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

From the Feed: Spilt Milk, Jack Kerouac Was a Self-Loathing Bisexual, and Muscle T's

Three subjects come from the feed this week, and all three concern what men show and what they hide. Today, men on social media show their bodies, their desire and each other openly. Seventy years ago, one of America's most famous writers could not.

Jack Kerouac had sex with men. Allen Ginsberg confirmed their sexual encounters in later interviews. Gore Vidal wrote that he and Kerouac spent a night together at the Chelsea Hotel in 1953. Joyce Johnson, Kerouac's girlfriend and later biographer, called him bisexual: mostly attracted to women, with some sexual relationships with men.

Kerouac wrote his life into his novels, but he left that night out. When he fictionalized the evening in The Subterraneans, the sex was missing. Ginsberg's explanation was that Kerouac was afraid of his mother. Kerouac lived with her most of his life, drank heavily, and died in 1969 at 47. The writer celebrated for telling everything kept this part of himself hidden.

The muscle T shows what Kerouac's generation concealed. The white crewneck began as U.S. Navy regulation underwear in 1913. Marlon Brando wore it tight in A Streetcar Named Desire, washing and drying each shirt repeatedly to shrink it to his body. In the 1970s, the tight white T became part of the gay clone look. It is underwear worn as outerwear, built to display the body.

In the first collage, a man in a muscle T faces a mirrored copy of himself. The second collage places men in the leaves, one covering his face with a towel, while a group stands in the background.

Spilt milk began as a joke. In 2012, students in Newcastle, England, filmed themselves pouring milk over their heads in public places, and the stunt spread online as "milking." In the third collage, milk runs down a shirtless man's chest while a man in white briefs stands under a chandelier and another raises a finger to his lips. The joke has become display.

There is no use crying over spilt milk. What men hid in Kerouac's time, they now post. The Blue Moon and the Jupiter 3, longing and escape, appear in all three collages.

— Behan

Sources

  • Gore Vidal, Palimpsest (1995)

  • The Rag Blog, Jonah Raskin, interview with Joyce Johnson (2012)

  • Mental Floss, "Jack Kerouac Writer Facts"

  • Mental Floss, "A Brief and Incomplete Timeline of T-Shirt History"

  • ASKET, "The Rebellious History of the Plain White Tee"

  • Know Your Meme, "Milking"

The Seen Witness

In these three collages, the viewer is a witness, and the viewer is seen. In each piece, a dark-haired man turns over his shoulder and looks out of the frame, at whoever stands in front of the work.

Every figure comes from the feed. The over-the-shoulder pose is common on social media. It is made for an audience the person posting will never meet. In these collages, that audience is specific: the person looking.

The settings change. The first collage is an open field, where a second man in red trunks walks away into tall grass. The second is the Dallas skyline. The third is a high-rise interior facing the Empire State Building at sunset. The glance repeats in all three.

Two other witnesses are present. The Jupiter 3 represents freedom and escape. The Blue Moon represents desire and longing. Both watch from above, and no figure looks at them. They are unseen witnesses.

The viewer is the only witness any figure acknowledges.

That acknowledgment changes the act of looking. An unseen witness observes from a distance and remains uninvolved. A seen witness has been identified. Once the man turns and looks back, the viewer becomes part of the scene: part of the attention, the display, and the desire between men.

Each piece positions the viewer differently. In the field, a close-cropped face at the right edge also looks sideways, so the viewer stands between two looks. In Dallas, the other two men face forward, and all three look at the viewer. In New York, a silver-haired man photographs himself in a mirror, and the glance is the only look directed out of the frame.

My work takes subtext and makes it context. Here, the subtext is the viewer's own looking. The glance makes it part of the picture.

Today's Feed = Today's Collages

Seven new works built from social media, algorithms and hefty scrolling to build gay-positive representations

Each collage here comes from one day's feed. The figures, the grounds and the combinations all arrive through social media, sorted by the day's algorithm. The goal is gay-positive representation built from what the scroll delivers.

Two men in army fatigues carry over from yesterday's collages. Today they stand beside a Freedom Elite motor home, its floor plan laid open below them: a dinette that converts to a bed, a wet bath, a cab-over bunk. They appear again inside a church, near a crucifix and a miraculous staircase behind a foreshortened figure.

Elsewhere, two wrestlers stand under a large blue moon with a new Veronica veil. A mid-century ranch house frames a lawn full of men at dusk, one holding a snake. A grid of OnlyFan selfies sits beside a White Star Line crew photograph and a smiling man in a 1950s plaid shirt. Contemporary figures share an AI representation of an ancient Greece exercise court. In a mall food court setting, gay men react to a chiseled torso at the center of the frame. Time for snacks!

Jupiter 3 appears in all seven. It stands for freedom, escape and witness.

Social Media Meets Gay Culture

The source material reflects how central social media is to LGBTQ life. A 2024 national survey by LGBT Tech and Data for Progress polled 1,304 LGBTQ adults and found that 96% use the internet at least once a day. Nearly 80% use social networking platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn or X, and 78% use video platforms such as YouTube or Twitch. Social media is super gay.

The purpose is connection and expression. At least 77% of LGBTQ adults use the internet to express themselves creatively, explore new ideas and connect with friends and family. 57% report often using social platforms to connect with friends or family.

This is not limited to the young. A 2025 study found that LGBTQ adults 55 and older were significantly more likely than younger LGBTQ adults to use social media for social bonding.

Sadly, the same platforms carry hostility. Half of LGBTQ adults report anti-LGBTQ bullying or harassment online, and more than a third have seen anti-LGBTQ misinformation shared online.

The feed supplies both the images and the conditions. These collages take what it offers and assemble it in support of gay life.

— Behan

Sources

  • LGBT Tech and Data for Progress, "ctrl+alt+lgbt: Digital Access, Usage, and Experiences of the LGBTQ+ Community" (2024): dataforprogress.org

  • LGBT Tech, survey release: lgbttech.org

  • Statista, LGBTQ+ adults using social platforms to connect with their communities (April 2024): statista.com

  • "Intergenerational Differences in Social Media Use Among LGBTQ+ Adults," Innovation in Aging (2025): ncbi.nlm.nih.go

The Lingering Shot

In a scene from the 2024 series Earth Abides, Alexander Ludwig slowly undresses. The narrative pauses, the camera holds an inverted full shot, a peekaboo framing that film has usually reserved for women.

The original dark ground is kept. It reads as flat space and infinite space at once. This simultaneous compression and extension produces ambiguity, and with it, unease.

The natural color of the darkened shot is heightened into a palette reminiscent of Matisse's Blue Nude. The questions asked of Matisse apply here: is this a new understanding of beauty, or a distortion of the human form?

The collages extend the 3-second shot with multiple views of the scene, combined, inverted, overlaid, and repeated, to ask the question: if this scene had been filmed for a male audience instead of a female one, would it have been called inappropriate?

Other questions follow. How does this scene serve the narrative? Viewers interested in Ludwig capture the moment and repost it, which drives views and revenue for the series. Is the scene only about money?

Compare the nude bathing scene in the 2021 film The Power of the Dog. That film drew criticism, including from actor Sam Elliott, for its homoerotic content. Ludwig's slow strip passed without apparent objection. The only difference is the implied audience, women for one, men for the other.

This returns to the long debate over the naked and the nude. What counts as appropriate is often decided by the intention behind an image, not the image itself. That judgment usually rests on one assumption: heterosexual attraction is acceptable, homosexual attraction is not.

The objection, then, is not to the nude body. It is to LGBTQ+ people.

Singularity

A singularity is a point at which known rules stop applying.

The two collages below are built around that point.

Both began as advertisements. A mid-century Masonite ad that sold aspiration: a home and a room built by hand. A 2001 Italian shower gel ad selling desire: the body, a scent, and the company of men known as "the boys."

Into each space I added men from different times to compliment those from the original ads. Within this compression, the rules that separated one period from another necessarily stop applying. The experience of being human becomes all present, all at once.

Two separate collages, one of aspiration and one of desire, each compressed and combining to complete the other.

Symbiosis.

Fall and Winter 1974

In the 20th century, gay men had almost no way to see themselves in publications or in print. When they did appear, they were shown in the most negative light.

One source of positive male imagery was the department store catalog of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Within those pages were images of men together, presented as subtext. For gay men, seeing those images was powerful.

These three digital collages use the actual Fall and Winter 1974 catalog covers of JCPenney, Sears and Montgomery Ward, and make the subtext context.

Since 1974, Montgomery Ward has closed, Sears is down to five stores, and JCPenney survives as part of a larger company. Perhaps if they had published covers like these, all three would still be thriving today.