Saturday Evening Flex

I like the way these three new digital collages evolved: each one placing the male figure in motion: flexing, lifting, carrying, surfing, posing. The blue moon and Jupiter 3 recur across all three like familiar friends, placing these bodies in a world slightly outside ordinary gravity. Fragments of the original screens are left in place. These figures came from the social media feed, and the work does not hide that.

And the strength emanating feels right. This year, my own relationship with strength has changed.

About 11 months ago, I started working with a personal trainer. We've been consistent three days a week, plus another day a week on my own in the gym. I have found this to be one of the most important developments occurring with my advancing age and impending work transition. I have discovered the love of the gym and working out, how it makes me feel, and the energy it gives me. I am really excited by it and grateful to have found it, like these digital photo collages.

Why it matters after 60, some stats:

• Age-related muscle loss can begin around 35 and can accelerate to 3% a year after 60.

• Adults who do not strength train can lose 4 to 6 pounds of muscle per decade.

• One in three adults 65 and older falls each year. Stronger muscles lower the risk of falling and of serious injury.

• Federal guidelines recommend strength training at least two days a week.

Four days a week. Eleven months. Still going. Let’s do this.

The Visitor

One trip to the 1950s, two trips to 2026, and more than a century between him and his new friends.

Each collage has its own personality.

So does Hackenschmidt. He fits wherever he lands.

P.S. About Hackenschmidt

Georg Hackenschmidt is born in 1877 in Dorpat, in the Russian Empire (now Tartu, Estonia). He trains as a weightlifter and wrestler, and in 1905 he becomes the first recognized world heavyweight wrestling champion. His physique photographs circulate across Europe and America, making him one of the first celebrity strongmen in the first Wed cake fashion. He settles in London, publishes The Way to Live in Health and Physical Fitness in 1908, and later writes books on philosophy. He stays active into old age and dies in London in 1968 at the age of 90. All accounts point to him being a happy guy. These three collages celebrate a well lived life.

I Died a Thousand Times (1955)

The Original

Paroled bank robber Roy Earle (Jack Palance) leaves prison and takes on one last job: robbing a resort hotel in the California Sierras. Along the way he grows attached to a young woman, Velma, and forms an uneasy bond with Marie (Shelley Winters), a dance-hall girl who follows him. Filmed in color and CinemaScope, this 1955 remake of High Sierra is a fatalistic crime drama about a criminal who cannot escape his past.

The Reimagined Version

Paroled bank robber Roy Earle (Jack Palance), a closeted gay man, leaves prison and takes on one last job: robbing a resort hotel in the California Sierras. Along the way he grows attached to Vic, a young man whose affection he cannot openly return, and he forms an uneasy bond with Marie (Shelley Winters), a dance-hall girl who follows him and shields his secret. Filmed in color and CinemaScope, this reimagined remake of High Sierra is a fatalistic crime drama about a gay criminal who cannot escape his past.

The Great American Pool and the Visible Gay Male

The Great American Pool: Hockney and the Visible Gay Male Figure

In the second half of the 20th century, the swimming pool was recognized as the quintessential sign of middle-class success, indicating financial stability and the luxury of leisure.

British artist David Hockney took this familiar setting as a stage for normalizing the presence of the gay male figure in American culture. In the 1960s and 1970s, the general public knew very little about gay life because it was rarely shown in mainstream images. By combining a widely known structure with a mostly hidden subject, Hockney presented gay men as part of the same landscape as everyone else. The images remain outwardly calm, yet each is a radical act.

My digital collages extend Hockney's assertion in an homage to his work. Where Hockney often showed the gay male figure alone or as a pair, the figures in my collages appear in groups and crowds around the pool. They are openly gay, with some embracing and kissing.

Where Hockney's paintings say we are here, my collages add and we are everywhere.

As we always have been.

Oh, Johnny: Johnny Angel and the Advance of Queer Culture in 1962

Consider the moment: a young girl steps onto the stage to sing a song in front of her mom and boyfriend. The song is about a secret love, a love that is yet to be spoken. It is unrequited and patient, waiting for recognition.

In February 1962, a song called "Johnny Angel" hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It was sung by Shelley Fabares, then a regular cast member on The Donna Reed Show, playing the role of Mary Stone. The song was written into an episode of the show as part of Mary Stone's storyline, then released as a single and became a genuine chart hit on its own.

The song is about unrequited love. The person singing it has fixed all their feelings on someone who does not know they exist. And they carry that feeling alone, in silence, with little expectation it will be acknowledged.

The connection between those lyrics and the reality of gay men and women in the early 1960s, and for years afterward, is clear. A same-sex attraction in that era had nowhere to go. It could not be spoken aloud. It had to be carried privately, the way the song describes, with no guarantee it would ever be answered.

That connection is reinforced by how often gay culture has actually reached for this song and this name in the decades since. A gay bar in Lexington, Kentucky was named Johnny Angel. Two well-known gay adult film performers used Johnny Angel as their stage name. And as recently as 2025, a gay couple chose "Johnny Angel" as their wedding song.

Johnny Angel can be seen as a type of tragic anthem of the closet. It is an anthem of longing, of unexpressed love, and what could have been had the culture been willing to let that feeling be spoken.

Current Work James Behan

No century in human history comes close to matching the twentieth for violence and for the sheer scale of existential threat it poses to humanity's survival, producing two catastrophic world wars and a weapon of mass destruction capable of ending everything in a single moment. Real and active today, for nearly eighty years now, humanity has lived under the shadow of total annihilation, a condition it has never faced before. The reach toward this ultimate destruction inspires an equal reach back to the first impulses of creativity: childlike wonder and innocence, expressed through child-inspired imagery, themes, and products.

Paul Klee begins this work in earnest in the 1920s, building stick figures and dreamlike forms drawn directly from children's art, working from the belief that untrained expression cannot lie the way academic technique can. His influence carries into Jean Dubuffet's Art Brut and the CoBrA painters after World War II, who push that same idea further: returning to something unschooled and child-inspired strips a culture's polish away, after that polish has just produced a war. Mike Kelley later uses real, worn, secondhand stuffed toys to ask what a comforting object might conceal. Takashi Murakami's Superflat movement, and his exhibition Little Boy — named for the Hiroshima bomb — argues postwar Japan's cuteness is itself a response to national trauma. Precious Okoyomon continues this thread today, building stuffed-toy hybrids that hold care and harm at once. Collectively, these artists and many others are calling humanity back from the brink of destruction.

Behan's work entered this conversation with a mixed media painting titled Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 2021, 8' x 8'. This mixed media work includes an image of the artist as an infant in a baby chair, alongside the Liddle Kiddles Klub playset and its dolls, a toy from the artist's own childhood. This work directly responds to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the world came closest to nuclear war at any point in history. It is the first piece in this body of work, and much like the event and the artist's own life, everything following grows from it.

Four streams flow from this 2021 painting, and all four are still active today: soft sculpture, digital photo collage, interactive sculpture, and a continued exploration of mixed media painting. None of them replaces another. They run alongside each other, the way tributaries run from a single source, live in the truest sense, still flowing, still being added to, each one carrying the same reach toward child-inspired material into a different form.

Two products carry the interactive sculptures specifically: Mattel's Barbie and Ken line, and Fisher-Price's Play Family, known today as Little People. Both were built to teach a restrictive heteronormative model of adult life through play. These sculptures use this same product exactly as it was designed to be used, posed, dressed, arranged into a scene, nothing about the mechanics changes. What changes is the range of relationships the pieces are allowed to hold: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, plus intersectional and asexual alongside straight. With these works, the claim is direct: diversity, equity, and inclusion are the answer to the brink humanity stands on. As the artist puts it: "Every time we make a step toward diversity, equity, and inclusion, we take a step away from the brink of destruction."

The Greek phrase pantoporos aporos, from Sophocles' Antigone, has stood behind this artist portfolio for years: resourceful in everything, and yet without a way through. It describes humanity at its most capable, able to sail any sea and cure any disease and build any city, running headlong into the one limit no cleverness escapes. In October 1962, that limit was not abstract. The United States drew an actual line in the water around Cuba, a naval quarantine line, and told the Soviet Union plainly a ship crossing it would be met with force. For thirteen days, the world's full resourcefulness ran up against one line on a map that could not be negotiated past, only stopped at. That paradox sits at the center of this project.

Epilogue: The Enemy Was Us

This opus begins in 2026, with an alleged whistleblower from Anthropic who has declared, without hysteria, we are ten years out from AI destroying humanity. This claim is substantiated by Anthropic's own founder, who has said there is a ten to twenty-five percent chance AI will destroy humanity in the future. In 2016, Behan painted Leeward, a work about wind and water, and about the only two postures available to anyone caught in that current: ride it, or fight it. Ten years later, deep into the ongoing work of these four streams, the painting's question returns with an answer none expected. We thought we knew the hardest part: the enemy was us, and we knew us. But AI is a different animal. Now the threat to humanity is not humanity itself. It is something humanity created, capable of turning against us on its own terms, whether we wish it to or not. This is a stark elevation, and it potentially makes the twenty-first century an ominous successor to the world's worst century in world history.

So Crowded

The Closet Is Crowded

The closet is not always a solitary space. In many cases, it is a shared, temporary arrangement among strangers who recognize each other's situation without acknowledging it directly.

The Collage

The Closet Is Crowded layers overlapping mirror selfies taken in a hotel bathroom during a political conference in downtown Dallas. Three men occupy the same cramped mirror. None looks at another. Each is mediated by his own phone screen. The central face is split and discolored, caught between two manifestations of light.

The room is crowded, but no one touches. The arrangement is transactional: proximity without contact, recognition without acknowledgment. Each man is there for the same reason and will not say so.

The piece belongs to "the closet," a sub-series within the ongoing Subdivision project.

A Recurring Pattern

Every few months, a large-scale conservative political gathering takes place in a major American city. Attendees fill hotel blocks downtown for two or three days. During that window, activity on gay hookup apps in the surrounding area increases sharply, sometimes to the point of causing service outages.

This pattern has been documented repeatedly. During the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Grindr usage near the convention's main hub rose by 66 percent. During the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, more than a thousand users in the area reported the app going down entirely, reportedly straining under demand. A similar surge and outage occurred at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2026, coinciding with the timing of a speech from the main stage. In 2017, an LGBTQ advocacy organization ran a geo-targeted ad campaign directly on Grindr near that year's CPAC, addressed to the app's users at the conference: attendees could not credibly oppose LGBTQ rights on stage and seek out gay partners in their hotel rooms that same night.

What the Pattern Shows

These men are, for the most part, married to women. They hold public positions that require public opposition to their own private conduct. The conference provides cover: a city full of strangers, a hotel bathroom mirror, an app that erases names and faces by design.

These men manage this well. They accept it, and many enjoy it. There is a specific pleasure in the encounter itself: the pursuit, the meeting of someone new, the exchange of intimacy without names, and then the clean departure. No follow-up, no complication, no record. The anonymity is not only cover. It is part of the appeal.

This is how they are caught. Not by exposure, and not only by circumstance, but by the pleasure of the system itself. It works well enough, and feels good enough, that there is no reason from inside it to leave. Each man returns to the same marriage, the same public position, the same silence, until the next city and the next conference. Nothing resolves, because the thing that would need to change is the thing that feels like relief.

Gamut

Running wild and wide 💙👄💙

Telling Stories

I built these collages around contrast.

Catastrophe next to nonchalance, spectacle next to indifference. That's the narrative move I care about most right now — not handing you one story to follow, but stacking enough conflicting signals that you have to build your own reading of what's happening and why nobody in the frame seems alarmed.

What the artist can never anticipate is the personal experience a viewer brings to their work. My intention is to celebrate the uniqueness of response, to empower the viewer to create their own story.

That's the shift I keep chasing in this work: away from the single fixed interpretation, toward artwork that hold several at once.

Inside Out: The Diptych

The Horseshoe Crab

The horseshoe crab lives where light does not reach it. It moves along the dark floor of the water, shaped the same way for hundreds of millions of years. It is a secret presence in an otherwise brightly lit world.

In its emergence from that silence, from what has stayed obscured, it can look intimidating at first. A hand lifts it out of the water and into daylight, and the first reaction is rarely wonder. The shape is unfamiliar. Something that has only ever existed in hiding, seen suddenly in the sun, can look fearsome.

This is close to what a young person can feel coming out as gay. The process itself is frightening, for many, and that fear is real — underscoring the actual weight of the moment. What is hidden, unaccustomed to light and unrecognized by those who have never seen it, is brought into the open, and the first response, on both sides, can be unease.

But appearance is not the end of the process. Appearance turns to observation. Observation turns to understanding. And understanding—once something is understood— it can be appreciated, even celebrated, where a moment before it could only be feared.

The Diptych

The image holds this movement across two panels and three recurring symbols. The left panel is interior — a stained-glass window, a man undressing on a window seat, a couple kissing on a bed below, all close and low-lit, the water the crab moves through unseen. The right panel is exterior — a bridge, a lake, full daylight, men visible in the open air to anyone passing, the light the crab is lifted into. A blue moon floats in both panels, standing for longing and desire that exists the same on either side of the water. And a flying saucer appears in both as well — called Jupiter 3, standing for reclamation, transformation, rescue, and freedom. Together, the two panels and the two floating symbols trace one continuous passage: from what is hidden and misunderstood, to what is seen and embraced.

The Legacy

The legacy of the horseshoe crab is endurance. It has survived nearly every extinction the planet has produced, unchanged, against odds that eliminated most other living things around it. That same endurance is what best describes being queer in a world that often does not understand it, and does not always tolerate it. Survival is the legacy. Endurance is the legacy. What remains, after every attempt to erase it, is still here — still moving—still whole.

Don’t Forget Joy

This morning’s studio work is a merged triptych — three moments folded into one frame. The connection? Joy.

The impromptu brunch with new friends, the ride home from the Eagle, knowing the NYC subway system backwards—-and being gay.

A Swansea University study tracking over 150,000 people found that gay men at the top of the wellbeing distribution report the highest happiness of any group measured — a reversal that only shows up once acceptance is genuinely present.

A separate global survey of over 82,000 people across 153 countries identifies family acceptance as the single strongest predictor of wellbeing in the community.

The pattern is simple. Take away the marginalization, and what’s left isn’t neutral — it’s joy.

Sources: Swansea University / The Conversation; Global LGBTQ+ Happiness Survey, CNRS & UNAIDS, Nature Human Behaviour

The Fourth Wall

A Locker Room and a Battlefield

Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women stages a frozen moment of male combat. Spears, shields, and muscled torsos lock into position around the woman who rushes between them. The intervention is the painting’s stated subject, but the composition’s real weight falls on the arrangement of male bodies in relation to each other.

Behan’s collage runs the same structural trick with a different pretext. The scene reads as a locker room after an athletic event. Sport is the stated subject. But the composition foregrounds male bodies in undress, contact, and display around each other, the same way David’s battlefield foregrounds bodies around a stated act of war.

The Central Three

Both works are organized around the same three-figure core: two combatants on either side and a single intervening figure between them. In David’s painting, the two combatants are warriors, and the intervening figure is the Sabine woman. In Behan’s collage, the two combatants are athletes, and the intervening figure is the central male figure, who takes on the woman’s structural role without taking on her gender.

Both works also place a supplicating figure on the ground near this central group. David’s fallen soldier kneels beneath the main action. Behan’s collage places a corresponding figure on the ground in the same relative position, echoing the same posture of submission at the base of the composition.

Shared Staging

Both works use a socially sanctioned pretext to justify a room full of exposed, physically idealized men in close proximity. War carries that justification in David’s painting. Athletic competition carries it in Behan’s.

Both stage men across a spectrum of poses. Active and heroic postures sit next to passive and exposed ones. David’s spear-wielders stand opposite his fallen soldiers. Behan’s central figure stands opposite the bent-over and reclining figures around him. This range establishes a visual hierarchy of masculinity inside a single frame.

Color and object substitution reinforce the connection. Red repeats across both images, marking key figures and drawing the eye through the composition in the same way in each. David’s shields, held up by the warriors in combat, reappear in Behan’s collage as saucers hovering above the scene, occupying the same visual position above the central action.

Both also rely on an outside presence to license the viewer’s attention on the male bodies without that attention reading as the actual point. In David’s painting, this is the Sabine woman. In Behan’s, it is the central figure’s direct address to the camera, an intrusive, contemporary gaze breaking the fourth wall of an otherwise classical arrangement.

Four Ways Artists of Old Painted Nude Men and Lived to Tell About It

For most of Western art history, an artist could not paint two men in a romantic context and expect the work to survive, let alone hang in a public gallery.

Social exile was the real consequence of open depiction. But a handful of genres carried enough institutional legitimacy to shield content that would otherwise be illegal or career-ending: the academic nude study, the Greek myth subject, the bather scene, and the man at his toilet.

The Nude Study: Eugène Jansson and Osmar Schindler

Academic art training required life drawing from nude models, and until well into the twentieth century, those models were almost always male. Male anatomy was considered more revealing of muscle and structure, and propriety kept female models scarce in mixed or public settings.

The Swedish painter Eugène Jansson took the nude study further than most. After building a reputation on moody nighttime cityscapes, he shifted around 1904 to painting nude gymnasts, sailors, and swimmers at Stockholm’s naval bathhouse, where he had become a regular. His 1907 painting “Naval Bathhouse” shows a crowd of nude men in the pool and around it, their glances and postures arranged with a charge that critics at the time were reluctant to name.

The German painter Osmar Schindler worked the same territory from inside the academy itself, teaching life drawing at the Dresden Art Academy alongside Sascha Schneider, whose own male nudes made him a landmark figure in queer German art history once scholars began to look. Schindler’s 1902 painting “Germanic Warrior with Helmet” shows a shirtless young fighter absorbed in polishing his own helmet, using national myth rather than classical Greek myth as its cover. He never married, and later scholarship has read his recurring male nudes and mythological subjects as part of the same homoerotic current running through Schneider’s work, though Schindler left no explicit statement about it.

The Greek Myth: Hippolyte Flandrin

Hippolyte Flandrin’s 1836 painting “Young Man Seated by the Sea,” now in the Louvre, is the clearest case of the Greek-myth cover at work. It shows a nude youth alone on a rock, knees drawn to his chest, head bowed, eyes closed, with no myth or story identified in the title. Critics have long read the solitary, inward pose against the myth of Narcissus, the youth so absorbed in his own beauty that he could love no one else. The painting has been reproduced, copied, and claimed by gay artists and viewers for more than a century, including by the photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden, who restaged the same pose for his own classical-themed photographs decades later.

The Bather: Thomas Eakins

The bather scene extended the nude into a narrative setting. A man bathing, swimming, or drying off after a swim had a built-in reason to be undressed, so a painter could show desire without depicting anything as explicit as an embrace.

Thomas Eakins used this device in his 1885 painting “Swimming,” showing himself and five male students and friends nude at a swimming hole outside Philadelphia, gazing up at the other men from the water. The composition is one of the most cited examples of homoeroticism in American painting. Eakins pushed the same territory too far the following year, removing a male model’s loincloth in front of a mixed class at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; he was forced to resign, and rumors about his sexuality followed him for the rest of his career.

The Man at His Toilet: Gustave Caillebotte

The fourth genre — a man washing, shaving, or drying off in a private domestic setting — offered a different kind of cover. Where the bather scene used outdoor leisure as its excuse, the toilet scene used ordinary domestic realism. A man alone in his bedroom was simply going about his morning.

Gustave Caillebotte made the genre’s most direct use of this cover in two 1884 paintings, “Man at His Bath” and “Man Drying His Leg,” showing a nude, muscular man alone in an ordinary bathroom, cropped close around his buttocks and groin. Bathing scenes were understood at the time as a genre reserved for female subjects; putting a man in that same intimate framing broke an unwritten rule. When a Brussels artists’ association exhibited “Man at His Bath” in 1888, they hung it in a side room rather than the main galleries, and recent scholarship reads the paintings as an explicit invitation to a homoerotic viewer.

What This History Means Now

Contemporary gay artists in the United States and much of Western Europe are not required to route desire through a swimming pool or a shaving mirror to avoid prosecution. That freedom is recent and remains uneven, both within Western countries and especially outside them, where sodomy laws and censorship of LGBTQ content are still active tools of state repression.

The coded-era record matters because it is genuine evidence of gay life in periods when almost no other documentation was possible — a diary could be burned, but a painting hanging in a national academy survived by definition. For artists working openly today, the choice is different in kind: coded work was built to pass as something else to a general audience while signaling clearly to an informed one, while open work addresses a general audience directly. Some contemporary artists still use the old vocabulary of the nude, the myth, and the domestic interior, not to hide behind it, but because it connects their work to a documented lineage of gay artists who came before them.

Putting the Romance Back In

Every artist in this essay was already doing the hard part. The desire is there in Jansson’s bathhouse, in Eakins’s swimming hole, in Caillebotte’s bathroom mirror. It just had to be folded down small enough to pass as anatomy, myth, or plumbing.

I’ve been unfolding it. Using several of these same paintings as a starting point, I’ve built a series of digital collages that take the coded version and finish the sentence it was always circling. Where the original artist could only imply two men wanted each other, I put the romance in the painting.

The pieces work best side by side: the original genre painting on one side, my reworked version on the other, so the change is easy to see and easy to name. Nothing about the source material had to be invented. It just had to stop pretending.

• Wikipedia and glbtqarchive.com, on Eugène Jansson and the Naval Bathhouse paintings

• Grokipedia and artblart.com, on Osmar Schindler and his Dresden Academy contemporary Sascha Schneider

• Wikipedia and Web Gallery of Art, on Hippolyte Flandrin’s “Young Man Seated by the Sea”

• Smithsonian Magazine, WikiArt, and the Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, on Thomas Eakins’s “The Swimming Hole” and its homoerotic reception

• Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Wikipedia, “Art Students’ League of Philadelphia,” on the 1886 Eakins dismissal

• The Art Newspaper, Artforum, and The Advocate, on the 2024–2025 “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” retrospective

— Behan