, responsive to the linguistic needs of its contemporary audience. For this post, the mountain in the title reflects the climb toward a language for what men have always felt and rarely had words for. And that’s a good thing.

— Behan

Heroes and Halos

Heroes and Halos

Actors Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis reunite in this collage from their prime, set against a moment from the Defiant Ones played out in successive stills — the source film running behind them with background text.

A purple moon crowns Poitier: allyship, the halo of a straight man who stood by his friend without condition. A pink moon crowns Curtis: queerness, worn openly here, not smuggled through subtext the way the era demanded. The two moons don’t compete. They complete each other, the way the two men did off-screen for the rest of their lives.

Looking back today to 1965: a straight man and a queer man, one Black and one white, friends and allies, together represented the best of what a man could be at the middle of the twentieth century.

Most though did not understand it, recognize it, or embrace it.

It’s never too late to get it right.

— Behan

BW and the Baron

Benjamin, William, and the Baron

Nobody alive can say with certainty that Benjamin Walker, William North, and Baron von Steuben were America’s first recorded male throuple. But nobody can say they weren’t, either. That’s precisely where the closet leaves us — not a denial, just a permanent, maddening maybe.

So, for the sake of argument, The Subdivision accepts the premise. Say they were lovers. Say the household they shared, the will that named them heirs, the letter calling it love and meaning it literally — say all of it was exactly what it looks like.

What would that actually change?

Nothing.

Baron von Steuben still took a starving, undisciplined collection of colonial militia at Valley Forge and drilled them into the force that helped win a war. Benjamin Walker still stepped forward at exactly the right moment with the French fluency the army needed and became indispensable to it. William North still served, still commanded, still earned George Washington’s own written praise as one of the most capable officers of the entire Continental Army. Three formidable, effective, trusted men — full stop — whose competence, valor, and consequence to the Revolution stand completely independent of who they loved in whatever private hours the war allowed them.

That’s the whole point of accepting the premise rather than arguing it. The men don’t get smaller. The history doesn’t get smaller. Only the old, tired assumption that it might have — a lie — gets exposed for what it always was.

— Behan, Improving American History one incomplete painting at a time.

WAM

What a Man | Gay Gaze | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

Five men, one hundred years, three decades of birth, each fifty years apart, all sharing one frame — the men from the 1920s in the background, the men from the 1970s in the middle, and the man from the 2020s at the very front. Not just three looks. Three different official answers to the same question: what is a man allowed to be?

The 1920s

The men in the background belong to an era defined by restraint — social restraint above all else. There was one gender, understood as fixed and self-evident. There was one orientation, assumed and unquestioned. The rules weren’t merely suggested, they were structural, and a man’s entire public self was built around visibly obeying them. Nothing about being gay, or bisexual, or anything other than the single sanctioned category was permitted to exist in daylight, let alone in a photograph. Manhood here wasn’t really about the body at all. It was about compliance, the suit, worn on the outside, where everyone could see it.

The 1970s

Still a suit, but now it’s all about leisure. The men in the middle belong to a genuinely different world — an era of expression rather than restraint. Men were finding their feminine sides. Gay rights had become a public, organized movement rather than a private, dangerous secret. Bisexuality entered the mainstream conversation in ways that would have been unthinkable fifty years earlier — even Penthouse, a men’s magazine built for a straight readership, ran essays exploring it. This was a decade of real openness: access to alternative materials, alternative thinking, alternative lifestyles, all suddenly circulating in the culture rather than being suppressed by it. If the 1920s asked a man to comply, the 1970s asked him to expand.

The 2020s

The man in the foreground belongs to right now, and right now doesn’t have a clean answer the way the other two decades did. We seem to be moving forward and backward at the same time. A significant part of the population wants to return to something like the 1920s — restraint, fixed categories, a single sanctioned way to be a man. Another significant part wants to keep pushing forward the freedoms the 1970s opened up. Both pulls are happening simultaneously, creating an unbelievable cultural tension. What a man is allowed to be right now isn’t settled. It’s being actively fought over, in real time, with no guaranteed outcome.

Restraint, expression, and now — contest. We don’t know who wins. We can only hope.

— Behan

The Pass

Three Day Pass / On the Town

Three sailors. A brief, sanctioned window of freedom. That’s the premise both films share, down to the smallest detail — On the Town, 1949, sends Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin racing across New York with twenty-four hours before their ship sails. Three Day Pass, filmed some three decades later, sends J.W. King, R.J. Reynolds, and Shaun Victors out with the same clock running, in a genre the culture never let anywhere near a movie palace. Same uniform. Same leave. Same basic dare: find something worth finding before duty reclaims you.

Neither film has much of a conventional plot. What both have instead is an Odyssean journey — a string of strangers and small adventures rather than a single destination, each one mattering for exactly as long as it lasts. Neither story asks to be resolved, because neither is really about arriving anywhere. It’s about the interval itself — the three days, the twenty-four hours, the temporary and specific freedom of a man in uniform who is, for once, not required to report to anyone.

Both films end the same way, too, and it’s worth saying plainly: the sailors get back on the boat. Everyone they met along the way stays behind. That ending isn’t a failure of storytelling in either film — it’s the entire point. The people are real inside the leave and gone the moment it’s over, the way anything found on a pass by definition has to be given back.

What ties these two films together isn’t just the premise — it’s that both were the work of a true auteur, one man’s vision worn in more than one role at once. Gene Kelly co-directed, choreographed, and starred in On the Town. Nick Eliot wrote, directed, and shot Three Day Pass himself, trained specifically for the job behind the camera with a master’s in motion picture production from UCLA. Neither film passed its vision down through a chain of separate departments — each ran through a single set of eyes, just with different resources behind them. Kelly had a studio’s money and crew to realize his; Eliot had almost none, doing far more of the work with far less.

Two sailors’ stories, three decades apart, each one man’s singular vision realized on a different scale — and neither one needed a resolution to be worth the time spent inside it.

— Behan

Two = One

Two Stills, One Light

Two becoming one — a classical, timeless phrase, biblical in its intonation, pervasive throughout Western culture, the idea of two merging into a single whole. That is, in fact, the nature of these two works: formally independent images, self-sustaining, equally interesting each in their own right, merging together to become seamlessly integrated, inseparable — one.

The Wrestlers

Gustave Courbet painted The Wrestlers in 1853, working, as always, from something he’d actually seen — a real match, staged at the old hippodrome on the Champs-Élysées, two men straining against each other in front of a crowd. Courbet was a Realist by conviction, not by default; he built an entire career on refusing to idealize a body into something classical, something safer than what was actually in front of him. Even so, writing to his parents about the Salon showing, he admitted he’d “covered their nudity” — proof that the classical half of this pairing wasn’t as chaste in its own moment as it now reads. Even a painter this committed to unflinching observation still worked inside a limit someone else had drawn.

The film still beside it shares that same basic grammar: two male bodies locked together, a diagonal thrust of limb against limb, weight and effort caught at the exact moment neither man has yet won. Set the two side by side and the vocabulary is nearly identical — not because one is quoting the other, but because two bodies in real physical contest only have so many ways to arrange themselves. Courbet drew the same lines a camera draws a century later, because the bodies themselves were always going to draw them first.

The Vessel

Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, painted around 1658, isn’t about contest at all. It’s about absorption — a woman entirely inside a small, ordinary task, pouring milk from a jug with a stillness so complete the viewer feels almost intrusive watching it. Nothing in the painting performs for anyone. That’s the whole quiet genius of it.

The still beside it works on that same register, not the Courbet’s. Two figures caught in a private, unglamorous room — a laundromat, a box of Tide in frame — absorbed in something entirely their own, unbothered by an audience that technically exists but isn’t being acknowledged. It isn’t about matching poses. It’s about matching interiority: two images, three centuries apart, both built around the same rare thing — a person caught fully inside a private act, asking nothing of whoever happens to be looking.

Two Kinds of the Same

Physicality and interiority — contest and absorption — these are two different energies, and the two pairings shouldn’t be read as saying the same thing twice. But underneath both sits one shared fact, worth naming plainly rather than dressing up: whether the medium is a nineteenth-century oil painting or a late-twentieth-century adult film, both are, in the end, simply light, arranged on a surface, describing a body. The vocabulary doesn’t change nearly as much as the culture insists it should.

Which is really the whole point of placing two images next to each other in the first place. Not two artworks displayed together, but one new artwork, made entirely out of the gap between them — a gap that, once closed by proximity, stops existing at all.

When I’m 64

Eighty-nine names sit on a list published by People magazine of celebrities American culture lost this year. Eighty-eight carry an age, and sorted by decade, one number stands apart. Only eight people died in their sixties — fewer than any decade around it, a real dip between the thirty-five who died younger and the forty-five who died older.

Sixty-five is also the long-established retirement age, the number a life is supposed to slow down at. The list seems to agree, on the surface. Low numbers, a quiet decade, the look of something people simply get through.

And while the statistics tell us if you can get to your sixties, you have a good chance of surviving them, even thriving into your seventies and eighties, that’s not always the case. Two of the eight who didn’t are Jim Hartung and Claude Lemieux, and the collage accompanying this post is a memoriam to both.

They share a timeline. Both are born in the sixties. Both rise to the height of their sport in the mid eighties, Hartung on the medal stand at the 1984 Olympics, Lemieux hoisting his first Stanley Cup in 1986. Their early years were the model of the male physique — trained, disciplined, built for the moment history hands them. The body that wins the gold, or wins the Cup. That same body, decades later, not making it through the one decade built to carry that body through.

We honor the lives they lived. Godspeed, gentlemen, and all those on the list, on the next part of the journey.

— Behan

Source: People, “Remembering All the Stars Who’ve Died in 2026”

Thoroughly Modern

The word “porn” used to describe one specific thing. It first drifted outside that meaning in 1977, when the New York Review of Books coined “gastroporn” to describe a lavishly illustrated French cookbook — a jab at how the photography seemed more interested in seducing the reader than feeding them.

By 1984, critic Rosalind Coward had sharpened that into “food porn” proper, a term that stayed mostly confined to media criticism for the next two decades.

Then social media arrived, and the hashtag did what hashtags do: it took a pointed, slightly academic critique and flattened it into an aesthetic category anyone could apply to anything. Today “food porn,” “real estate porn,” “travel porn,” “car porn,” aren’t critiques anymore. They’re genres.

What actually happened in that shift wasn’t really about food, or houses, or vacations. It’s that “pornographic” stopped meaning explicit and started meaning simply intensified — anything shot, lit, and cropped specifically to trigger a want rather than convey information.

An underwear ad and an adult film both do exactly that. They’re both engineered to produce desire on contact, using nearly identical formal tools: skin, proximity, a body arranged for maximum visual pull. The only real difference left is what happens next — whether the desire ends at a shopping cart or somewhere more private. Strip that ending away and look only at the image itself, and the line gets hard to find.

That’s what these four collages are quietly arguing: three are underwear advertising, one is adult film, and the fact that it takes effort to sort which is which is an accurate report on where the culture’s visual grammar has evolved.

None of this is a complaint about explicit content existing, or a complaint about advertising being seductive — both have always done exactly what they’re built to do. It’s a smaller and stranger observation: that the aesthetic vocabulary built specifically for one has become the default vocabulary for the other, until an entire visual culture, food included, runs on the logic of arousal whether or not arousal was ever the actual point.

Now back to the collages, which one is sourced from an adult film?

Does it matter? All four could sell underwear.

— Behan

Sunday Curb

Somebody’s curb pull becomes somebody’s centerpiece. The transaction is that old and that simple.

This curved mahogany piece — reeded legs, brass casters, a shallow well built for something other than flowers — sits at the curb one week and holds court on the covered porch the next. No sanding, no stripping, no new finish. Just water, soil, and vinca spilling over the rail where a drawer or a tray used to sit. The wood keeps its scars. The shape does the rest of the work.

Furniture like this gets discarded for reasons that have nothing to do with its bones. A stain, a wobble, a style out of fashion in a particular decade. The frame outlives all of it. Set among ferns and impatiens, the piece stops being furniture in the conventional sense and becomes structure — something the plants grow into rather than sit on top of.

The instinct isn’t rare right now. Furniture repair and reupholstery is a market measured in billions, growing on the strength of people choosing restoration over replacement. Antique furniture restoration in particular is having a moment, driven by collectors and casual owners alike who want the object to keep going rather than start over. None of that is new information to anyone who has ever hauled something home from the curb. It just means the instinct now has a market size attached to it.

The dog underneath is Talavera — tin-glazed earthenware out of Puebla, hand-painted in the cobalt and ochre the tradition has carried since Spanish potters and local craft merged four centuries ago. The table above it used to be someone’s problem. Now it’s holding pink.

— Behan

Sources: Furniture Repair Service Market Size, Share & Forecast (Verified Market Research); Key Trends in the Antique Furniture Restoration Service Market (STATS N DATA); Furniture Repair & Reupholstery in the US, IBISWorld

On Space

Interiors

Four rooms on a gradient scale

What is realism? Is it believable scale, an accurate recreation of light? Is it the way the eye sees, or the way the heart sees?

Who’s to say what’s more or less real?

For a millennium and more, Western culture treated a gay relationship as less real than a straight one — less legitimate, less lasting, less worth building a room around.

In the light of day, we’re finding out that isn’t true.

It never was.

Different scale. Same light.

Double STUFF

Harrison Cone on His Current Role with The Bold and the Beautiful

Cone plays Deke, a fashion designer at Forrester Creations and the romantic interest of Remy Pryce (Christian Weissmann) — the show’s first-ever male gay couple, sharing its first on-screen kiss between two men in the soap’s history. Speaking about the role, Cone said he was excited simply to be part of the show, and that learning the storyline would give viewers representation to feel connected to meant a great deal to him — adding that he wanted the moment to feel special for the fans.

On chemistry with Weissmann: “I feel like we had good chemistry right from the start. It was really easy to stay present with each other. I’m very thankful to have him as my on-screen boyfriend because he’s super sweet and made it easy to get to know.”

On the significance of the storyline: “It’s a landmark, pivotal moment in the history of the show, which is a super exciting period to be a part of the show.” (Out Magazine 2025)

Harrison Cone on the Value and Importance of Supporting Gay and Trans Rights

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Harrison Cone on His Favorite Line, from a Naluda Magazine Interview

Asked to share a quote he lives by, Cone offered a line by Seamus Heaney: “Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.” (Naluda Magazine, 2024)

Ambience

On the Nature of Light | The Gay Domestic | The Subdivision | Digital photograph | 2026

Not everything in The Subdivision has to be built. Some of it just has to be noticed.

This is a straight photograph. No collage, no layering. The house set this photo up on its own. The way it has since its foundations were laid in nineteen sixty two. More than a residence, this house is my largest installation today.

A plant in the foreground reads as six different greens. None of that belongs to the plant itself. It belongs to the light that is falling on it. The glass is refracting. The same thing that puts a rainbow in a garden hose spray.

Water sitting on a vertical plane bends light differently depending on thickness and angle.

The result looks composed. It isn’t. It’s just weather, glass, and a moment in time. This is the view from my kitchen. This is the view, diffused light or clearly visible, I love most.

— Behan

Fever Dream

Variations on a Fugue | Digital Photocollage | On Gays Who Dream | The Gay Gaze | Te Subdivision | 2026

A body sprawls across the frame at a scale nothing else in the image can match — a leg here, an arm there, a face turned sideways and half-asleep at the center of it all, other men orbiting in fragments too small to be anything but decoration on something larger than themselves. This is the colossus: not one man but the accumulation of many, dreamed into a single recumbent giant too big for the frame to hold steady.

The set follows a fugue’s own logic. A fugue states its subject once, cleanly, before the rest of the piece takes that subject apart and puts it back together in new keys, new speeds, new voices layered on top of the original line. The pool image here is that subject — the first version made, blue water beneath the whole composition, the figures arriving in their most unforced arrangement. Everything after it is variation: the color shifted into blood orange, the frame cropped tighter around the sleeping face, the whole thing repackaged as a pulp magazine cover, “BEEFCAKE” bleeding in at the edges like type intruding on a dream. None of the variations are lesser. They’re what a fugue does with its subject once it’s been stated — testing what the idea can survive, how far it can be pushed before it stops being recognizably itself.

Beneath these visual variations is a real question, and it turns out someone has actually gone looking for the answer. A small study out of Germany recently asked something almost nobody had bothered to ask before: do gay men and straight men dream differently? The researchers polled over a hundred men about their inner lives while asleep, and the results were, on the whole, reassuringly unremarkable — nightmares, anxiety dreams, the ordinary furniture of a sleeping mind, distributed about the same regardless of who a man loved awake. But a few differences did surface. Gay men reported more sexual dreams. A higher ratio of men to women populating the dreams themselves. More romantic content generally, more of it involving other men.

Which is, on reflection, not remarkable at all. It would only be surprising if the desiring mind clocked out the moment the eyes closed — if orientation were something a person could set down at bedtime the way you set down a phone. It isn’t. The dreaming brain, it turns out, is simply continuing the same conversation the waking one was already having, just without the editor on duty. No closet operates at three in the morning. No audience to perform correctness for. Whatever a man actually wants surfaces on its own schedule, unsupervised, the moment consciousness stops managing the story.

That’s the real subject of this collage, more than any single figure in it. A fever dream isn’t a hallucination out of nowhere — it’s ordinary desire running at a higher temperature than the waking hours allow, all the fragments a life doesn’t have room to arrange neatly stacking on top of each other instead: an athlete’s leg, a stranger’s face, a hockey jersey glimpsed on a phone screen, a UFO drifting past all of it as though even the fantasy needed an exit route. The colossus isn’t a person. It’s what accumulates in a mind that has spent its waking hours being careful, the moment the carefulness finally goes off duty.

— Behan

Source: study on sexual orientation and dream content, Journal of Homosexuality, cited via Happening Out Television Network, “New Study Considers If Gay & Straight Men Dream Differently,” January 2025.