Artist Paul Cadmus Never Painted Two Men Kissing. Doing So Would Have Ended His Career.

In this set of digital collages, gay men stop to kiss in front of Paul Cadmus paintings. The kiss completes what Cadmus could only suggest. He kept same-sex desire in the subtext to protect himself, the people he loved, and his career. These collages put it in plain view, and that is the homage.

Cadmus painted sailors, beaches, locker rooms, playgrounds and porches full of men looking at men. He never painted the kiss. The grounds here include The Fleet's In! (1934) and Shore Leave (1933). In both, the desire is present but unstated.

The cost of showing it

Cadmus learned early what was at stake. In 1934 the Navy removed The Fleet's In! from a show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art before it opened. The Met calls this one of the earliest known cases of a gay artist being censored in the United States. The figure that likely offended the admiral was a civilian with a red tie, a known gay code, offering a cigarette to a marine. Cadmus later said, "I owe the start of my career really to the Admiral who tried to suppress it." The same scandal also taught him how far he could go.

The rest of his century set the same limits:

  • 1934: The Hays Code took effect in Hollywood and banned any depiction of "sex perversion."

  • 1953: Executive Order 10450 made homosexuality grounds for firing federal employees.

  • Until 1980: Sodomy was a crime in New York, where Cadmus lived and worked. It stayed a crime in Texas until Lawrence v. Texas in 2003.

The late 20th century

Censorship continued after Cadmus's career was established.

  • 1989: On June 12, 1989, the director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art cancelled The Perfect Moment, the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective. She feared the show would endanger NEA appropriations in Congress.

  • 1990: The show moved to Cincinnati, and the Contemporary Arts Center's director was charged with obscenity. It was the only time a museum director was charged with a crime for the art he showed. In October 1990, a jury acquitted the museum and its director.

  • 1990–1998: Congress added a "decency clause" to NEA grants. The clause allowed funding to be denied based on subject matter, and queer subject matter was targeted. On June 25, 1998, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the clause was constitutional.

The 21st century

The pressure did not end in 2000.

  • 2010: The Smithsonian's Secretary had David Wojnarowicz's video removed from the "Hide/Seek" exhibition after Catholic League complaints led Republican leaders in Congress to threaten the Smithsonian's funding. Several other museums had already declined the exhibition.

  • 2013: In a SAG-AFTRA and Williams Institute survey of about 5,600 union members, nearly half of gay and lesbian respondents strongly agreed that producers and studio executives see lesbian and gay actors as less marketable. More than half of LGBT performers had heard anti-gay comments on set.

The kiss Cadmus could not paint

Cadmus died in 1999. The laws, the funding rules and the museum boards made the kiss off-limits for his whole life. In these collages, the men in front of his paintings are no longer coded. They are kissing.

— Behan

Sources: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Fleet's In!" essay; Wikipedia, "The Perfect Moment"; The Art Newspaper; Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati; Center for Constitutional Rights, Finley v. NEA; University of Georgia, "The NEA Four"; Associated Press via Washington Times (2011); Washington Blade

Working Girl Still Works

America is Once Again Working Girl

It's a quiet Saturday afternoon in Dallas after one of the most consequential weeks in American history, and I am on the couch under a duvet watching Working Girl, a fabulous film I have not seen in ages. Mike Nichols made it in 1988, and it is bright, beautiful and optimistic. It is set in New York City, and the Twin Towers appear throughout. As was typical of 1980s romantic comedies and most American films of the 20th century, there are no openly gay characters.

As the film progresses, I find myself watching three things: women in the workplace, and whether things have improved for them; the September 11 still to come, and what it will do to Lower Manhattan and the country; and the seeming absence of gay men from American films of the 20th century, even though gay men are part of everyday life in the real world. My four collages take up that last absence and put two gay characters into the film.

Women in the Workplace

Tess McGill, played by Melanie Griffith, is a Staten Island secretary with a business degree from night school. She begins the film at a secretary's desk outside her boss's office and ends it with a window, a door and a secretary of her own. In 1988, that office signals that she has arrived.

Since then, women's pay has improved, but slowly. In 1988, women working full time, year-round earned 65 percent of what men earned. In 2025, they earned 84 cents for every dollar men earned. If the gap keeps narrowing at the rate it did from 2000 to 2025, equal pay will not arrive until 2071. The gap is wider for most women of color: compared with white, non-Hispanic men, Black women earned 64 cents and Hispanic women 60 cents.

September 11 and Lower Manhattan

Before 2001, almost every film and television show set in New York City included a shot of the Twin Towers as a symbol of progressive modernity and American success. Working Girl is no exception. Seeing the towers today, in any context, is always sad. The film is also a record of Lower Manhattan before September 11. Tess's office lobby is the lobby of 7 World Trade Center, with Alexander Calder's red sculpture Bent Propeller visible through the glass doors. Her new office in the final scene is in One Chase Manhattan Plaza, a few blocks away.

Tragically on September 11, 2001, 2,752 people died in Lower Manhattan. 7 World Trade Center collapsed and crushed the Calder sculpture featured in Working Girl. Fourteen million square feet of office space was damaged or destroyed, 65,000 jobs were lost or relocated, and more than 20,000 residents were displaced. One Chase Manhattan Plaza still stands.

The Men Hollywood Left Out

For decades, American films kept gay men off the screen. From the 1930s, the Hollywood Production Code stated that "sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden." The code was gone by 1988, but an upbeat studio comedy still had no place for a gay man. Eight years later, Mike Nichols made The Birdcage, a major studio comedy with a gay couple in the leading roles, shown with warmth and affection instead of as a tragedy. It marked a dramatic change in the film industry's representation of gay men and in his own oeuvre as a filmmaker.

In Working Girl, Alec Baldwin plays Mick Dugan, Tess's philandering boyfriend. Tess comes home on her birthday and finds him in bed with Doreen. My four collages imagine she finds him in bed with Jason, his best friend from work instead. Mick tells her he loves her, that it is only sex with Jason, and that it has nothing to do with her. She still leaves him, and the plot stays the same. The scene would have worked in the film, and added surprising depth, but in 1988 it was not something the film could do. As such, I am doing it now with my four digital collages.

Mick is not only a 1980s story. In a New York City Department of Health survey, almost 10 percent of men who called themselves straight had had sex with a man in the previous year, and 70 percent of those men were married. Nationally, about 3.3 percent of American men report sex with another man in the past year. Because these men keep their lives hidden, every count of them is likely too low.

A Hopeful Note

Working Girl ends on an uplifting note, and I still find the film inspiring. Nearly 40 years on, women are still paid less than men, Lower Manhattan still carries the scars of 9/11, and men like Mick are still keeping secrets. Even so, in the days after the most dramatic midterm election in 100 years, the pursuit of justice and a better world remains strong. It is the right film for this weekend. America is indeed Working Girl again.

— Behan

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review (July 1990); Center for American Progress, analysis of U.S. Census Bureau, "Income in the United States: 2025" (September 2026); AFI Catalog, Working Girl (1988); On Location Tours, Working Girl filming locations; National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Bent Propeller fragment; Downtown Alliance, "The Post-9/11 Triumph of Lower Manhattan" (2012); EBSCO Research Starters, "Hollywood Bans 'Sexual Perversion' in Films"; Pathela et al., Annals of Internal Medicine (2006); Bennett et al., JMIR Public Health and Surveillance (2024).

First Came the Dream Date, Then Came the Anti-Gay Propaganda

In 2018, two men in Arizona wanted a wedding set for their niece, who was going to be a flower girl at their wedding. They could not buy one, so they bought a standard set and an extra Ken and made their own. Mattel met with them to discuss a same-sex wedding set. Eight years ago, during the first Trump administration, Mattel chose not to make it. Mattel has sold Barbie and Ken to children as a couple since the early 1960s, first on a date and then at a wedding. Barbie's Friday Night Date outfit was sold alongside Ken's Dreamboat, and in 1982 the Dream Date line told children that Barbie was "everybody's Dream Date," with Ken as her escort.

For more than 60 years, Mattel has sold Barbie and Ken wedding sets to American children as a bride and a groom. It has never sold a set with two brides or two grooms. Not in 1964. Not even after same-sex marriage became legal nationwide in 2015. Not after that meeting. Not today.

This is intentional. Mattel has pursued a policy of heteronormative conditioning aimed at American children, starting at age three. It has taught generations of children that a wedding is a man and a woman. Mattel has never made a wedding set that shows gay and lesbian children their own future.

In 2015, the year marriage equality became law, Target sold an exclusive Barbie and Ken Fairytale Wedding Set: a bride, a groom and two bridesmaids. In November 2024, Mattel released the Barbie Ultimate Wedding Set, again a bride and a groom. It is still on store shelves in 2026, six years after Mattel's meeting with the Arizona couple.

My Ken Doll Gay Neighborhood Series Reminds American Culture That Gay Love Has a Place in Our Society

My Ken Doll Gay Neighborhood series answers this record with Mattel's own products. Using Ken, Barbie and Allan dolls, along with other 12-inch dolls, I build miniature installations, set in a gayborhood called Kensington Hills, that show gay love as a normal part of everyday life.

The sculptural installation pictured here recreates a moment from my own life. In 1986, my boyfriend and I were shopping together at the supermarket when we ran into a female colleague from work. We were terrified. In 1986, being seen together could have cost us our jobs, and possibly our safety. We never shopped together again.

My next work answers Mattel directly. It is a 3D collage, titled “No More Secrets: a Ken and Ken Gay Wedding” built from an original Barbie wedding set, now with Barbie as a Catholic priest officiating the ceremony for two grooms. In life and play, anything is possible.

Mattel used these dolls for more than 60 years to promote heteronormative conditioning with the idea that only a man and a woman belong together. My work uses the same dolls to remind American culture that gay love has a place in our culture too.

Sources

Twenty one Collages: Subtext Made Context

All twenty one of these new digital collages show gay men openly. In American culture, men looking at men, wanting men and loving men is usually kept as subtext. Here it is the subject itself, set in plain view in gyms, barbershops, cabins, motel lawns, ranches and living rooms.

This matters now because many LGBTQ+ people are becoming less visible. In January 2026, the Human Rights Campaign reported that 47.5% of LGBTQ+ adults had become less out somewhere in their lives over the previous twelve months: 28.3% in public spaces, 26.5% in workplaces and 25.4% in healthcare. More than half, 51.1%, said they are less visible than the year before.

The data also shows resistance. HRC's fall survey of 9,328 LGBTQ+ adults found that 56% say the current political climate makes them less likely to be open, yet 85% are somewhat or very open. One-third are more open than two years ago, compared with 22% who are less open. Among adults 18 to 34, about 40% are more open. And 84% say wanting to build support for equality makes them more likely to be open. People keep choosing to be visible under pressure.

These collages come from that choice. The figures come from the social media feed: men who put themselves in view. The settings span decades: a barbershop with snow falling on the street outside, a New England meetinghouse in winter, a carnival booth offering a date with Mr. America, a rain-soaked cabin porch where a masked figure walks, Robin bound in a rope net, two men kissing on alien ground.

Two figures appear in every collage. The Jupiter 3 represents freedom and escape. The blue moon represents loyalty, love and desire. Both are unseen witnesses, and both stand for the viewer. Anyone who looks at these works becomes a witness to men living openly.

The November 3 midterms give reason for hope. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire became the first out gay man elected to the U.S. Senate. JD Ford became the first out gay person elected to Congress from Indiana. Jeremy Moss became the first out LGBTQ+ person Michigan has elected to Congress. In Texas, after Republicans spent tens of millions on anti-trans television advertising, Democrats won both the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat, and Maggie Ellis became the first LGBTQ+ person to win a statewide race in Texas. Democrats are projected to control both the House and the Senate.

Visibility in elected office and visibility in art do the same work: each makes it harder to push people back out of public life. These twenty collages keep gay men in view.

Brought to you this season in living color.

— Behan

Sources

  • Human Rights Campaign, Annual LGBTQ+ Community Survey findings (January 2026), as reported in The Advocate: https://www.advocate.com/news/lgbtq-safety-coming-out-trump

  • HRC Foundation, "Being Out in a Difficult Moment: LGBTQ+ People Continue to Choose Visibility" (October 2026): https://www.hrc.org/resources/being-out-in-a-difficult-moment-lgbtq-people-continue-to-choose-visibility

  • HRC, "New HRC Data: Despite Political Headwinds, LGBTQ+ People Are Choosing Visibility Ahead of 2026 Midterms": https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/new-hrc-data-despite-political-headwinds-lgbtq-people-are-choosing-visibility-ahead-of-2026-midterms

  • The Advocate, "Democrats flipped Republican seats. LGBTQ+ candidates helped deliver the decisive blow": https://www.advocate.com/politics/election/blue-wave-lgbtq-democrats

  • Pridesource, "Michigan Election Results: Democrats Win Trifecta, LGBTQ+ Incumbents Sweep": https://pridesource.com/article/election-2026-results-michigan-lgbtq

Digital Reps: Wednesday 11-04 and Thursday 11-05

Two more days of reps produced 18 digital collages. The routine stays the same, and each morning works the subject, the scale, the history and the palette. The blue moon and the Jupiter 2 appear in every piece and connect this set to the first.

The subject is still men together, now in more settings: a diner booth, a beach, a bedroom, a pool, a bathroom under repair, a driveway, a mountain cabin and a Christmas tree. Two men kiss over an open car engine under the caption "Step one." A plumber works at the tub while a swimmer in black briefs bends beside him. These are ordinary places, and the men in them are together.

Scale does most of the work in several pieces. A seated man rises as tall as the mountains behind a log cabin while a couple kisses on the porch below his knee. In a green field, the same blond runner appears at three sizes: held from behind in the foreground, then walking alone in the distance twice. The kissing couple in suits from Tuesday's set returns in small size above a poolside lounger. Enlarged lips and chest hair become the ground behind a bearded man.

Ken returns in three collages. Mattel introduced him in 1961 as Barbie's boyfriend. Here he and Barbie hold hands by a pool next to her pink Jeep, while real men in swim briefs stand around them. The dolls show the couple that was sold to children, and the men show another kind of couple.

Two pieces use magazine covers. A 1973 Playgirl cover becomes Playgay, with the lines "Where straight dudes come to play" and "Gay for Pay Rules." Playgirl was marketed to women, but much of its readership was gay men. A Vogue cover now reads "Men of the Democratic Party." The source material shows through in other places too. Screen icons from the feed remain at the top of the beach collage, and part of the Grindr name sits above the man at the cabin.

The palette leans toward orange and pink: sunburned backs, the pink Jeep, a pink sarong, a pink swim brief and Christmas ornaments. Blue toile wallpaper and pool water balance those colors, and the blue moon stays constant across every work.

The reps continue.

Brieftastic

The advertisement says it sells briefs. What it sells is the body in the briefs, and the desire to look at that body. This diptych puts that desire on the surface.

The source images come from three separate advertisements by the same company, all for the same product: men's bikini briefs, shot at a pool. Each one carries the subtext swimwear advertising has carried for decades. The briefs are the excuse, and the man is the picture.

I compress the three advertisements into a diptych. One panel shows a model from the front, with one hand at his waistband and one arm extended. The other panel shows a model from behind in red-and-white briefs, facing the pool.

Side by side, the panels give the full figure from the front and from the back. That is a view of a man, not of a garment.

The blue moon and Jupiter 3 usually appear together in one collage. Here they are split: Jupiter 3 is in the sky of one panel and the blue moon is in the sky of the other. Because the pair carries across the seam, the two panels read as facing pages from the same book.

The diptych also shows who is looking. In one panel, a mustached man walks toward the model and looks straight at him. In the other, a second man stands behind the model and watches. Men looking at men is no longer something the viewer has to read into the image. It is what the image shows.

A photographer's lens points out of the frame, toward the viewer. The advertisement hides how it was made, and the collage shows it. The viewer looks at the model, and the camera looks back at the viewer.

All my work follows the same approach: take the subtext and make it context. The company sells briefs. The images sell longing. The diptych says so, briefly.

So what is being sold? On paper, the briefs. In practice, the contents of the briefs. In brief: longing and desire.

-Behan

Funeral of a Politician

The funeral plays on the evening newscast. The flag is folded. The honor guard salutes. The eulogies praise a life of public service.

For gay Americans, that service can include a record of votes against our marriages, laws against our bodies, and policies against our military service. The politician may be buried, but the record remains.

In the living room, no one is watching. The moon is up, and the lamp casts light on the men who are together, as men have been before these political careers began, and as they will be long after the last of them end.

Here is a sampling of the record:

1940s–2011
More than 100,000 service members are forced out of the military for their sexuality with almost 13,000 service members discharged under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

1996
Congress passes the Defense of Marriage Act, defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

2023–2026
More than 2,000 anti-LGBTQ+ state bills are filed, and about 211 become law.

2026
At least 11 states introduce bills calling for a ban on same-sex marriage.

2026
Texas still lists "homosexual conduct" as a crime, more than two decades after it became unenforceable.

The Broadcast Ends

In 1996, the year DOMA passed, only 27% of U.S. adults supported legal same-sex marriage. By 2025, there were more than 800,000 married same-sex couples.

The eulogies end. The flag goes to the family. The television goes dark.

In the living room, the lamp is still on. The men are still together. The politicians who voted against them are gone, one funeral at a time. The men remain.

Caravaggio, Ryan Idol, and the Bad Boy Mystique

The bad boy mystique is simple. With talent comes temperament, and with temperament comes trouble. Talent, temperament and trouble together often mark a highly creative personality. The Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) and the American adult film star Ryan Idol (born 1966) have all three.

They live four hundred years apart, but their lives follow a remarkably similar path. Both talented, they rise to the top of their field almost at once. And both end up facing the gravest charges of their lives: Caravaggio for murder, Idol for attempted murder.

Genius is not limited to respected art forms. Caravaggio's genius is in staging the body for a viewer: choosing the model, setting the pose and lighting the moment. Idol's genius is in being that body, in knowing how to hold a viewer's attention and keep it. Both men practice the same art from opposite sides of the frame.

The Early Years

Both men start with nothing. Caravaggio is orphaned at 12, after plague and illness take his father and mother. Idol grows up in foster homes and never knows his father. Neither has a family to fall back on, and both learn early to depend on what they can make of themselves.

Each man's career begins at age 22. Around 1593, newly arrived in Rome and without money, Caravaggio paints Sick Bacchus, a self-portrait as the god of wine. Early biographers say he paints it in a mirror while recovering from an illness. He is his own first model. In February 1989, Idol appears as Playgirl's Man of the Month under his birth name, Marc Anthony Donais. He too begins by presenting himself.

The rise is fast for both. Within a few years Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte takes Caravaggio into his household. There he paints young men, partly undressed, looking straight at the viewer, for a private circle of collectors. In 1600 his Saint Matthew paintings are unveiled in the Contarelli Chapel, and he becomes the most talked-about painter in Rome.

Idol's first video, Idol Eyes, with Joey Stefano, comes out in 1990 and wins an award. His videos are made for gay men to watch in private. By 1994 he has won Best Actor and earns $50,000 a film. Idol's name is in the titles of his films, which is unusual for the period, and in the early 1990s his name on the box sells the video.

Both men's private lives include men and women. In about 1650, an English traveler records that the model for Caravaggio's Amor Vincit Omnia is Cecco, Caravaggio's own boy, "that laid with him." Caravaggio's 1605 attack on a notary is over Lena Antognetti, who is called "Michelangelo's woman" in the record. Idol has an on-and-off relationship with Jeff McCourt, the founder of Windy City Times, while he also has a girlfriend.

Working the Theater

Caravaggio's paintings are built on theatrical presence: models in costume, lit from a single high source, caught at the most dramatic moment of the story. Idol takes his talent to the stage itself. After leaving video, he spends ten years as a stage actor. He plays a straight actor in gay porn in Making Porn, a rural gay man in love in Scent of Rain, and himself in his one-man show, Anatomy of an Idol. In 2007 he makes his Broadway debut in Terrence McNally's The Ritz. Very few adult performers reach Broadway.

Both build their fame on a small body of major work over careers of about 18 years. Caravaggio completes about two dozen major works, mostly large public commissions for churches. He works without a large workshop, and no drawings by him are known. Idol, from 1989 to 2007, completes about 16 major works, including films and stage productions.

Temperament and Trouble

Fame does not settle either man. In 1604 the writer Karel van Mander reports that Caravaggio works for two weeks, then spends a month or two walking the streets with a sword, looking for a fight. The Roman police records support this. He is arrested for assault and for carrying a sword without a license. He throws a plate of artichokes at a waiter and stones at the police. He is jailed for libel in 1603, and in 1605 he wounds a notary.

Idol's trouble starts before his fame. In 1987, while serving in the Navy, he is court-martialed for assaulting an officer and dishonorably discharged. After he leaves video, drugs and alcohol take over. In March 1998 he falls from a fourth-floor window in New York in a suicide attempt and survives. Months later he arrives 45 minutes late for a performance in Miami Beach, and the production ends.

Then each man commits the act that defines the rest of his life. In May 1606 Caravaggio kills Ranuccio Tomassoni in a sword fight in Rome. Accounts of the cause differ. He is sentenced to death, and the sentence means anyone may kill him on sight. He flees.

In September 2009 Idol attacks his former girlfriend in Sacramento with a toilet tank lid. He claims self-defense. He is convicted of attempted murder in 2011 and sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2012.

Caravaggio keeps painting while he is on the run. In Naples, Malta and Sicily he makes some of his greatest work. He is made a Knight of Malta, then jailed after a brawl, and he escapes. In Naples his face is slashed in an attack. He dies in July 1610 at Porto Ercole, at age 38, while traveling to Rome to receive a pardon.

Idol calls himself "the creation of Marc Anthony Donais." Ryan Idol is the star. For Broadway he is credited under his birth name, and Marc Anthony Donais is the man who serves the prison sentence. He is released in August 2022 and turns 60 in 2026.

For almost three hundred years after his death, Caravaggio's reputation is low. In the twentieth century it recovers, and today he is one of the most popular painters in the world. Idol's videos are not in museums, but they remain part of gay visual history.

Talent, temperament and trouble make both men famous, and they also bring real harm. Tomassoni dies, and Idol's girlfriend is badly injured. The story of each man includes both the genius and the damage.

— Behan

Sources:
Wikipedia, "Ryan Idol."
Box Turtle Bulletin, "September 28th, 2012."
Xtra Magazine, "Naked on Stage: Ryan Idol Bares His Soul."
Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (1604).
Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura (c. 1620).
Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (1998).
Peter Robb, M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio (1998).
Galleria Borghese, Rome, collection record for Sick Bacchus.

Caravaggio's Next Painting

This collage shows what Caravaggio could paint if he were working today. It extends the comparison between Caravaggio and Ryan Idol from the past into the present.

Idol reclines nude across a bank of cut flowers. One leg is raised and his body twists toward the viewer as he looks back over his shoulder. The pose is close to Caravaggio's own nudes. Saint John the Baptist (1602, Capitoline Museums, Rome) shows a nude youth twisting toward the viewer and smiling over his shoulder. Amor Vincit Omnia (1602, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) shows Cupid with one leg raised, facing the viewer directly.

The flowers are part of Caravaggio's story too. When he first arrives in Rome, he paints fruit and flowers in another artist's workshop. Here the flowers return as the ground for the nude.

Caravaggio's nudes always carry a title from religion or myth: a saint, a god, Cupid. That title is what allows the body to be shown. This figure has no saint's name and no myth. He is a man posed for a viewer who wants to look at him. Four hundred years after Caravaggio, the subject can be shown without a title to cover it.

The blue moon and the flying saucer carry over from the earlier collages and mark the image as part of the same series.

— Behan

Afternoon Delight

2026, Digital Photo

For gay men, the afternoon has long been the hour for desire. It fits inside a lunch break, an errand, a gym visit or the gap before the commute home, and it leaves the evening accounted for. Gay men organized much of their sexual lives around daylight long before a pop song gave the phrase to straight America. These five digital collages bring that hour indoors and into plain view, in the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen, with nothing hidden.

The phrase comes from a restaurant. The title came from the happy hour menu at Clyde's restaurant in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. The song was written by Bill Danoff of the Starland Vocal Band. It reached #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 on July 10, 1976, and the group won the Grammy for Best New Artist. Danoff said he wanted a fun song that hinted at sex rather than an all-out sex song. The band was two couples, so the song presented the afternoon tryst as a light secret between husbands and wives.

For many gay men in 1976, the afternoon was often the only time they could meet. A man living with a wife, a family or a landlord who asks questions cannot easily disappear at night. During the day, his absence goes unnoticed.

Sociology recorded this. In Tearoom Trade (1970), Laud Humphreys studied men who met in public restrooms. He confirmed that over 50% of his subjects identified as heterosexual men who were married to women. Many were family men who were well-educated and well-respected members of their communities. Humphreys concluded that the harm in these encounters came from police activity: arrests, blackmail and destroyed families.

Gay culture also built open institutions around the afternoon. The Sunday tea dance became a fixture in Fire Island and Provincetown, a daytime gathering where men danced together in the sun. The gym, the bathhouse and the long lunch each gave a man a reason to be somewhere else for an hour. Today, apps show which men nearby are available now, including at noon.

In these collages, the afternoon delight is no longer hidden from a household. It happens inside the household. Men lounge in a sunlit bedroom with nowhere else to be. One man takes a mirror selfie while another leans out from behind the shower curtain. Two men share a kitchen in their underwear. In two of the works, an early twentieth-century photograph of two men with their arms around each other stands among the men of today, in the same light.

Two icons appear in every work. The Blue Moon stands for longing and desire, and it hangs in a daylight sky. Jupiter 3 stands for escape, rescue and witness, and it hovers over each scene. The afternoon is an escape from the workday, and Jupiter 3 witnesses what happens in it.

The subtext of the afternoon delight was the hidden lives of men who could only meet by day. These collages make that subtext the context. Here the afternoon belongs to the men openly, in their own rooms.

— Behan

Sources: Wikipedia, "Afternoon Delight"; WTOP, "How a Georgetown restaurant's menu led to 1970s 'Afternoon Delight' earworm" (2023); Parade, "How a Restaurant Menu Inspired a No. 1 Soft Rock Hit in 1976"; Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (1970); EBSCO Research Starters, "Study of Anonymous Gay Sex Leads to Ethics Scandal."

Digital Reps

This morning's six digital collages are a full body workout. Each one works a different part of the practice: the subject, the scale, the history and the palette. There's only one way to get visually buff, and that's to produce. The work improves by being made, and these are today's morning reps:

The subject stays the same throughout: men together.

In What They're Thinking, two men in overcoats walk a cliff path while a couple in suits kisses above them. The scale and space both affirm and supersede a natural representation to a supernatural one.

In What They Tell Their Families, two men share a bed under the caption "We're just friends." The first two titles work as a pair, one for the private thought and one for the public account. "We're just friends" is the phrase that has covered for men together for generations. Here it sits over an image that contradicts it, and the subtext becomes the context.

In Midnight Moon, a man emerges from a pool at night, revealing his prodigious party gift to the delight of his Scruff hook ups.

In Haring Elegy, two men embrace in a room covered in drawings by Keith Haring, titled Once Upon a Time, which he painted in May 1989 in the men's room of the LGBT Community Center in New York, less than a year before he died of AIDS-related complications.

In History Looking Back, History Looking Forward, an enlarged torso and a pair of blue sweatpants become the ground, and 1950s physique models stand at the height of a waistband.

In Feeling Connor McGuire, enlarged skin becomes an orange landscape behind a model in white briefs. The body is the figure and also the setting.

History runs through the set. Physique photography of the 1950s circulated among gay men as fitness imagery at a time when anything more open could lead to arrest. Those models now share the frame with a man from today's feed.

The palette holds the set together. Blue repeats in the moon, the sweatpants, the sheets and the pool. Against it are warm skin tones and a field of orange. The cliffs are pushed to lavender and green, and the night pool to green and violet. The color moves from piece to piece, but the blue stays constant.

Tomorrow brings another set of reps.

The Gay Odalisque

These five collages take reclining odalisques by Titian, Manet, Ingres, Francesco Hayez and Theodor Aman and reconstitute them with male figures. The aim is to widen the understanding of sexual intimacy and sexual desire. Who qualifies as a voluptuary? We all do.

The odalisque is a female genre. For four centuries, European painting places a woman on a couch, turns her body toward the viewer, and calls the result art. The male version exists, but it survives only under other names: myth, sleep, athletics, the classical study.

An openly gay odalisque appears only after 1970, and it arrives the same way each time. An artist takes a famous painting and changes who is on the bed. These collages continue that practice.

The Canon

Odalisque comes from the Turkish odalık, a chambermaid in an Ottoman household. European painters turn the word into the fantasy of the harem concubine.

The lineage is short and well known: Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (c. 1510), Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538), Ingres's Grande Odalisque (1814) and Odalisque with a Slave (1839–42), Manet's Olympia (1863), and Matisse's odalisques of the 1920s.

The genre spreads across Europe in the 19th century. Francesco Hayez paints reclining odalisques in Milan, and Theodor Aman paints them in Bucharest.

The conventions stay fixed. A horizontal body, a hand at the groin, a servant in the background, drapery, flowers, exotic props. The viewer is assumed to be a man, and the body on the bed is assumed to be a woman.

Myth as Permission

Antiquity has no difficulty with the reclining male nude. The Barberini Faun (c. 220 BCE) lies asleep with his legs open. The Sleeping Hermaphroditus reads as a female odalisque from behind and reveals male genitals from the front. In 1620 Bernini carves a marble mattress for the Borghese version, now in the Louvre.

Later painters use myth as permission. The key work is Anne-Louis Girodet's Sleep of Endymion (1791). In the story, the moon goddess Selene falls in love with the sleeping shepherd Endymion.

Girodet paints Selene only as moonlight. What remains is a passive young man laid out for the viewer, while the boy Zephyr parts the branches to watch.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau, in Male Trouble, documents how French painting from the 1790s to the 1830s makes this languid male youth a central object of desire. Jean Broc's Death of Hyacinth (1801) and Hippolyte Flandrin's Young Male Nude Seated beside the Sea (1836) follow.

The Orient and the Camera

The harem fantasy has a male counterpart. Flaubert, Gide and Wilde travel to North Africa in part for the sex with men that Europe forbids. The Ottoman world has its own tradition of köçek, young male dancers painted in court miniatures.

Photography gives the genre a new cover. Wilhelm von Gloeden, working in Taormina from the 1880s to the 1930s, poses Sicilian youths on furs and draperies with the props of the odalisque. He sells the results as classical studies.

In the United States, physique photography carries the pose through the censorship years. Bob Mizer's Athletic Model Guild, founded in 1945, publishes reclining men under the label of fitness, with the posing strap as legal protection. George Platt Lynes makes more explicit reclining nudes that circulate privately.

The Reversal

After 1970 the substitution becomes the point.

Sylvia Sleigh paints Philip Golub Reclining (1971), a nude man in the pose of Velázquez's Rokeby Venus. In The Turkish Bath (1973) she replaces Ingres's women with nude male art critics, among them her husband, Lawrence Alloway.

Burt Reynolds's centerfold in Cosmopolitan (April 1972) and the launch of Playgirl (1973) bring the reclining nude man into mass media. Both are aimed at women. Both find a large gay audience.

Pierre et Gilles, working in Paris from the late 1970s, make saturated, flower-filled photo-paintings of men posed as saints, sailors and mythological figures. Kehinde Wiley's Down series (2008) places young Black men in the reclining poses of European painting.

Five Collages

Each collage begins with an odalisque ground and changes who lies on it.

  • The first restages Theodor Aman's Reclining Odalisque, keeping its carpets, cushions and long-necked lute.

  • The second restages Francesco Hayez's Reclining Odalisque, with its green curtains and view of the sea.

  • The third lays a male body directly over Ingres's Grande Odalisque. Her blue curtains and orange drapery remain visible around him.

  • The fourth uses the interior of Titian's Venus of Urbino, with the servant still at the chest in the background.

  • The fifth restages Manet's Olympia. A standing man takes the maid's position, and the reclining man wears Olympia's flower in his hair.

Three elements repeat. The blue moon refers to Endymion: the moon looking at a sleeping man. The Jupiter 2, the saucer from Lost in Space, places each scene inside a 1960s idea of the future. The roses replace both Olympia's hand and the bouquet her maid carries.

The largest change is in the fourth and fifth collages. In the paintings, the second figure is a servant. Here the second figure is a partner, and the subject becomes a couple rather than one body on display.

The male odalisque has existed for more than two thousand years as subtext. These collages make it context.

— Behan

Sources

  • Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (Thames & Hudson, 1997)

  • Linda Nochlin, "The Imaginary Orient," Art in America (May 1983)

  • James Smalls, Homosexuality in Art (Parkstone, 2003)

  • Allen Ellenzweig, The Homoerotic Photograph (Columbia University Press, 1992)

  • Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (Columbia University Press, 1996)

Things Appear Larger 2026, digital photocollage

In Things Appear Larger, I shift the space of the image from one defined by physical scale to one defined by mood and emotion. The scale of the figures identifies the sexual tension shown in the image.

In painting, drawing or digital collage, an artist can build any space at any scale and can use any standard to set that scale. Western art has mostly used one standard: the way the eye sees. Objects farther away appear smaller, which produces linear perspective. They also appear less distinct, which produces atmospheric perspective.

That standard is justified, and it dominates Western art. It is not the only way to define space.

Here, the room keeps its traditional perspective. The figures do not. What I am doing with this collage is intentionally shifting scale to step away from the physical familiarity of space and focus on the emotional intensity of a moment, which includes a sexual tension.

Precedents

Writers in art history, philosophy, geography and anthropology have described space in these terms.

Erwin Panofsky treats linear perspective as a cultural convention, not a neutral record of sight.

Otto Friedrich Bollnow describes "attuned space," meaning space shaped by mood.

Gaston Bachelard describes rooms by intimacy and memory instead of measurement.

Yi-Fu Tuan describes how space becomes place through experience and attachment.

Edward T. Hall measures the distance between people by their relationship: intimate, personal, social or public.

Together, they show that space can be defined by how it is experienced, not only by how it is measured. Emotional scale applies that idea to the image.

The domestic interior is the most traditional space in Western painting. It is also the space where gay life was expected to stay out of sight. The figures in this room are sized by what is happening between them.

The title comes from the warning printed on a car's side mirror. In this collage, things appear larger because they are.

See for yourself.

— Behan

Sources
Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927; English translation 1991).
Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Human Space (1963; English translation 2011).
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958; English translation 1964).
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977).
Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (1966).

Gay Getaway

Two collages: one shows what could not be photographed in 1963, and the other shows what can be lived now.

For gay men, a getaway is a specific kind of safety. In a place where nobody knows you, nobody can tell your boss, your family, or the press. You can hold hands at dinner. You can ask for one bed and not explain it.

That safety has limits. Being unknown is not the same as being safe. That is a reality gay men still have to contend with today.

Rock and Lee Leave Town

From 1962 to 1965, Rock Hudson, Hollywood's biggest leading man, dates Lee Garlington, a young film extra. In Hollywood, they pretend to be straight. The studios hire detectives to find out which male stars sleep with other men.

In 1963 they go to Puerto Vallarta, then a quiet Mexican beach town. Nobody there is looking for Rock Hudson's boyfriend. For a few days, they are two men on a beach. Even so, each photograph they take is a risk. One print in the wrong hands ends a career.

One collage focuses directly on Rock and Lee's getaway. Photographs of Rock and Lee on the beach fill the frame, each one posed, none of them touching. Teddy and Rusty stand in with a kiss. It shows what the photographs of Rock and Lee never could.

Safe, Not Free

The pattern holds for decades. Gay men build entire towns around being somewhere else: Palm Springs, Key West, Fire Island, Provincetown. Palm Springs becomes a refuge for Hollywood men two hours from the studios.

The danger still travels, in smaller forms. A host who will not rent to two men. A local who stares too long. A photo posted without asking. And every getaway ends on Sunday night, back where people know you.

Teddy and Rusty Check In

In this triptych collage, Teddy and Rusty book a midcentury BNB with a saltwater pool and a mini putting green. Nobody there knows them. That is the reason for the booking.

Every wall in the house is glass, floor to ceiling. They leave the curtains open. They are not ashamed, and they love the natural light reflected in each other's eyes.

The three panels are then merged into one image, with text added for emphasis. The added text reads like a guest review:

Teddy and Rusty enjoyed every bit of their weekend BNB midcentury getaway with saltwater pool and mini putting green.

Every bit is accurate. The putting green never gets a visit. Five stars. Would book again.

Rock and Lee had to leave the country to be a couple for a few days. Teddy and Rusty only need a reservation. The danger is still out there. For one weekend, it is far enough away.

— Behan

Sources

The 1970s: A Decade of Promise, a Decade of Harsh Reality

In 1970, three musicals were made for the new decade: Pufnstuf, Scrooge and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Their storylines ended with hope and anticipation of good things to follow. The 1960s preceded with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the new decade promised a fresh start. The films offered a talking dragon, singing ghosts and a river of chocolate, along with the promise that kindness and honesty would always be its own reward.

That promise carried a deeper meaning for one part of the audience. For gay men, these three films hold special attention. Each tells the ballad of an outcast: Jimmy, a lonely boy whose only friend is a talking flute; Charlie, the poorest, loneliest child in town; Ebenezer, a man who has been shut out from the world. Each is carried into a fantastic world. Jimmy goes to Living Island and its population of lovable creatures, Charlie to Willy Wonka's factory and its singing Oompa-Loompas, and Ebenezer to a realm of chain-rattling spirits. In each of these places, difference is the rule. All made in 1970, these three family musicals told the story many gay men lived: rejection, a transformational journey and redemption.

And for gay men, in each storyline the link between fantasy and reality is clear: Anita Bryant becomes Witchiepoo, the Oompa-Loompas and their moralizing songs become the Moral Majority, and AIDS becomes the third ghost, the specter of death.

The children who enjoyed these films came of age during a decade that brought a presidential resignation, two oil crises, a staggering 13 percent inflation, a political realignment called the Southern strategy, and a militant right-wing religious political movement organized against marginalized communities, including Black, Hispanic and gay Americans. Many of the gay men of that generation died young in the AIDS crisis, which began in the early 1980s and continues today.

The Timeline: 1969–1985

• 1969 — Robert Rayford, 16, dies in St. Louis of an illness his doctors cannot identify. In 1987, tests on his preserved tissue find HIV. He is the earliest known AIDS case in the United States, twelve years before the disease had a name.

• 1970 — Pufnstuf premieres in San Antonio on June 3, then opens in Los Angeles on August 19. It is based on Sid and Marty Krofft's H.R. Pufnstuf, which ran 17 episodes on NBC in the fall of 1969. Jack Wild stars with Billie Hayes, Martha Raye and Mama Cass, who sings "Different," a song about the loneliness and the value of being different, which speaks directly to gay listeners. Universal co-financed it with Kellogg's, the show's sole advertiser, in the cereal company's first film. Mixed reviews and small box-office returns.

• 1970 — Scrooge opens on November 5, with Albert Finney as Scrooge and Alec Guinness as Marley. Leslie Bricusse wrote the screenplay and songs, and Ronald Neame directed for CBS's film division, Cinema Center Films. It cost under $5 million, reached No. 1 in Variety's weekly box-office sample in December, and earned four Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe for Finney. It still earned only $3 million in North American rentals. Cinema Center closed in 1972 without ever turning a profit.

• 1971 — Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory opens from Paramount on June 30, with Gene Wilder as Wonka and 12-year-old Peter Ostrum as Charlie. Quaker Oats paid the $3 million budget to launch a Wonka candy bar. Bricusse and Anthony Newley wrote the songs, which earned the film's one Oscar nomination. It grossed about $4 million, and the candy bar failed. The film found its audience later, on television.

• 1972 — In June, five burglars are arrested inside Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex. In November, Nixon is reelected with 49 states, including every former Confederate state. The Southern strategy, built on coded appeals to white voters about "law and order" and "states' rights," completes the South's move to the Republican Party.

• 1973–74 — Arab oil producers impose an embargo after the U.S. supports Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Oil prices quadruple. Gasoline prices rise 40 percent in November 1973 alone, and stations post "No Gas Today" signs.

• 1974 — On August 9, Nixon resigns over Watergate to avoid impeachment, the first U.S. president to leave office this way.

• 1977 — Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign, which cast gay people as a threat to children, persuades Dade County voters to repeal a gay-rights ordinance. Similar repeals follow in St. Paul, Wichita and Eugene. Historians connect the campaign to the organized entry of conservative Christians into politics.

• 1978 — On November 27, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California, is shot dead at San Francisco City Hall with Mayor George Moscone. Three weeks earlier, voters had defeated the Briggs Initiative, which would have barred gay people from teaching in public schools.

• 1979 — The Iranian Revolution sets off the second oil crisis. Gas lines return, inflation passes 13 percent, and unemployment rises to 6.1 percent.

• 1979 — In June, the Rev. Jerry Falwell founds the Moral Majority, a political organization that unites conservative Christians against gay rights, abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. It becomes a major force in electing Ronald Reagan the following year.

• 1979 — On July 12, Disco Demolition Night at Chicago's Comiskey Park admits fans for 98 cents with a disco record. The records are blown up between games before about 50,000 people, thousands storm the field, and the White Sox forfeit the second game. It is a racist and homophobic backlash against music made popular by Black, Latino and gay audiences.

• 1979–81 — On November 4, 1979, Iranian students seize the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Fifty-two Americans are held for 444 days and released on January 20, 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan is sworn in.

• 1981 — On June 5, the CDC reports a rare pneumonia in five young gay men in Los Angeles, the first official report of the AIDS epidemic. By the end of the year, 337 cases have been confirmed and 130 people have died.

• 1985 — The Iran-Contra affair begins with secret U.S. arms sales to Iran, intended to win the release of American hostages in Lebanon. Profits from the sales are later sent to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, in violation of a congressional ban.

The films still show what 1970 expected the decade to be. The timeline shows what it became. The children who watched them lived through the difference.

The accompanying collage places a young gay man of 1983 inside the worlds of the three films. The collage brings the two halves of the essay together: the boy who watched these musicals, grown into the generation that the decade would test. At its center is Damian Guy, the first cover model of the Australian gay magazine OutRage. He would have been a child when these films were released in 1970 and 1971. Around him are the creatures of 1970: Witchiepoo and H.R. Pufnstuf and a chorus line of Oompa-Loompas. Behind him rises the third ghost, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. He looks back over his shoulder, an outsider in the collage itself. In the foreground, a young man of today smiles with his eyes closed, at ease where Guy is wary. The saturated colors of the collage are inspired by the unique palettes of the three films.

Postscript

The children who acted in these films came of age in the same decade as the children who watched them. They lived through the same years the timeline describes. More than 50 years on, rest in peace to those who have passed on:

• Jack Wild (Jimmy, Pufnstuf) — March 1, 2006

• Denise Nickerson (Violet Beauregarde, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory) — July 10, 2019

• Richard Beaumont (Tiny Tim, Scrooge) — April 26, 2022

Amid the Ruins, Amid the Fog, Amid War: Love

Love doesn’t wait for a perfect moment.

These three digital photo collages combine the 1970s, the early 2000s, and today to create reverberations of love and desire. The settings are a war zone, a foggy day in San Francisco, and soldiers from the Vietnam era.

The constant is an embracing couple from the early 2000s. The couple appears in all three works, unchanged. All the settings around them evolve.

In the first work, a contemporary figure extends across the frame, suspended above a city reduced to rubble. The couple embraces below him. Desire continues amid the ruins.

In the second work, the couple stands before the Golden Gate Bridge, obscured by the fog. Across the frame is a contemporary reclining figure, head back, with a second man pressed to his chest. In February 2004, around the time the couple was photographed, San Francisco began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The California Supreme Court voided those licenses that August.

In the third work, the couple stands in front of a unit of shirtless soldiers in the jungle. The soldiers look at the camera. During the Vietnam era, gay service members served under threat of discharge, and the ban on openly gay military service did not end until 2011. Here the couple embraces in front of the unit, in plain view.

Two symbols appear in all three works. One is the Jupiter 3, which stands for freedom, deliverance, and witness. The other is the blue moon, which stands for love and desire.

Each collage places three periods on one surface. Love and desire continue amid the ruins, amid the fog, and amid war. Love is the redeeming factor in any circumstance.

Digital photo collage.

— Behan