Enter Armageddon

This is not about gay, straight, or bi. This is about the male form in transition.

Behind three men, a mushroom cloud rises over Bikini Atoll.

In 1946, days after the atomic tests there made the atoll’s name synonymous with annihilation, the shock of the bomb moved into culture almost immediately and never left. The fallout includes an ever-evolving understanding of the male form as best suited to responding to the events of its day — call it the mod bod. This is a formal analysis of that form, tracked across seventy years, the way an art historian might track sculpture’s handling of the male body from the Renaissance into the Baroque and on into the neoclassical. Three mod bods, seventy years, each a different answer to a question the bomb first asked and has never stopped asking: what shape, what armor, what strategy does a man need to survive what’s coming?

1950s

The mod bod of the fifties is the jet fighter. Smooth, untoned, unbothered by definition — power carried not in the body but in the sleek, disciplined image projected outward. The suit is the fighter’s fuselage, giving nothing away about the machinery inside. This is the triumph of American democracy on the surface, and underneath it, the low hum of the duck-and-cover drill — a generation of children folded under classroom desks, living inside the jet age’s promise that the next war would be fast, airborne, and over before anyone had time to brace. The form performs readiness. It assumes the position.

1970s

The mod bod of the seventies is the aircraft carrier. Brutalist architecture is all the rage; in May 1975, the USS Nimitz is commissioned — nuclear-powered, over a thousand feet long, the largest warship ever built, able to run for decades without refueling. That same decade, the male form stops being worn and starts being built on the same principle: overwhelming scale, overwhelming endurance, a body designed to dominate by being too large to challenge directly. Call it the brutalist body — heavy, fortress-like, all visible structure. Like the carrier, it could not simply happen. It had to be commissioned, fueled — steroids were everywhere in the decade’s bodybuilding culture, more than ten years before any law regulated them. The carrier body moves slowly, then stands its ground. It projects power by simply being present.

2020s

The mod bod of the twenty-first century is the drone. Call it Twinky Abs: a lean, defined midsection built by stripping away rather than adding — high-intensity circuit work trading the carrier’s mass for something smaller, faster, harder to hit. It’s also a real workout routine many young American men are actively following. Agility is now the governing value, the same logic reshaping actual warfare: a carrier costs a decade and billions to build and can be threatened by a drone costing a few thousand dollars, too fast and light to catch. The current mod bod follows that doctrine — built for a fight that no longer rewards standing still and absorbing the hit.

The Atomic Jacket

A jet fighter. An aircraft carrier. An unmanned drone. Three vehicles of survival, descended from one unbroken thread — a species that has spent seventy years, after two thousand years of a far more static male form, redesigning the male body against a threat that never resolves and never leaves. This isn’t about who or how a man loves. It’s about what his own form has been asked to become.

A bomb dropped once. The male body has been absorbing its shockwave ever since.

— Behan

The Penn Dutch Furniture Co Tragedy

PART ONE: JUNE 20, 1922

Dear reader,

There are tragedies that time forgives, and tragedies it cannot. What happened in the cedar-scented showroom of Philadelphia’s Penn-Dutch Furniture Company that sweltering afternoon was of the second and darker kind — a tale the neighborhood still will not speak above a whisper.

The papers printed it simply. Edmund “Eddie” Boyd, a brooding young clerk, had watched with a curdling heart as his oldest friend and fellow employee, Raymond “Ray” Castle, rose above him — a coveted promotion, and crueler still, the devoted heart of Margaret “Mags” Sanders, a plain but exceptionally sweet neighborhood girl both men had once courted.

Driven half mad, so the story went, Eddie tracked his rival to Mags’s doorstep. Harsh words were exchanged. The gentle Mags fled indoors, while brave Ray stepped forward to calm his friend, walking him back — foolishly, fatally — to the empty showroom. There, among the unfinished cabinets, the curtain fell. One shot into a friend’s heart. One shot, self-delivered, to close the account.

The coroner’s report set the order down plainly: Eddie killed Ray first, then turned the gun on himself. It made a tidier kind of horror. The town wept for the sweet girl left behind. Two young men were buried in a quiet cemetery, their story fixed forever in stone.

History, though, only records what it is permitted to see.

PART TWO: JUNE 19, 1922 — The Day Before

The scent of cedar shavings and linseed oil hung heavy in the back room of Penn-Dutch Furniture. The storefront was locked, the gas lamps turned low, casting long, amber shadows across the floorboards.

Ray stood by the shipping desk, his collar loosened against the oppressive summer heat. He wasn’t looking at the ledgers. His eyes were fixed on Eddie, handsome and tall, who stood just inches away, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge of a drafting table. Four years they had stood like this in this same back room, after closing, when the gas lamps burned low enough that no one on the street could see two shapes standing closer than friendship required.

“Say it again,” Eddie whispered. His voice wasn’t angry yet. It was hollow, trembling with a fragile, desperate hope. “Look at me and say it.”

Ray swallowed hard, pulling his gaze away. He hated himself for the cowardice, but the fear was a physical weight in his chest. Just last week, a man in South Philadelphia had been arrested, his name dragged through the papers, his life ruined for the crime of who he loved. Ray couldn’t live in the dark anymore.

“I’m going straight, Eddie,” Ray said, his voice barely louder than the hum of the city outside. “It’s over. We have to stop.”

“Because of her?” Eddie’s voice cracked on the question, small and stunned.

Ray looked out the grimy window, his jaw tight. “Fairies don’t marry pretty girls,” he said quietly, the raw truth hanging heavy between them. “No, the girl is always plain but sweet. Mags is plain, simple… she won’t expect much. Neither will anyone else.”

Eddie reached out, his hand hovering near Ray’s jacket, a familiar gesture that had brought comfort in a hundred secret midnights. But this time, Ray stepped back, letting the distance stretch between them like a chasm.

“I love you,” Eddie choked out, a hot tear finally cutting through the dust on his cheek. “Four years, Ray. In the shadows, sure, but it was ours. You think you can just step out of the dark and leave me behind?”

“It’s not that I don’t love you,” Ray said. “It’s that I can’t love you. Can’t you see that? There’s no place for us.”

“Ray, please don’t do this,” Eddie pleaded, his voice breaking as the weight of the moment pressed down on them both. “We can leave. I can get money; I swear I’ll get it.”

“And go where?” Ray’s laugh was sharp, jagged with despair. “Where can we go where we won’t be a freak show?”

Eddie held his hands up, looking at the only man he had ever truly wanted, terrified of the unraveling silence in the shop. “Please don’t do this.”

“It’s done,” Ray said, hardening his posture even as his eyes filled with tears. “I’m asking Mags to marry me tomorrow. She’ll say yes. I’m a catch.” He tried to smile, but the weak joke fell flat.

“Please don’t do this,” Eddie whispered one last time, the words a final, dying plea.

Ray turned his back to lock the ledger. He didn’t see the dangerous, quiet shift in Eddie’s eyes. He didn’t see the despair hardening into a terrifying resolve. If he wouldn’t choose him in this life, Eddie would make sure he never had to choose her, either.

The next afternoon, when Eddie burst onto Mags’s porch, it wasn’t out of passion for her. It was a crazed, desperate attempt to tell her the truth — to scream that he and Ray were in love, that she was being used. But Ray stepped out to stop him, desperate to keep the secret buried. In the quiet showroom moments later, Eddie fired first into his own heart, a horrific, tragic proof of a love that had never been allowed to say its own name — and only then, weeping, turned the gun on the man who could not follow him into the dark.

The coroner would write it down the other way around. It was, perhaps, the only order the world was prepared to believe.

Heptatonic

Score | Gay Gaze | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage Set of Seven | 2026

A diatonic scale has seven notes. Not six, not eight — seven. It is the oldest, most universal shape music has ever settled into: the major scale, the minor scale, nearly every hymn, blues, and pop chorus ever hummed, built on the same seven-note frame. Musicians call it heptatonic, but the plainer truth is simpler: seven is the number of notes it takes before a scale stops sounding like a fragment and starts sounding like a complete world.

This piece works from seven collages. And underneath all seven, in every single one, the same two elements recur: the marching men in suits, and the moon. Call this the drone — the held note, the pedal tone a piece of music sustains beneath everything else, present whether the melody above it is quiet or crowded, tender or chaotic. A drone doesn’t develop. It doesn’t resolve. It just persists, indifferent to what’s happening above it, and that indifference is the point. Here, it is a wall of identical men in identical suits, walking in the same direction, in every frame, regardless of what tenderness or chaos is happening in the foreground. The moon changes color from frame to frame — pink, blue, gold — the way a drone can be voiced slightly differently each time without ever stopping being the same note.

The kiss — two men, warm-lit, foreground — states the tonic against that drone for the first time. Intimacy, held in place against a moon gone the color of blood and a river of suits that do not see it happening three feet away. Every image after this one is heard in relation to this first interval.

The triptych — one bearded face repeated left and right, a UFO and a bare back sandwiched in the panel between — is the piece’s most literal act of composition: theme and variation as structure, not metaphor. The same man, twice, is not the same phrase twice.

The poolside scene is the densest chord in the set — four men, a priest inset small and watching, a moon held against water — and now, for the first time in this version, the suits appear here too, tucked into the upper corner as though the drone had found its way even into the one frame that felt, in the earlier draft, briefly exempt from it.

The street sign, Young Ave crossing Gay St, is the wit in the composition, the pun a soloist slips in for four bars before returning to the changes — and the suits still walk, this time descending a rooftop, never quite in the frame’s center but never absent either.

The crowd and the bare shoulder is the rest — the bar where density drops out and the ear is allowed to breathe. It is the frame where the drone is most exposed, closest to the surface, hardest to ignore, because almost nothing else is competing with it.

The last two collages are the improvisational risk the set needs — the moon held overhead like a weight in one, a wall of marching legs closing in around a nude figure and a swan in the other. Here the drone stops being background and starts closing in, the suits pressing close enough to fragment the body they surround into slivers glimpsed between shoulders and knees.

Seven notes. Seven images. One note held under all of them, never resolving, the shape the whole scale is built against.

— Behan

Seen Scene Seem Seam

GAY SEEN | The Gay Gaze | The Subdivision | Digital photo collage | 2026

Seam. Seen. Scene. Seem.

1973 — Homosexuality removed from the DSM as a mental illness.

2003 — Sodomy laws struck down nationwide, Lawrence v. Texas.

2010 — Singer Ricky Martin comes out as gay. Yowza.

2015 — Marriage legalized nationwide, Obergefell v. Hodges.

That’s the good news. Now here’s reality.

2019:

• Same-sex borrowers are 73% more likely to be denied a mortgage than heterosexual couples — despite being no riskier as borrowers.

• Same-sex couples face a 20% mortgage rejection rate. Had they been straight, that number would be 11%.

• Even when approved, same-sex couples pay higher interest rates than straight couples with identical qualifications.

• 26 states still have zero statewide housing protections for LGBTQ people. In half this country, this discrimination isn’t hidden. It’s legal.

Sigh.

— Behan

State of Undress | Gay Gaze | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

The Gay Angle

The men in this collage do not wait to be discovered. They compose themselves, arms crossed, eyes locked forward, claiming the frame before the viewer can claim it for them.

It is the same rupture Picasso staged in 1907, when his women stopped posing and started staring back — confrontation replacing invitation, presence replacing permission.

Both works rely on multiple fractured, doubled figures — Picasso’s mask-faced women confronting the viewer from multiple angles at once, this composition’s central figure similarly flanked and multiplied by reflection and background bodies — so the eye never settles on one correct vantage point.

The resemblance is not only formal. Both scenes are crowded and claustrophobic — pressed close. In both, the figures do not hide. They meet the eye without apology, defying the social contract of their respective centuries, the one that named them deviant and asked them to disappear.

Picasso’s women and history’s sex workers, the men gathered here and history’s homosexuals, were catalogued by the same era’s medicine and morality under a shared heading of deviation — filed side by side not by choice but by the taxonomies built to define what desire was permitted to be. What connects them is not camaraderie. It is a shared position: both made the material from which “normal” was drawn, and both, in these images, refuse to hold still for it.

That refusal of a single controlling perspective is the assertion itself. Nobody owns the angle from which these bodies are seen.

— Behan

The Fresco, the Sedan, the Actor and Mr July | Gay Gaze | the Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

1347 — The Black Death arrives in Europe, and for the next century and a half, plague returns in waves, never fully leaving. It is a lived memory, not distant history, for anyone painting the body or its suffering.

1492 — Giovanni Canavesio paints the fresco cycle at Notre-Dame des Fontaines, La Brigue, its six-panel grid narrating betrayal, arrest, and suffering in sequence, in a region still within reach of plague’s return.

1968 — Pontiac releases the Bonneville with hidden headlamps and a new full-width rear treatment, the hundredth year of a company built on the promise that the American body could move faster, further, and more beautifully than before.

1975 — Chevy Chase joins the Not Ready for Prime Time Players on Saturday Night Live, becoming an overnight heartthrob and an object of desire for young gay men, television transforming itself in real time around him.

1981 — AIDS is identified, and within a decade it claims a generation of the very men who had watched him.

Four moments, five centuries apart, share a structure more than a subject. Each depends on innovation — a fresco cycle, a hardtop sedan, a sketch show, a body captured mid-desire — arriving at the exact moment mortality is closing back in. The fever and the flourish, always at the same address. Behan reassembles Canavesio’s panels, Pontiac’s chrome, and Chase’s easy grin into one plane, not because they knew each other, but because none of them got to choose their timing.

— Behan

Gay Restoration

Series recreating community where gay men are isolated and alone.

Gay Restoration

The thirst trap has a formula. One man, alone, on a beach or in a mirror, performing for a camera that isn’t really there. The isolation is the product. It sells the fantasy of a body no one else gets to have.

Gay Restoration takes that image and breaks the formula. The man stays. But he isn’t alone anymore. Other men appear in the frame — walking the shoreline, standing at the tide line, going about their own business, making no claim on him and asking nothing of the viewer either. No commentary. No hierarchy. Just more of them there.

This is the first entry in a new series: solitary images, restored to community. The original source image and collage are included each time. With this collage, a Pink Moon watches from one corner. Jupiter 3 hovers in from the other, doing what it always does — arriving to witness, not to rescue anyone who wasn’t actually in danger. The beach was never actually empty. It only looked that way because the culture kept cropping everyone else out.

— Behan

Bells | Closet Saints | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026 | James Behan

Neither one was dumb.

The actor Judy Holliday and her character in Born Yesterday, Billie Dawn, shared something the world kept mistaking for simplicity. Both carried an interior logic that defied the cynicism and corruption of the day — a way of seeing clearly while everyone else assumed they see nothing at all. This collage celebrates the life and times of the amazing Judy Holliday:

1921 — Born Judith Tuvim in New York City.

1927 — Her parents separate when she is six. She is raised by her mother.

1943 — Judith Tuvim changes her stage name to Judy Holliday, adopting it when her comedy troupe, The Revuers, travels to Hollywood and she signs with Twentieth Century Fox. She chooses “Holliday” as the English translation of her Hebrew surname, Tuvim.

1948 — Marries David Oppenheim.

1950 — Born Yesterday is released. The world reads her as a blonde who barely follows the conversation, and she finds the opportunity in that — being underestimated can be its own kind of superpower. Her performance is instant stardom.

1951 — Wins the Academy Award for Best Actress and the Golden Globe for Best Actress, Comedy or Musical, for Born Yesterday — beating out Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson in what is considered one of the biggest upsets in Academy history.

1952 — Called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee during the Red Scare, the same era the Lavender Scare runs alongside. It is alleged she also carried an affair with a woman from her early Greenwich Village years. The fear in that hearing room is not only political. It is also a fear of rejection at its most fundamental level, an accusation of being less than human based on what you believe or who you love. She gets out of it by trusting the same interior logic that got Billie Dawn out of every scene where the men underestimate her.

1954 — Her marriage to David Oppenheim is failing, and she falls into a severe depression. Around this time, Betty Comden and Adolph Green begin writing Bells Are Ringing, meant as a lifeline for Judy. Though there is no guarantee she has the stamina left for it.

1956 — Bells Are Ringing opens on Broadway. She goes on.

1957 — Wins the Tony for Bells Are Ringing. Divorces David Oppenheim the same year.

1960 — Films the movie version of Bells Are Ringing with Dean Martin and Vincent Minnelli. Her body is already sick with undiagnosed breast cancer. Cast and crew know her history with depression and anxiety, so they read her exhaustion and pain as more of the same story they already have about her. Even while dealing with a debilitating illness, she receives a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress, Comedy or Musical. The film receives a nomination for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture. This is her final film performance.

1960–1964 — She continues performing. She undergoes a mastectomy and returns to work, starring in the Broadway musical Hot Spot in 1963. She also collaborates with jazz musician Gerry Mulligan, writing lyrics to his music.

1965 — Judy Holliday succumbs to her illness on June 7, at the age of forty-three. She is remembered as a queer icon and as a prototype for feminism — her characters embodying a working-girl alternative to suburban domesticity years before Betty Friedan gave that critique a name.

Rock Hudson, Cesar Romero, Tab Hunter — the Closet Saints have been a men’s gallery so far. Judy Holliday belongs beside them, and belongs there specifically as a woman, because the closet was never only a men’s condition.

Sources: Advocate.com, The New Yorker, Turner Classic Movies, Playbill, Encyclopedia.com, Jewish Women’s Archive, Love Letters to Old Hollywood, Wikipedia, AllMusic, University of Massachusetts Boston American Studies

Processing The Process

Every work of art starts as an idea, invisible to everyone but the maker. Here’s how one of my digital collages takes form:

Figures are found and sourced online. Twelve separate images, gathered with no relationship to each other yet — the Jupiter 2 from the classic television show “Lost in Space,” a full moon in seven colors for seven seasons, a purple finch, a set of pillows, a black swan, two gay men in a kiss. Raw material, still just separate objects, unrelated to each other.

The figures are aligned with a conceptual understanding of what part each will play within the composition. This is the artist as the screenwriter. Before anything gets placed, it gets meaning. Each piece is assigned a role — danger, freedom, longing, grace — so that by the time the collage is built, every object already knows what role it’s playing.

Note: every figure is planned, with a purpose and understanding.

A background image is selected as a surface, this time, is my own ceiling. A photograph of the room I live in becomes the sky the collage with fall under.

The figures are arranged, in this instance, the artist is a director, planning how the figures move or stand, their entrances and exits within the frame.

Lastly, the collage aesthetic is shaped, in this instance, the artist is a production designer, identifying color saturation, value range, point of focus, overall visual variety and cohesion:

Space: how much air sits between each moon, so nothing crowds and nothing floats untethered.

Color: open palette with a rainbow of hues, fully saturated, each with varying intensity.

Value: the ceiling’s warm gradient against the cooler tones of blue, teal, and purple, so the piece has depth instead of flatness.

Balance: the two men anchored bottom right, heavy enough to hold the weight of everything scattered above them. The asymmetry creates an image in motion.

Scale: nothing here is actually to scale with anything else, which is the point — mythology doesn’t obey physics.

This is a behind the scenes look at how the collage comes together from inspiration to presentation.

All the World | The Gay Gaze | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026 | James Behan

With this work, we focus on two men in an embrace, an expression of romantic love with a kiss. Around them circles all the worlds, ones of support, ones of concerns. The two men in their own world surrounded by an avalanche of views about their love for one another. In this scene arrives the Jupiter 3 as witness, the truth teller, also present the black swan and purple finch, two elements of nature the speak of the nature of gay love as purposeful and noble. Lastly, the set of pillows, as an expression of hope for a soft landing for this couple, to be supported and encouraged in their relationship to one another.

— Behan

Legend

A Key to the Subdivision

Every tradition that lasts long enough grows its own symbols. The medieval church had the lamb, the rabbit, the fish — small pictures that carried whole doctrines inside them. The Subdivision has its own. What follows is the key, and then the reason each one exists.

Jupiter 3 — escape, rescue, witness

The Embrace — connection

Blood Moon — danger

Aquarian Moon — freedom

Harvest Gold Moon — fulfillment

Pink Moon — pleasure

Pale Moon — invisibility

Blue Moon — longing

Purple Moon — allyship

Black Swan — purpose

Purple Finch — nobility

The Pillow — grace

Jupiter 3 does not carry captives. It carries passengers who chose to be onboard, moving toward a life no one assigned them. The ship exists because escape only means something when it’s a decision, not an accident.

The Embrace exists because isolation was the old inheritance, the thing every closeted life defaulted to. Two men holding on is not a symbol of love in the abstract. It’s the specific, physical end of being alone.

The Blood Moon is the other side of the story, and every story here has one. It represents the danger that doesn’t go away just because a life gets freer — the people, the laws, the silences that still want the story reversed.

The Aquarian Moon is freedom in the widest sense, the shift from a world built around one kind of life to a world that makes room for more than one.

The Harvest Gold Moon is what comes after survival. Abundance, not scarcity. A life that adds up to something whole instead of something merely endured.

The Pink Moon is pleasure taken without apology — the part of a gay life that doesn’t need to justify itself by being useful or noble first.

The Pale Moon is invisibility, the years spent present in a room and absent from the record. It’s pale because it was never allowed full color.

The Blue Moon is longing — not satisfied, not resolved, just carried. The wanting that outlasts the waiting.

The Purple Moon belongs to the allies, the straight men and women who showed up. Allyship gets its own moon because it was never nothing.

The Black Swan is the argument the whole Subdivision makes without arguing it: that there is a natural order here, and homosexuality has its place inside it, not outside it.

The Purple Finch is nobility — the idea that there is as much dignity in being gay as there is in being straight, and neither needed to be earned.

The Pillow is grace — a soft landing, an inclusion. Not comfort as an idea, but comfort as a wish extended to everyone: the fulfillment of potential, the being treated well, the being let all the way into the room instead of tolerated at its edge. It belongs to no one in particular because it should belong to everyone.

— Behan

Uberest

Front seat. Rearview. Full view.

Three passengers. Jupiter 3 rides slow then hard. The Blue Moon hangs low and full.

Behind him, the back seat doing what back seats do: holding two men who forgot the car was moving.

Closets don’t always come with seatbelts. Buckle up if you can.

— Behan

Into the Glossary We Go

Weeboom

wee·boom / ˈwiː.buːm / — noun

Etymology: A portmanteau coinage — “wee,” carrying its double sense of smallness and the exclamation of a thrill, fused with “boom,” the sudden report of impact or arrival. Together they name a paradox: influence that announces itself loudly while occupying almost no time or space at all.

Definition: Access or proximity to power; the state of influence at the confluence of desire and determination. Measured not in résumés but in minutes — how long someone gets to guest on a talk show before the segment ends and the name changes.

The desk is where it lives. Conan owns the desk, which means Conan is weebooming — he is the fixed point, the eye contact, the mug that never moves. Everyone else performs proximity to him: the couch, the greenroom, the ninety seconds of charm before the next guest is called. Weeboom is not the fame. It is the clock running while you have it.

Eric Andre tests the form from the inside. For a decade he has let the question of his own sexuality sit half-open — everyone is bi, a hole is a hole, never quite yes, never quite no. It reads like evasion, but it functions like currency. A one-time disclosure cashes itself out; ambiguity keeps generating interest. Andre’s weeboom is not a fact he’s hiding. It’s a position he keeps occupying.

…and then, Chippendales. Chant? Alarm?

Weeboom.

— Behan

Introducing: The Gay Historical

Bill and Phil’s Outrageous Battle | The Gay Historical | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026

Two men who wanted men, leading armies that wanted each other’s land.

The Subdivision has, until now, worked in three registers: The Closet, for men who could not be seen; The Gay Gaze, for the culture’s ongoing performance of desire and denial; The Gay Domestic, for the ordinary life gay men were told they couldn’t have. None of them fit what follows, because the men in this piece were never hidden. They are simply men history already knew about and declined to say so plainly.

The Gay Historical exists for exactly that gap. Its subjects are real, its evidence is documented, and its complaint is not that the record is empty but that the record has been handled carelessly — footnoted where it should have been foregrounded, hedged where the evidence is strong, quietly dropped from the popular account while surviving, technically, in the academic one. This category doesn’t invent queerness where none is attested. It restores weight to queerness historians have already attested to and popular memory has simply declined to carry forward.

Bill and Phil’s Outrageous Battle

On April 11, 1677, two armies meet outside Cassel in French Flanders. One is commanded by William III, Prince of Orange, stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, a man who will go on within a decade to take the English throne and set the terms for two centuries of British imperial expansion. The other is commanded by Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, brother to Louis XIV, known at court simply as Monsieur. Philippe wins. It is his only major field command of the war, and the one clear military triumph of a life otherwise kept, by his brother’s design, well clear of real power.

Both men are documented, by contemporaries and by serious modern historians, as having preferred men. Philippe’s case was never really a secret in his own time — his court favorites were a known and largely tolerated feature of who he was, distinct from the dynastic marriages arranged around him, which functioned as foreign policy rather than romance. William’s case has been treated more cautiously by history, but not because the evidence is thin. His closeness with William Bentinck, who rode with him on this very campaign, and later with Arnold Joost van Keppel, drew comment from contemporaries and has been weighed seriously by historians on both sides of the North Sea ever since. The balance of circumstantial evidence, by the reckoning of scholars who’ve actually done the archival work, sits at least as strongly on the side of William having loved men as on the side of the dutiful, politically arranged marriage that produced no children and precious little warmth.

Which means: on this field, in this year, two men each documented as loving men led armies that existed to take land from each other’s countries. Nothing about that fact changes the outcome at Cassel. What it does is puncture the tidy separation the culture likes to maintain between “great men of history” and “men who loved men” — as though the second category could only ever produce private lives, never public ones, never armies, never empires. William goes on, four years after losing this battle, to steer the events that will hand England its imperial century. History remembers the empire. It has been considerably less interested in remembering the man who built its foundation, or who he actually loved while he did it.

The collage presents on a background of a then contemporary painting by Adam Frans van der Muelen of the battle of Cassel. The main actors are rendered in contemporary dress against the original battlefield, played by actors drawn from gay adult film — a deliberate collision of registers. History has spent three centuries treating William and Philippe’s desire as a footnote to be managed, hedged, or ignored outright, while treating their military and political record as the only part of them worth painting. The Subdivision refuses the split. Two men. One battlefield. Full color, present tense, unhedged.

The battle ensues.

— Behan

Sources: “Battle of Cassel,” various historical accounts of the Franco-Dutch War, 1677; “William III of Orange,” Wikipedia and standard biographical accounts; Cormac Moore/History Ireland, “Billy’s Boys, or an Orangeman’s Dilemma,” on the historiographical debate over William III’s sexuality; H. Montgomery Hyde, The Other Love: An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain (1970).

Sunday Essay: Get. A. Dog.

The Modern-Day Eunuch

The culture has a script for gay men who end up alone, and it is not a script about tragedy. Get a dog. Take up a hobby. Throw yourself into charity work. Find god. These are offered, gently and often sincerely, as solutions — as if solitude were a condition to be managed rather than a wound to be acknowledged. No one hands a grieving widower a leash and calls it even. But a lonely gay man is regularly handed exactly that, along with the quiet expectation that he will be grateful for it, and grateful, too, for not asking for anything more.

The Subdivision’s three most recent collages — a truck window, a corner store, a garage — all begin at the same site: an image built for solitary consumption. A thirst trap. A reel. A picture-book spread with a spine running down the middle. Each source image sells attention one man at a time, and each collage answers by refusing the premise, populating the frame until the man is no longer performing alone. The work is not subtle about its argument. It is making the case, image by image, that the aloneness gay men are so often pictured in is not natural. It is manufactured, and it is expected, and the expectation has a long history.

Boys in the Band is as good a place as any to see the manufacturing at work. The film gets remembered as a landmark of early gay representation, and it is one, but look closely at what it actually resolves. Alan, the straight college friend whose unexpected visit derails the party, spends the whole night circling something he never names — old rumors of an affair with another man, a visible discomfort he can’t quite explain even to himself. By the end, he calls his wife and reconciles with her, on screen, confirmed, done. Hank and Larry, the film’s one gay couple, get something far less certain: after a night of accusations about infidelity and commitment, they go upstairs together, and the film lets the audience assume reconciliation without actually showing one. Given everything the film has spent two hours establishing about Larry’s resistance to monogamy, calling that ending a real partnership requires more faith than the text earns. What the film gives outright, without ambiguity, is a straight marriage restored. What it gestures at, and lets the audience fill in, is a gay relationship that may or may not survive the morning. Michael, the host, gets nothing at all — he ends the night sobbing in a friend’s arms and then walks alone into a church.

This is worth sitting with, because Boys in the Band was not made by people hostile to gay life. Mart Crowley was gay. He knew this world from the inside. And even his own instrument, gay-affirming to the extent that instrument could be in 1968, could not resist the old shape: the straight man gets restored to partnership, cleanly, while the gay men are left in various states of unresolved aloneness, self-loathing, or unearned hope. If the closet was a trick the culture played on gay men, this is the sleight of hand at its center — even the stories built to defend gay life default to picturing it as fundamentally solitary, as if solitude were simply what being gay costs.

The psychology bears this out in ways that are no longer speculative. Sexual minority adults report markedly higher rates of loneliness and social isolation than their straight peers, and researchers working from the minority stress framework first developed by Ilan Meyer have traced why: living under chronic, minority-specific stress — discrimination anticipated even when it isn’t present, identity concealment, a lifetime of learning to expect rejection — makes intimacy itself feel unsafe to reach for. The isolation is not incidental to the stigma. It is one of the primary mechanisms by which the stigma does its damage, and it compounds: gay and bisexual men who have internalized shame about their own desire become more isolated, and isolation itself becomes a source of further distress, a closed loop with no obvious exit.

None of this is an argument against solitude itself. A man who chooses to be single, who wants his own company and finds it sufficient, is not the subject of this essay. That kind of aloneness can be chosen fearlessly, held without apology, lived as a complete life rather than a diminished one. The tragedy isn’t solitude. The tragedy is solitude imposed by a culture that has spent a century telling gay men, in a thousand small and large ways, that they are meant to be modern-day eunuchs — desired, sometimes, looked at, often, but never quite entitled to the same ordinary partnership it hands straight men without a second thought. And when that imposed aloneness produces exactly the sadness anyone would predict, the culture has a second script ready: the lonely gay man becomes pathetic, his late-night encounters read as desperate rather than human, his solitude treated as evidence of some personal failing rather than the cost of what was demanded of him.

The Subdivision’s answer to all this isn’t an argument so much as a correction, made one collage at a time. Populate the frame. Close the gap the spine insists on. Give the man in the truck a companion, the man in the store a boyfriend to mind the cart, the men in the garage a shared space instead of a shared page. It is a small gesture, repeated. But so was the original exclusion — small, repeated, built into pictures long before anyone thought to call it a pattern.

— Behan

Sources: Meyer, I.H., “Minority Stress and Mental Health in Gay Men,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior (1995); Meyer, I.H., “Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations,” Psychological Bulletin (2003); “Minority Stress and Loneliness in a Global Sample of Sexual Minority Adults,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (2022); The Boys in the Band, dir. William Friedkin (1970), screenplay by Mart Crowley.

Once Upon a Time Zone

Time Upon Time Zones

“Forever separated, forever alone.”

The first timezone this collage crosses is the picture book — that familiar architecture of gay representation where two men are photographed separately, then paired across a spread, held together only by proximity and layout. They share a page. They never share a frame. The spine runs down the middle like a border nobody asked for, and the two men on either side of it are, as Behan puts it, forever separated, forever alone.

The Subdivision refuses the spine. It takes the separation the picture book enforces and undoes it — populating the space between the two men with others, closing the gap that publishing convention insisted on keeping open. No one is paired-but-distant here. They occupy the same garage, the same light, the same body of collaged time.

The second timezone belongs to persona rather than person. Deadpool’s pansexuality wasn’t incidental — his director said so on record, and Reynolds himself pushed to have it quoted. Off-screen the bit continues: a Family Guy cameo built around fixating on another man, a running habit of on-camera kisses with men from Andrew Garfield to Conan O’Brien, the joke always hovering at the same close distance without ever quite landing anywhere. The Subdivision isn’t interested in what any of this says about the man. It’s interested in what the performance says about the culture — that even a straight man’s brand can be built, in part, on flirting with gay legibility, because the flirtation itself has become valuable.

Two timezones, one closet, with its’ architecture of separation, corrected, and the culture’s ongoing flirtation with the thing it claims not to be.

— Behan

Heels Up

No man is an island. The internet keeps insisting otherwise.

The source clip announces itself as a joke before it’s anything else: “POV: Just doing errands,” shot in a corner store between snack shelves and a drink cooler, the shirt lifted like an accident rather than a choice. Six hundred fifty-four likes, nineteen comments — proof that the bit works, that solitude staged as spontaneity is its own kind of content.

Behan doubles him: the same man appears twice behind himself, caught in motion, one flex blurring into the next. In motion, he needs a spotter. The Subdivision gives him a boyfriend up front to steer the cart — so nothing gets bumped, so the errand actually gets done while he’s busy being watched. The Blue Moon crowds into the corner of the frame like it wandered in from the parking lot, and Jupiter 3 hovers over the register, a witness that has clearly seen stranger things than this. Motion and stillness share the same aisle.

No one should be alone, not even mid-errand, not even mid-motion.

Who’s minding the cart?

— Behan

The Fix

The content-creator economy sells the myth of the desirable man as a solitary transaction. One body, one camera, one subscriber.

In this instance, the source image is a thirst trap built for Facebook: a truck-window reel, one man alone, performing for a phone camera at a stoplight. Two hundred and twenty-one likes, three comments, a battery running low. He’s angling for likes and shares — every like feeds an algorithm, the algorithm returns reach, and reach is the actual currency: it becomes brand deals, sponsorships, a subscriber base somewhere else. The performance reads effortless because effortlessness is the product.

Behan answers that solitude by multiplying it: one man becomes three, with all the suggestion of a ménage à trois neither Facebook nor the algorithm would ever reward. The hyped-up color isn’t decoration — it pushes the emotions already present in the frame, makes them impossible to scroll past.

Solitude was never the gay man’s instinct. It is a condition of the closet, constructed by others and mistaken for nature.

The Subdivision solves the problem of singlehood one collage at a time, building worlds where gay men are not alone. They are, instead, in good company.

Summer Time

Subject to Context: A Summer Scene

1869

Frédéric Bazille paints young men bathing on the banks of the Lez, near his family’s estate in the south of France. Two of them wrestle in the grass, bodies pressed close, watched by nothing but trees. Nothing in the painting names what it shows. It doesn’t have to. Bazille chooses contemporary men in contemporary swimwear rather than reaching for the usual cover of Greek myth — a mythological alibi would have made the homoeroticism safe, distant, classical. He paints his own moment instead and leaves the subject exposed rather than costumed. Historians now count Summer Scene among the earliest visual precedents for a specifically modern gay gaze: not allegory, but the thing itself, barely veiled.

1982

Making Love becomes the first major studio release to put a gay romance at its center rather than its margins. Michael Ontkean and Harry Hamlin, a Los Angeles doctor and a writer, a marriage that comes apart because a man finally admits what he wants. The film is clumsy in places, cautious in others — but first. It proves a mainstream American audience could be handed a gay love story as the main event, not the subplot, not the joke, not the warning. Between Bazille’s canvas and this screen sit over a hundred years of the same subject learning, slowly, how much it was allowed to say.

2026

The Subdivision takes up Bazille’s move and finishes it. Where his wrestling men gesture toward desire, Behan’s kiss. Where his river became a private grove out of time, Behan’s becomes a water park — gaudy, contemporary, unmistakably now, the same instinct toward modernity Bazille had a century and a half earlier, since a pastoral setting would have let the eye look away. The subtext becomes context. Nothing here needs decoding.

Firsts are rarely fully realized. They just have to happen. Someone has to go first so the next one doesn’t have to negotiate the terms all over again.

Sources: Bazille’s Summer Scene (1869), Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums; on the painting’s place in early queer visual history