Perfect Fit

Perfect Fit | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan

Spotted in the Wild:

The Closeted, Preening Gay Peacock. Jeremy has Married Sally, and they are Looking for a New (Old) Home to Purchase.

Their Agent is Jax, Jeremy’s Best Friend, Best Man, and Best Camping Bud. Jax is Bringing Oranges to Remind Jeremy of their Vacation in Florida to Tour Orange Farms.

Sally Thinks Jax is Super Sweet and Doesn’t Mind that He is Around ALL THE TIME.

The Closet offers straight women one option.

Lots of trips to Home Goods with Jeremy and Sally. Frequent camping trips with Jeremy and Jax.

The Closet fits everyone inside its walls — with room to spare.

Dark Sepia

Dark Sepia | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan |

“Len” Keith and “Cub” Coates of Havelock, New Brunswick. Two WWI army vets who found each other in a small rural town and built a life together.

What are the odds?

For almost 30 years, Len pointed his camera back onto themselves. Canoeing. Hunting. Hugging.

One was forced out of town.

The other married.

The photographs survive.

The Other Man

The Other Man | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan |

Tony did it in the nineteen fifties. Flip did it in the nineteen sixties. Dustin did it in the nineteen eighties and so many more. Careers were made with men performing as women, most often in comedic roles, to great acclaim.

So what is the beef with transgender women?

It’s as simple as stepping off a stage.

As long as men in women’s clothing are set apart and set away like specimens in a zoo, the dominant culture is free to laugh and enjoy the spectacle. But step off the stage into real life and real problems emerge.

The hypocrisy of conservative thinkers who can’t see the problem with both supporting one end and rejecting the other end of men in dresses is profound. The absurdity of the argument that somehow society is endangered when men step off the stage in a dress is tragically pathetic.

It’s way past time for some folks at long last to get a life.

Behold the Gay Man

Behold the Gay Man | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan |

Behind the marble, behind the scripture, behind the press release, behind public opinion, is the man.

And that man is entirely human — gay, bi, or straight — filled with the same dreams of success, achievement, happiness, adventure, love.

As Maya Angelou said, “we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”

And to quote one of the less used lines of scripture — whatever you do to the least of my brothers…

OFV Mysteries

OFVMysteries | Digital Photo Collage | 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan |

In the 70’s AD, the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii was about access. Who gets in. What is revealed. To whom and at what cost. The initiate earns the mystery.

In the 1970’s AD, bathhouses and bars performed a similar function for the gay initiate.

In the 2020’s AD, OnlyFans operates on the same principle but in the digital realm. Access and desire, desire and access.

The platforms change. The human need does not.

Desire has always found its room.

Sometimes We Punt

Sometimes We Punt Digital Photo Collage 2026

The center point of this collage is the Aquarian Moon. It’s the age of Aquarius moving into the age of… what age are we in now? I can’t remember. Whatever that age is, it’s about the changing tides of time and history and how we make advances.

And advances are almost always followed with retreats, like waves on a beach.

It is about the nature of being alive and the limited amount of control we have over what happens in our day.

The moon is being playfully kicked by the central figure as if a soccer ball. So it is about our interaction with time, nature, our place in the world, our place within histories, context, when we are and where we are, and what we have to accept, and what we can capitalize on.

That’s what this collage is about.

That’s what this post is about.

The title of the work is “Sometimes We Punt.” That is a playful acknowledgement of when sometimes you’re in a situation where you don’t have a lot of good options, you punt.

And that punt is a moment of hope.

It is about responding to life’s idiosyncrasies. It may not always be fun, but it will always be interesting.

And that’s how I see life.

I think this is my artist statement, at least for today.

On a Gay Death

As a gay man who grew up in the Catholic tradition, the idea of last things can be anxiety producing. The church has had a spotty history on the subject.

In 1347, the bubonic plague killed half of Europe in a year. Gay men and women were certainly among those lost. They always are. And the Church that might have offered comfort had already decided they were beyond it.

In 1981, AIDS hit America, and its government looked away while a community buried itself. No funding. No urgency. No grace. Gay men died without medicine that could have saved them because the dominant culture had decided they did not deserve to live. The church called it divine retribution.

And now in 2026, the current administration and conservative Christians are moving to restrict and remove the HIV medications that are keeping people alive.

There is no other word for this. It is violence. It is immoral. It is unacceptable.

The ars moriendi — the art of dying well — was the Church’s promise to its faithful. Gay men and women are still being denied it.

In the Catholic realm, there is a sacrament for marriage. There is a sacrament for holy orders. Gays are barred from both, with no sacrament for gay Catholics. That’s not Godly.