Oh Billy Joe

Ode to Billy Joe at 50: Three Scenes snd a Collage for the History Books

When Bobbie Gentry’s song “Ode to Billie Joe” hit the radio in 1967, it created a genuine cultural phenomenon built entirely around one unanswered question: why did Billy Joe McAllister jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge? Gentry never explained it, in the song or in interviews, and the not-knowing is what made the song famous. People wanted the answer for a decade.

By the time Warner Bros. made the film version in 1976, they had a decision to make: give the audience an answer. The screenwriter, Herman Raucher, later said the choice he landed on — that Billy Joe’s death followed a sexual encounter with another man — was picked mainly because it was novel, not because anyone involved was trying to make a statement about homosexuality. It was a plot device, pure and simple.

That’s what makes what actually ends up on screen so strange, and so worth revisiting fifty years later. Whether they meant to or not, the filmmakers put something on screen that mainstream American film had essentially never shown before: a young man in the specific moment of realizing he’s gay. Not through attraction to another man. Through the absence of attraction to a woman.

The Scene

At the town jamboree, a makeshift brothel is set up in a building behind the main event. Billy Joe, drunk, is escorted through it. The film shows this in a series of distinct vignettes: a young man with a woman, a middle-aged man with a woman, an older man — the town sheriff — with a woman. All of them are enjoying themselves. Billy Joe is walked past it, toward a stall of his own, where he finds a woman waiting for him.

His face, in this scene, is the whole point. Robby Benson plays it with almost no dialogue, and what’s on his face is shock.

Up to this point in the film, Billy Joe has romanticized the idea of being with a woman, and so has Bobbie Lee, the girl he loves. They’re both young, and they’ve both imagined this the way young people do. So when Billy Joe is confronted, in plain and repeated terms, with actual heterosexual sex happening around him, and finds that it does nothing for him, the shock is real. He expected to want it, the way he’d imagined wanting it with Bobbie Lee, and instead he feels nothing. The gap between what he expected to feel and what he actually feels, in that moment, is the recognition — the recognition that he wants to be with men the way others want to be with a woman. He recognizes that he is gay.

The Unseen Scene

The second most important scene in this film is a scene that was never shot, and it happens immediately after the one above — no time passes on screen between Billy Joe’s recognition in the brothel and what follows from it. The story doesn’t pause, doesn’t cut away to anything else. It moves straight from the moment he understands himself into the moment he acts on it.

What happens between Billy Joe and Dewey Barksdale that night is never shown. We only get it secondhand, afterward, in what characters say about it. And I think it’s the smartest decision anyone involved in this film made, whether they understood what they were doing or not.

Here’s what we can piece together from what is said. Within what seems like minutes of walking through that brothel, Billy Joe is with a man. It suggests something people now have a casual name for — gaydar— the ability to recognize another gay man almost immediately, without either party saying anything explicit. Barksdale, for his part, sounds almost thrown by it. In the dialogue that survives in the film, he tells Bobbie Lee he doesn’t know that it will happen again, which reads less like a plan and more like a man startled by how quickly it happened. And in a line that was written but cut from the final film, Billy Joe says it outright: he liked him. He wanted to be with him, and he’d be with him again.

When a person finally understands what they don’t want, they understand, in the same instant, what they do want. And once someone knows what they want, they usually go after it. Nothing about that is troubling or unusual — it’s normal, and it’s the same thing anyone does the moment real clarity arrives after a long stretch of confusion. Billy Joe had been ready for romance the entire film. He and Bobbie Lee had both been imagining it. What he hadn’t had, until that night, was an accurate understanding of what he was actually ready for. The brothel scene gave him that understanding. And once he had it, he didn’t just recognize it — he was finally able to have it. Who happened to be there when that recognition arrived is at best incidental. The fact is, he was there.

As if two scenes weren’t enough

There’s a third, and it follows the second just as directly as the second followed the first. Nothing sits between this scene and the encounter with Barksdale — no other plotline, no time skip that isn’t accounted for. One recognition leads straight into one act, and that act leads straight into this: Billy Joe disappears after the jamboree, hiding out for days in the wilderness, sustaining himself on wild mushrooms and onions.

Bobbie Lee finds him in that wilderness. And what happens between them there is, for a boy in 1950s Mississippi, close to a miracle in its own right: he tells her the truth.

She responds the way people in that time and place would have been trained to respond. She offers him a way out of it — he was drunk, it was an accident, he didn’t fully know what he was doing. It’s a generous thing to offer, and she means it kindly. He refuses it. He tells her he knew exactly what he was doing, and that he wanted it. He won’t take the exit she’s offering him, even though it would be so much easier for both of them if he did.

Then she goes further. She tells him they can still have this — still have a life together, still have what they’d both been imagining before that night at the jamboree. He pulls his hand away and tells her no. He doesn’t want it.

He turns Bobby Lee down because he understands that it wouldn’t be fair to either of them. She deserves the chance at real love, the same as he does. Taking what she’s offering would cost her that chance, and it would cost him the truth he’d just found.

What he couldn’t survive

So Billy Joe learned who he was. And based on the cut dialogue — the lines that didn’t survive into the final film — he liked who he was. He says so plainly: he liked the man, he wanted to be with him. That’s not shame. That’s clarity, arrived at and accepted, at least in that moment, in that room.

What follows in the film isn’t Billy Joe failing to understand himself. It’s Billy Joe understanding himself completely and then being told, by everything around him, that what he now knows is unacceptable. When he finally speaks about it to Bobbie Lee, in the woods, he doesn’t describe a person he loved or a feeling he trusted. He describes a sin against nature, a sin against God. That language isn’t his own discovery. It’s the culture’s verdict, handed to him fully formed, and he applies it to himself the moment he tries to say the truth out loud a second time.

But I don’t think shame is the whole story, and I don’t think it’s fair to the character to leave it there. Look at where and when this film is set. In 1950s Mississippi, it wasn’t only that Billy Joe would have been condemned for being gay. It’s that there was no visible path in front of him toward an actual life — a partner, a home, a future built on honest terms. That possibility simply didn’t exist yet, not in any form he could have seen or reached for. So alongside the shame, there’s a second thing working on him: despair, of a different and in some ways heavier kind. Not the fear of being punished for who he was, but the sense that even without punishment, there was nowhere for him to go.

That combination — inherited shame, a genuinely closed future, and the sheer size of the time he thought he’d have to spend alone in it — is what he couldn’t survive. He knew who he was. He liked who he was. He simply could not hold onto that, against the weight of what he’d been taught to believe about it, and against a future that offered him nothing to hold onto instead.

The Collage

This digital photo collage is built entirely from the one scene where Dewey Barksdale and Billy Joe McAllister actually share space on screen — a small exchange, but a significant one, since it’s here that their relationship is first established. The collage is kept stark: just the film stills themselves, with minimal accents, arranged in strict alternation down a vertical strip, their sense of light (color and value) heightened for dramatic effect. That repetition mirrors the structure of the scene itself, a question posed and an answer given, so the collage reads less like a set of screenshots and more like a compressed record of the exchange, focused just on the mechanics of the scene. Dewey and Billy Joe never appear in the same frame together, but the back-and-forth rhythm of the panels stands in for that shared moment, keeping the focus on the two men and the small, early exchange between them. It imagines what that unfilmed scene might have looked like.

The Film

Is it a good film? My take, no.

As a whole, Ode to Billy Joe leans on a cliché that has done real damage: the troubled gay teenager who can’t handle what he’s feeling and ends with his demise. That’s a straight person’s idea of what being gay means — that it’s a kind of sickness, an instability, something a person might not survive finding out about themselves. The film never questions that premise. It just uses it, as the answer to a decade-old pop song mystery, and moves on.

That’s the larger arc of this film, and it’s a thin one — a country ballad stretched into a plot, built mostly as a novelty. But inside that thin arc is a much smaller one, made of three scenes, that has nothing shallow about it at all. A boy realizes, watching heterosexual sex play out in front of him, that it isn’t for him. What happens next isn’t shown at all, and is stronger for it. And when the girl he previously pursued offers him a way to avoid the truth, offering to build a life with him anyway, he turns her down, on the grounds that they both deserve better. These three scenes aren’t scattered across the film — they run one immediately into the next, an unbroken sequence with nothing else allowed to interrupt it: a young man comes to understand who he truly is, acts on that understanding, and is briefly, genuinely happier for it, before the world closes back in around him.

I don’t know a better word for that than miracle. Filmmakers who, by their own account, were reaching for nothing more than a novelty twist somehow produced a continuous, unbroken account of a person coming into the truth of who they are — clear-eyed, unashamed for as long as it lasts, filmed and with more precision than the rest of the movie earns. That this startling clarity happened here, made by people who don’t seem to have known what they were doing, is close to inexplicable, arriving from people with no apparent reason to produce it.

That’s a miracle.

Taken together, those three scenes are about as clear and unsentimental an account of gay self-recognition as American film had produced up to that point, and maybe for a while after.

Final Thoughts

Ode to Billy Joe is a film worth watching for what happens inside it, almost by accident, in those three scenes — and that alone earns it a place in the history of how gay lives have been shown, or failed to be shown, on American screens.

And, btw, Robby Benson is hot. That’s another reason to watch it.

That’s not a metaphor for anything. It’s the actual, ordinary content of a gay man’s attention, and it’s exactly what the culture around Billy Joe refused to let him have in peace. Saying Robby Benson is hot is a small, honest example of the same thing this whole piece has been about — attraction that doesn’t ask permission and doesn’t need explaining, because it was never a choice to begin with.

On Nike, the Field, and Gay Athletes

A Queer Timeline of US Athletics

• ~800–700 BCE — Nike appears in Greek mythology, in Hesiod’s Theogony, as the winged goddess of victory and patron of athletics, daughter of the Titan Pallas and the sea-nymph Styx.

• 1920 — Bill Tilden, openly gay, wins Wimbledon and goes on to be named the greatest tennis player of the half-century.

• 1971 — Blue Ribbon Sports, founded in 1964, rebrands itself as Nike, taking the goddess’s name and wings for its logo, the swoosh, and grows into one of the largest sponsors and patrons of athletics in the world.

• 1975 — David Kopay, a former NFL running back, becomes the first professional team-sport athlete in America to come out, three years after retirement.

• 1981 — Martina Navratilova comes out publicly as bisexual; Billie Jean King is outed the same year by a lawsuit.

• 1982 — Glenn Burke, former Dodgers outfielder credited with inventing the high-five, acknowledges he is gay after retiring, the first Major League Baseball player to do so.

• 2013 — Brittney Griner comes out at the start of her WNBA career and signs an endorsement deal with Nike, the first openly gay athlete to do so. Robbie Rogers comes out and joins the LA Galaxy, the first openly gay man to play in a top North American men’s league.

• 2014 — Having come out in 2013, Jason Collins plays for the Brooklyn Nets, the first openly gay athlete to be active in any of the four major North American men’s leagues. The Galaxy, with Rogers, win the MLS Cup. Michael Sam is drafted by the St. Louis Rams, the first openly gay player drafted into the NFL.

• 2016 — Nike ends its relationship with boxer Manny Pacquiao after he calls same-sex couples “worse than animals,” calling the remarks abhorrent.

• 2021 — Carl Nassib becomes the first active NFL player to come out as gay while still on a roster.

• 2026 — A record 49 openly LGBTQ+ athletes compete for Team USA at the Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina — about one in five of the team. The Olympics are largely individual and small-team events; the four major U.S. professional men’s team leagues — the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL — still have no openly gay active players at all.

Having one fifth of Team USA’s athletes at the Olympic level be openly LGBTQ+ is something worth sitting with. This is the tier where only the most disciplined, most physically capable athletes in the country qualify to compete at all. The old idea — that gay men in particular are somehow less athletic, less coordinated, less fit for competition than straight men — was never true, and the numbers make that plain once athletes are actually free to be visible.

On the Collages

Eight collages make up this set, all built from the same three-part legend: Ground, Figures, and Accents.

The Ground is a grid of previously created collages, compressed into a single field that forms the foundation the new work is built on top of. It’s not a backdrop in the traditional sense — it’s the layer of past work underneath the present one, often only partly visible once the rest of the composition sits on top of it.

The Figures are found, sourced from social media — specifically Facebook — then cut, cropped, and reused. The same handful of bodies recur across all eight pieces, at different scales, rotations, and croppings, rather than one figure serving one collage. Figures are allowed to extend past the edge of the frame rather than being contained within it, keeping the composition open rather than closed, and no piece is built for symmetry — bodies, accents, and ground are balanced against each other unevenly, weight against weight, rather than mirrored.

The blue moon, the black swan, and Jupiter 3 are the three accents, and each carries its own charge rather than functioning as decoration. The blue moon stands for desire and longing. The black swan points to the positive natural occurrence of homosexuality across species, a fact of the animal world rather than an anomaly. Jupiter 3 acts as a witness to the scene, but also as a symbol of escape and freedom. None of the three appear at the same scale or position twice; they’re a fixed vocabulary, reinvented per each collage.

Color, value, rhythm, repetition, and balance are what hold each piece together formally. The collages function as a kind of playing field: a bounded space where figures act out the realities of gay life the way athletes act out a game. Nike patronized athletics without knowing which bodies would eventually stand on the field she named. These eight pieces put that question, does sexual orientation hinder athletic ability, back in front of her, and us.

From Inside

Artist Timeline

Born in 1961, into a Cold War childhood shadowed by the threat of nuclear annihilation — a fear that never fully receded, only changed shape. By 1981, that same Cold War anxiety had intensified, joined by a new and quieter threat: the emergence of the AIDS crisis, and with it, a culture that responded with suspicion and blame rather than care. In 2001, the threat became domestic and immediate — September 11th, followed by two decades of war in the Middle East. By 2021, it was biological and global: COVID-19, arriving alongside a breakdown in family structure, a culture confined to bed and screen, and a public health crisis that curdled into outright distrust of science itself.

Taken together, these decades trace something like a return to an older, more fearful way of living — a new medieval era, where basic safety can no longer be assumed, where bunkers and self-sufficiency have crept back into the cultural imagination as reasonable responses to an unstable world.

The Disruption, Dislocation, and Disease. The Call Is Coming From the Inside.

Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds is a film returned to often — not for the spectacle, but for what it captures about a particular, ongoing anxiety. H.G. Wells wrote the original novel over a century ago, and there’s something eerily prescient in it: the Martians in the 2005 adaptation don’t arrive from the sky so much as emerge from beneath — machines buried and waiting, already here, already among us. It echoes an old horror-movie premise: the call is coming from inside the house.

That image feels apt for the present moment. American culture is currently consuming itself from within — polarized, fractured along political lines, turned inward against itself rather than facing any outside threat. No one is fully safe right now, and the danger isn’t some invading force from elsewhere. It’s already here.

The Collages

That’s the frame for the collages associated with the film: disruption, dislocation, and disease — not as three separate crises, but as one continuous condition, the atmosphere this body of work has been made inside of, a narrative of anxiety encouraging escape, to anywhere, and burrow. The atmosphere within these collages is intense, fraught with the fear of what comes next. Dark values and high-key colors pervade the visual narratives, offering no relief — only unrelenting fear.

Following a sabbatical in 2016, digital photo collage began as an informal practice on a newly purchased iPhone, often worked out while hanging out in gay establishments around Dallas — a way to practice art making and pass time creatively. Over the next several years it grew more frequent, and in 2023 became the primary medium.

This is work in the folk tradition: self-taught, outside any formal training, made principally on the iPhone and supplemented by various apps and the wider internet. That lineage matters.

Artists like David Wojnarowicz worked in photo collage and mixed media through the 1980s and into the ’90s, often without formal training or institutional recognition of their own, insisting on gay presence in a culture that refused to recognize it — underscoring the essential reality that gay people exist, and have a right to exist.

My own work is now an homage to their visual successes, and a continuation of that same understanding: the validity of gay presence in the world. Through this new purpose, this new medium, and this new work, a new subject has emerged: the swan made human.

Black swans mate for life. And within the species, that lifelong bond is often between two males — two black swans committing to each other, raising a family, and doing so with a strength and capability that rivals, if not exceeds, that of a male-female pair. A black swan, or a pair of black swans, appears within these collages for exactly this reason — a reminder that just as this species includes gay pairs among its own, so does the human species, and that presence is an essential, positive force within culture when it is allowed to simply exist.

Documenting the positive force that gay culture provides for the larger society is the force being my studio practice. And we are beginning to see what that looks like at scale: stable relationships, families raised well, people who are honest and open about who they love, contributing fully and openly to the world around them. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s already visible wherever it’s been allowed room to exist — in nature, and increasingly, in us.

The swan made human. Not a metaphor stretched to fit an argument, but an observation about what nature already does, plainly and without controversy, when left alone to do it — and a claim that the world is better, not worse, for making room for it.

The Naked Gunner

The Naked Gunner

Actually, in one of nine universes, he was The Naked Gay Gunner.

Why does this matter? Why would we pause to wonder aloud what cannot be answered or make a collage that imagines rather than confirms?

What we do know is that he was a young man, courageous, a man who did not abandon his post. He’s remembered as a hero — an anonymous stand-in for the very best of the American soldier.

Based on population statistics, there was a one in nine possibility that he was gay. That’s a fact.

And this is a real photograph. I’ve embellished it with collage elements to make one point: gay men can be brave, the same as straight men.

We live in a country that still questions the manliness of gay men, their fitness for military service, to the point of testosterone testing.

The hero in this frame could be straight.

Could be.

We know he was brave. And maybe gay.

Neo Neo

Same Sets, Different Story

Seven digital collages

In 1977, Dario Argento built a dance academy out of stained glass, geometric color fields, and walls in impossible red, yellow, and blue — the same year painters were staging their own revolt against Minimalism’s cool detachment, bringing back the figure, the myth, the raw feeling, in colors just as vivid. Suspiria‘s sets belong to that same reaction. Whether or not Argento’s crew ever named it, the instinct is Neo-Expressionist: maximalism as an answer to restraint, the body and the color turned up loud.

This series treats those sets as exactly that — a Neo-Expressionist stage, built for one story and left standing for another. The crew wraps, the coven’s story is told, and a different film moves into the same rooms before the lights come down. Same corridors, same saturated color, maybe a familiar face passing through frame — but this time the story is gay characters, gay storylines, a film Argento never made living inside the one he did. Seven scenes from that unmade movie, staged on a set too vivid, and too Neo-Expressionist, to strike after just one film.

Stay in Your Lane

Fun studio time baking a variety of works based on my morning scroll. Idea: gay men exist. Gay men have a right pursue happiness without any comments from a peanut gallery.

J'accuse

There’s a well-known image of Ronald Reagan as a young man: a lifeguard at Lowell Park on the Rock River in Dixon, Illinois, credited with pulling dozens of people out of the water over his summers there. He liked to tell that story for the rest of his life. It fit the persona he’d go on to build in Hollywood — the soldier, the hero, the steady man who shows up when someone is drowning. His film career ran on that image for years: the uniform, the square jaw, the man other men could count on.

And then his moment actually came, and he wasn’t there.

This is a post about betrayal.

By the time Reagan reached the presidency, a real emergency had already started, and it kept growing through his two terms in office. He didn’t publicly say the word “AIDS” until September 1985, four years into the epidemic. In July of that same year, his old friend from Hollywood, Rock Hudson, collapsed in Paris while trying to access an experimental treatment unavailable in the United States. Hudson’s people sent a telegram to the White House, asking for help cutting through the red tape to get him into a hospital that had turned him away. The answer came back: no. Hudson died three months later. The lifeguard didn’t go in the water for his own friend.

That refusal is small in one sense — a single phone call not made — and enormous in another, because it’s a perfect miniature of everything the administration didn’t do for everyone else. Thousands of men died in the years before Reagan ever said the word publicly. Tens of thousands more died in the years after, while funding lagged and research moved slowly and the disease was still spoken of, when it was spoken of at all, as something happening to other people. The undesirables. God’s rejects.

Running paradoxically with all of it was a culture obsessed with a very different picture of the male body. The garish, inflated, oiled, steroid-built men of eighties action movies and cartoons — Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Lundgren, Van Damme, Tarzan’s and He-Man’s and every animated variant of him — heteronormative on the surface and soaked in homoerotic subtext underneath. Audiences ogled these scantily clad men flexing and grappling and saving each other for two hours at a time, night after night, without ever having to admit what they were looking at. It was permitted, even celebrated, as long as it stayed fictional. The real men dying in hospital wards a few miles away got no such permission, and precious little help.

There were no American heroes in the 1980s. There were no valiant warriors coming in to save the day. There were only play-actors and cartoon villains and cartoon wannabe heroes, flexing on a screen while the real dying happened off it. And at the very top of that heteronormative nightmare food chain stood a man who used to be a lifeguard — who once ran into the water again and again to pull the drowning out by hand — now standing at the shore with his back turned to it, watching the tide come in with bodies in tow, calling it someone else’s trouble.

J'accuse.

Betrayal.

The Breakfast Nook

Les Valeurs Personnelles et la Table à Manger (Personal Values and the Dining Table)

There’s a quiet contest that’s been playing out in American homes since the 1950s: the TV tray versus the dining room table.

The TV tray stand introduced something new. Before it, eating with the family meant sitting together at a shared table. The TV tray offered another option: the same room, the same show on the same screen, each person on their own small surface instead of one shared one. It continued with cable, VHS, and now streaming, all giving people more reasons to eat wherever the screen is — tray or lap or coffee table. As part of the dynamic of a living culture, the last forty years have seen a remarkable change, with the table no longer being the only place dinner happens.

Keeping the Nook

My 1962 ranch rambler on the sunny southern side of Dallas, Texas, is a lot like houses from that era. It came with two distinct eating spaces: a formal dining room up front, and a breakfast nook off the kitchen.

There’s a real renovation trend right now of absorbing the breakfast nook into the kitchen itself — knocking it out for more cabinetry, a baking zone, even a small island. I thought about doing exactly that. But I’ve committed to keeping this nook as a nook, original to the mid-century design of the house, rather than turning it into an extension of the kitchen.

What I let go of instead was the formal dining room. Between two separate dining spaces, I didn’t need both, so the formal dining room became a casual lounge, and the breakfast nook stayed the breakfast nook. To me, that’s the room with the real job to do — the small, human-scaled space that’s perfect for a cozy cup of coffee in the morning, the kind of table that shows up as a central gathering point in classic sitcoms, whether it’s the kitchen table on The Golden Girls or the breakfast nook on Leave It to Beaver. Real estate opinions on breakfast nooks are pretty mixed — some buyers love the coziness and built-in storage, others would rather have the open counter space or an island — but for me, the nook won.

The Cabinet That Changes With the Seasons

The feature that makes this room work for me is the built-in china cabinet, original to the house. Instead of settling on one look, I treat it as a rotating display and swap between two dinnerware collections about every six months.

With fall coming, I have placed the Tienshan Prelude on display — an all-white, untrimmed porcelain pattern with a clean, pared-back look that leans into the stripped-down side of mid-century modernism.

My Brookpark melamine collection, designed by Joan Luntz for the International Molding Company starting around 1950, is now in the kitchen cabinets for daily use. Luntz was one of the few women designing for the plastics industry at the time, and her Brookpark line stood out for its confident use of square forms when almost everything else on the market was round or oval. Her work went on to earn real design recognition, including from the Museum of Modern Art, and it’s now considered a meaningful chapter in the history of American melamine dinnerware.

Twice a year, the two collections trade places — one moves into the glass-front display cabinet, the other into everyday storage — along with a rotation of the artwork on either side of the cabinet and a smaller decorative dishware display I keep above the refrigerator.

Why Collect the Whole Line

For some, the question might be: why does a single gay man need two complete dishware collections? Well, any well-equipped home has both casual and formal dining options, so it’s really a matter of the nature of the home itself. Also, you never know who’s going to show up, and it’s always good to be prepared.

But finally, and this is what matters most to me as an artist, it’s about seeing the complete vision of the designer — how they addressed the salt and pepper shaker, how they handled the salad plate versus the soup bowl versus the cereal bowl versus the dinner plate. Seeing the full expression of a design helps you understand not just the designer, but the era they worked in.

That’s the appeal for me — not owning a few nice pieces from each pattern, but assembling the whole line as completely as I can: the teapot, the sugar and creamer, the bowls, the mugs, the salt and pepper shakers, whatever that pattern originally offered. It’s about honoring the full design intention behind each collection, not just a curated fragment of it.

My hope is that someday each one lands with someone who wants a complete set of their own — one more way of keeping this design history in circulation instead of letting it sit in storage.

Setting the Tableau

Beyond the cabinet, the room itself is deliberately staged. The seating is an Eames chair paired with a white garden stool, pulled up to an IKEA tulip table — all white, all clean lines. Wicker shows up twice, in quiet conversation with itself: the woven pendant light overhead, and a woven basket to the right of the table. On the left, living plants are the one unstyled, organic element in the room — proof of life against all that white and wicker. And at the center of the table sits a modern, almost sculptural take on the traditional fruit bowl, standing in for the bowl of fruit you’d expect on a breakfast table without actually looking like one.

I can’t set up a room like this without thinking of René Magritte’s 1952 painting Personal Values (Les Valeurs personnelles). It’s a bedroom with the walls papered in blue sky and clouds, where a handful of ordinary objects — a comb, a shaving brush, a wine glass, a bar of soap — are blown wildly out of scale, dwarfing the actual furniture around them. I love that painting — it’s such a wonderful play on scale — but what really draws me to it isn’t the surrealism so much as the staging: a small room where every object has been placed with intention, so the whole thing reads as one scene rather than a collection of furniture.

That’s the instinct I was chasing here. The Eames chair, the garden stool, the tulip table, the wicker pendant and basket, the plants, the fruit bowl — none of it is incidental. Every object in this nook is doing double duty as furniture and as part of a small, deliberate scene. That’s what sets the tone for the room, and honestly, for how I think about the rest of the house.

Poor Buster, Maybe.

Buster Crabbe had it all: Olympic gold-medal swimmer, matinee idol, straight, with a wife and three kids, living the technicolor dream in sunny Hollywood.

But what it had been different? What if Buster had been gay, and, miraculously, it was ok to be gay in 1930’s America? What would life had been like for him?

In this alternate 1930s — this imagined timeline, Hollywood in the golden age didn’t just tolerate a gay leading man. It fell head over heels for one.

A Paradise for an Olympic Champion

If the culture had simply let him be, Buster’s life would’ve been a dream.

• Body Culture — No hiding behind “athlete” as a cover story. He was proud of the body that won him gold, and nobody batted an eye.

• Poolside Parties — His Hollywood Hills house became legendary for pool parties that ran till sunrise, guest list a who’s-who of the era’s brightest names.

• Fashion Freedom — Skin-tight swimwear, open collars, tailored linen suits — he wore what looked good, and the papers loved him for it.

• Public Romance — He walked every premiere red carpet arm in arm with whoever he was seeing, flashbulbs popping like it was the most natural thing in the world.

The Ultimate Eligible Bachelor

Buster wasn’t just accepted — he was the catch of the decade.

• Social King — The most sought-after bachelor in a town built on sought-after bachelors.

• Famous Peer Circle — He ran with the era’s other openly gay icons, no whispers, no code words needed.

• No Fake Marriages — The studio never once floated a sham engagement to “clean up his image,” because there was nothing to clean up.

• Fan Adoration — Millions of fans — of every stripe — idolized him precisely as he was.

Career Boost Instead of Ruin

The thing that could have ended a real career instead built his.

• Tailored Roles — Studios wrote parts for him, not around a secret.

• No Blackmail — The tabloid vultures who thrived on threatening actors had nothing to hold over him.

• Authentic Living — He spent his energy on stunts and scripts instead of managing a double life.

The Movies of a Gay Action Star

His filmography looked different, too — bigger, bolder, a little more romantic.

• Reimagined Sci-Fi — His signature space-serial franchise gave him a male co-lead as his romantic interest, turning ray-gun battles into genuine swoon-worthy adventure.

• The “Beefcake” Hero — Directors leaned into it. Lingering shots of Buster emerging from the surf sold tickets to everybody, no apologies.

• Co-Star Dynamic — Instead of the damsel-in-distress formula, his pictures gave audiences a hero who rescued — and fell for — his equally dashing male co-star.

• Subverting Genre — Even his westerns got the treatment: two ranch hands, one shared horizon, and audiences ate it up.

How the Culture Around Him Shifted

Buster wouldn’t have just lived in this world — he helped shape it.

• Men’s Fashion Revolution — Suddenly every young man in America wanted to dress like him: colorful, close-cut, a little daring.

• Redefining Masculinity — “Man’s man” got a lot bigger as a category. Turns out you could win Olympic gold, punch out movie villains, and be openly gay — who knew.

• Open Nightlife — L.A. and New York sprouted upscale, legal gay clubs and resorts, A-listers included, no back doors required.

• Media Representation — Life and Look ran glossy spreads of Buster and his partner at home, rivaling their friends Cary and Randolph, treated with the same warm, glamorous coverage as any other Hollywood couple.

Of course we know none of this happened, and if Buster had been gay, he would have kept it a secret, and married his wife, had his children, and lived a lie his entire life. Because that was what was only available to men, gay, bi, or straight, in 1930’s America.

Because gay men weren’t free to be gay, straight men weren’t free to be straight either — not really. Everyone performed the one script allowed. It’s just for some it was an easier part to play. But everyone played. That’s the real cost of the closet: not just the lies it forced some men to tell, but the freedom it never let anyone experience.

So for a moment, these collages reimagine a film Buster made, and instead of chasing the girl, he’s chasing the guy. Sure looks happy to me.

64

When I’m Sixty-Four

A new photographic series

There’s a moment, right after a shower, that might be the best moment of the day — clean, warm, hopeful. Then you catch yourself in a full-length mirror. That the two happen back to back, every time, is a cruel irony, and this new series lives in the irony between the two.

These new works are self-portraits, shot on iPhone, taken moments after a shower, day or evening. A towel, most often, will be included. It is straight photography, single frame, no collaging, no compositing, no full moons added to the scene. The editing stays within iPhone tools, and it’s one exception from reality: it leans into heightened, saturated color — a Willy Wonka bright palette used not for performance, but to carry the interior emotion of the moment.

The premise is documenting an aging, queer body as it actually is, in that specific moment — clean and guarded, caught between motion and pose.

The title comes from the obvious place — the Beatles line about being needed, being fed, growing old. There’s an Irish gloom underneath this project — that is countered by my French ancestors’ determination to remain as beautiful as possible. I’m working with a trainer. I’m paying attention to my skin. I’m thinking about facelifts I can’t afford. None of this is separate from the project.

It is the project.

Enter Laughing

The New Gay Panic: Straight Men Are Jealous

There’s a bit going around in stand-up right now — straight male comedians riffing on gay men having better sex, better friendships, better closets, better everything. It plays as flattery. It gets laughs from straight audiences who’d never sit through an actual “gay panic” bit, but will happily laugh at “gay men are just living better than us.”

Jeff Dye is a useful case study. He’s built a recurring bit around the “I could be gay” premise — it’s even the title track of one of his stand-up albums, and he’s got a companion bit called “I’d Make a Great Gay Man.” It’s faux envy in its purest form: not hostility, just a comedian wishing out loud that he had it as good as gay men supposedly do. What makes it worth naming is where that material travels. Dye is also a recurring guest on The Greg Gutfeld Show, a Fox News comedy program built for a conservative audience — the same circles where an “I could be gay” bit lands as harmless self-deprecation, but where actual gay rights, marriage, or visibility are frequently treated as up for debate. The envy bit is portable in exactly the rooms where a slur wouldn’t be. That’s the safer packaging doing its job.

It’s a clever end run. Ten years ago the joke was built on disgust or fear. Now it’s built on envy — which lets a straight comedian talk about gay men, gay sex, gay culture at length, without ever having to examine why he’s so fixated on it. Envy reads as generous. Disgust reads as bigoted. Both are obsessive. Same subject matter, safer packaging. Same obsession.

Here’s the part the bit skips: actual research shows gay men report more specific, comfortable sexual communication, and it predicts their satisfaction more strongly than it does for straight men. That’s not “gay men have better sex.” That’s “men who talk about sex have better sex” — and this bears repeating: men who talk about sex, who engage in discussion and conversation about sex, report higher levels of satisfaction regarding sex. Period.

So why do gay men communicate better? Because they have to. Coming out means naming desire explicitly — first to yourself, then to everyone else — before any sex happens at all, while straight men get to assume their way into it. Gay male dating also doesn’t inherit the traditional script of heteronormative behavior: who asks whom, what it means, when sex happens. So specificity is required — what you’re looking for, what you’re into, whether it’s casual or not. Absence of a script necessitates negotiation. Add in a generation that had to discuss health status openly just to stay alive, and you get a culture that treats direct sexual communication as baseline, not bonus.

Now, let’s take a look at Jeff Dye’s bit again. Picture it performed differently — not to a room where gay men are the subject being discussed from a safe distance, but with gay men on the stage itself, part of the scene rather than the audience. Does the joke survive that? A bit built on “I could be gay, look how good you have it” assumes a one-way gaze: the comedian looking out at a world he’s imagining, not being looked back at by the people he’s imagining about. Put actual gay men in the frame with him — not laughing along from the dark, but present, visible, part of the composition — and the safety of the distance collapses. The bit was never really about gay men. It was about a straight man’s freedom to talk about them without them talking back.

What, Me Worry?

The Platforms Changed. Quietly.

Since January 2025, several major social media platforms have rolled back protections for LGBTQ users — and it’s worth knowing exactly what changed, because most of it happened without much fanfare.

Meta led the way. In January 2025, the company rewrote its community standards to allow more hostile language toward LGBTQ people and other groups — a change widely read as a move to get in step with the incoming administration. The new rules explicitly permit users to call being transgender a mental illness. They also now allow content arguing that certain jobs — military, law enforcement, teaching — should be off-limits based on gender. At the same time, Meta scaled back content moderation broadly and ended its U.S. fact-checking program.

YouTube made a smaller but telling change: it quietly removed “gender identity” from the list of protected characteristics in its hate speech policy.

GLAAD’s annual Social Media Safety Index — which tracks TikTok, YouTube, X, and Meta’s platforms — found that the political climate has shifted sharply since January 2025, with coordinated anti-LGBTQ campaigns intensifying while these platforms scaled back or eliminated safeguards for LGBTQ users. The report notes the changes echo language from Project 2025, which explicitly called for removing the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from official use.

None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened everywhere at once. It happened at specific companies, on specific dates, right after a change in Washington. That’s worth a worry.

Rip it, RIP it Good!

"RIP, You Know Who"

Nothing says "beloved senator" like a send-off that finally shows the real him — surrounded by the people he actually wanted to spend time with and money on, while the rest of his colleagues pretended not to notice a thing for thirty years. The eulogy never mentions the good times. This one remembers.

What If?

What If the Divorced Dad Was Gay?

I’ve been thinking about a very specific kind of movie character: the divorced dad who gets the kids for the weekend, right as the world falls apart around him. You know the type — a little rusty at parenting, in over his head, forced by crisis into becoming the father he didn’t know he had in him. It’s a familiar arc in disaster movies. So here’s the question I keep coming back to: what would change if that dad were gay?

Honestly? Not much. And that’s kind of the point.

Case in point: Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.

The divorced dad we’d meet would still be a dock worker, still just trying to find time for a little nap before the next shift. He’d still pick up his kids for his weekend, probably a little late, probably underprepared. He’d still be caught completely off guard when the sky splits open and everything goes sideways. He’d still spend the next forty-eight hours fighting like hell to keep his kids alive, discovering a strength in himself he never had reason to test before. None of that changes.

Here’s where it does: in the original, Ray steals the only working vehicle left in Manny’s auto garage, and with less than a minute before the neighborhood comes apart, he begs Manny to get in. Manny doesn’t. He stays behind, and he doesn’t survive the day. In this version, Manny gets in the car. He rides shotgun through all of it — the chaos, the crumbling roads, the not knowing — helping Ray keep the kids calm and the car moving as they push toward his ex-wife’s house. It’s the kind of thing that, later, once the dust settles, either becomes a story you tell at dinner parties, or becomes the reason two people end up together. In this version, it’s both.

What’s different beyond that is the texture of his life around the edges. He’s not pining for an ex-wife pregnant by her new husband — he’s genuinely, easily co-parenting with her, the kind of arrangement that took work but landed somewhere comfortable. And Manny — the guy from the garage, the guy who got in the car — becomes one of a couple of men Ray’s been seeing since. Nothing serious yet, just a divorced dad in his forties figuring out what dating looks like the second time around. His kids know. It’s not a plot point. It’s just Tuesday.

And maybe that’s the quiet reimagining worth sitting with — not a dramatic rewrite, not a “very special episode,” just a version of the same story where being gay is one more unremarkable fact about a guy who’s mostly just trying to keep his kids alive during a space alien invasion. Sometimes the most radical version of representation is the simplest: the ordinary weekend dad, who happens to be dating men, doing exactly what every other version of that character has always done — showing up for his kids, boyfriend in tow, when it matters most.

Hawt Dawg

Ode to Hot Dogs

I was 11 when homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness. I was 42 when it was decriminalized in the United States. And I was 53 when gay marriage was legalized here. It’s been a long road, with a lot of ups and downs — but there’s one thing that’s gotten me through it all: hot dogs.

I love hot dogs. Long ones, short ones, fat ones, thin ones. I love hot dogs.

So, in honor of National Hot Dog Day — which technically happened on July 15th this year, and yes, I’m a little late — here’s my very belated, very sincere celebration. In my world, every day is hot dog day.

First, a little art to set the mood: a hot dog stand, two men sharing a dawg, and a bit of whimsy floating in the background.

Then, lunch. Hot dogs of course, with sauerkraut and mustard, chili and beans, and stealth pickles to pile sky-high.

And finally, a little reminder of the holiday that started it all — belated, but no less enthusiastic.

So here’s to hot dogs, the NYC Met Hot Dog Stand, and not taking life too seriously.

On Design

The Dining Room That Grew Up to Be a Lounge

Turning a formal dining room into a lounge is having a real moment in design circles — swapping the stiff dining set for something softer, lower, and made for lingering. I decided to play with that idea while keeping the room’s original bones completely intact. That’s really the design philosophy behind everything I do: understand where a room’s original character comes from, and find a way to enhance and support that origin while still updating it to meet the needs and expectations of how we actually live today. It’s about honoring the past while living in the present, rather than starting over in some HGTV mashup.

In designing the space, I kept the format of the classic dining room setup: a round table centered under a pendant light, with four chairs around it. The table is now a large faux leather ottoman, and the four dining chairs have become a mix of club chairs and vintage office furniture. Same choreography, entirely different mood.

Where It All Started: A 1962 Wallpaper Mural

Every choice in this room traces back to one thing: the original 1962 wallpaper mural still on the wall, depicting a serene Japanese garden — bonsai in glazed pots, a flowering tree, a fountain rendered with a classic mid-century line.

The first deliberate nod to the mural was swapping the overhead fixture for a paper lantern pendant from IKEA, echoing the illustrated paper lanterns floating in the wallpaper’s own sketched garden. From there, the Japanese garden idea spills into the room for real — houseplants tucked into corners.

Between the two chartreuse chairs sits a slim Asian-styled sofa table, holding books, a salt lamp, and the ginger jar lamp — carrying the wallpaper’s outside-in garden idea through the room and setting it as the design tone for the rest of the home. Underneath the table, two more pieces continue that conversation: on the right, one of my own digital photo collages, and on the left, a boho-inspired camel figure that was popular in the 1970s and saw a resurgence in the late 2010s — a lucky HomeGoods find.

Outdoors In

Since the wallpaper’s whole theme is nature brought indoors, I leaned into that with a small collection of animal figures scattered through the room. The standout is a small ceramic balloon dog, streamlined and glossy, from Jeff Koons — produced in a mid-century mass-production format that made an original piece of fine art available to a much wider audience. I love that idea: real art, made accessible. Alongside it sits a cottage-core ceramic bird perched near the ginger jar lamp, and a piece of original artwork featuring a small animal worked into a textile. Mid-century sleekness, cottage-core warmth, and original fine art, all standing in for the outdoors the mural imagines just beyond the wall.

Privacy, Light, and Whimsy

The screen tucked into the corner might be my favorite detail in the room. I took bird decals originally designed as car window stickers and applied them in an asymmetrical pattern across the panels — a small, unexpected flourish with its own personality. Functionally, it creates privacy from the front porch, but as a translucent screen rather than a solid one, the room never loses its light. Privacy and glow, at the same time.

To Thrift or Not to Thrift

A huge part of what makes this room feel personal — and what I wanted to spotlight — is how much of it was thrifted, inherited, or made rather than bought new. Making smart decisions in a thrifting process can allow you to create instant history, atmosphere, and understated elegance within a manageable budget.

Thrifted or handed down:

• The two chartreuse side chairs

• The Asian-styled sofa table

• The blue-green ginger jar lamp

• Two mid-century chairs, original to 1965 — these actually came from my dad’s law office, so they carry real family history into the room

And then there’s the chess set — my favorite handmade moment in the entire space. The pieces were made from glaze test samples that were being cycled out, each one a little swatch of a different glaze test, repurposed into playinguu pieces, paired with a board that was purchased new. Total cost for the entire set: under $100. It’s a small thing, but it captures exactly what I love about mixing thrifted and handmade pieces into a space — you get texture and history that money alone can’t buy.

Wabi-Sabi, Underneath It All

The imperfections in some of these thrifted and handmade pieces — a slightly uneven glaze, the wear on a decades-old chair — aren’t flaws to hide. They connect to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi: finding beauty in imperfection, and in the sense of history and age a piece carries with it. And that idea is really the whole philosophy behind this room, and every room I design: honor the original design, thrift and repurpose what’s been discarded or handed down, and reinvent it all in support of a style that’s uniquely its own.

Variety Spice

Juxtaposition Through Elaboration

It’s a kind of language, really.

Each layer is a phrase — figures collaged against dissimilar imagery, pulled out of their original context and stacked together until they build a whole new world to inhabit. The swans rhyme with the moon’s texture. The painted figure is the swan made human. The chorus of men rhymes with each other, but not with the chaos above them — and that dissonance is the whole point.

That’s the principle I keep circling back to in this work: juxtaposition through elaboration. Not just placing unlikely things side by side, but fully revealing each one until the collision becomes a conversation instead of a shock.

This is the principle of variety at work: not randomness, but layered conversation, where nothing sits quietly in the background.

The Machine made Meets the Handmade with a Secret Handshake

It’s true. Two design styles can occupy the same space and breathe the same air while serving the same purpose in completely unsame ways.

On the left is mid-century design— bowls and plates from the legendary IKEA, stacking with smooth uniformity and sharp industrial lines. On the right is cottage core design — a handmade teapot, a mug, bowls with handles, each piece carrying the unmistakable mark of the hand that formed it, including, with some, a little bite taken out of the rim. That’s not a flaw. That’s a signature.

One might argue that mid-century modern and cottage core shouldn’t sit this close together. One is precise repetition via machine. The other is handcraft made supreme. But put them together with that same muted gray green glaze, and something shifts. They begin to speak the same language. That’s the handshake —shared color and overall simplicity of form letting these two opposite worlds recognize and engage each other.

And that’s the value of putting them side by side. The differences don’t cancel, they juxtapose. IKEA looks more precise. The handmade looks more unique. It is this diversity expressed equitably that creates an inclusive visual opportunity.

Stronger together.

And that truth is beautiful to behold.

Surplus Reincarnation

Surplus Reincarnation: What the Ranch Rambler Inherited

There is a temptation to think of mid-century modern design as an invention — a clean, sudden break from everything that came before it. Low-slung rooflines, walls of glass, the studied plainness of a post-and-beam frame: it reads, at a glance, like something new under the sun. But the Ranch Rambler I live in isn’t new. It’s a reincarnation. It belongs to a lineage that stretches back through two thousand years of people figuring out the same basic problem — how to let the outside in, and let a house become a place instead of just a container.

Go back far enough and you find the Roman atrium: a house built around an open center, sky visible overhead, the family’s daily life arranged around a court instead of sealed off from it. Go back further and there’s the Egyptian courtyard house, oriented to catch the one breeze worth catching, its rooms wrapped around open air the way a hand wraps around something it intends to keep close. Look south instead of east and you find Mesoamerican builders working almost entirely in what the land gave them — adobe, stone, timber pulled from nearby, nothing shipped in from anywhere — because the material at hand was also, not incidentally, the material that made sense.

None of these were poor solutions waiting for modernism to arrive and correct them. They were the same idea, tried and re-tried, in different climates and different centuries: that a house works best when it doesn’t fight the land it sits on, and that a family’s well-being has more to do with light, air, and gathering space than with how much square footage you can wall off and call “more.”

The Ranch Rambler — my 1962 home here in Dallas included — is simply the most recent incarnation of that idea. The vaulted ceiling, the low roofline reaching out toward the yard instead of away from it: these aren’t ornament. They’re the same argument the Romans and the Egyptians and the builders of Mesoamerica were making, translated into a mid-century American accent.

Which brings me to the phrase that, for me, best fits the midcentury moment: surplus reincarnation.

Every design era has its own idea of surplus — its own answer to the question “once basic needs are met, where does the excess go?” Plenty of eras before this one poured that surplus into ornament: more carving, more gilding, more square footage, more stuff, as a way of visibly announcing wealth.

Mid-century modern took the same surplus and reincarnated it into something else entirely — not more material, but more relationship. More light. More connection between the room you’re standing in and the tree outside the window. More time and attention available for the people in your life, because the house isn’t asking you to maintain, polish, and account for a pile of ornamentation.

That’s the real inheritance here, more than the roofline or the fireplace. Surplus reincarnation is the idea that a household’s wealth is better measured in emotional terms than material ones — in the quality of your relationships and your groundedness in a place, not in the size of a bank account or the density of what you own.

Simplicity of form

Honest, low-cost materials used well instead of expensive materials used to impress. A blurred line between indoor and outdoor that keeps you tethered to the land rather than sealed off from it. None of that is new to 1962. It’s just the version of a recurring idea that happened to land in my neighborhood.

When I work on this house — pulling cottagecore textures into a mid-century frame, resetting a room, deciding what stays and what goes — I try to keep that lineage in view. I’m not restoring a decade. I’m tending to something a lot older than that: a house’s relationship to the land it inhabits, and to the people who gather in it.