The Lingering Shot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Singularity

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

The two collages below are built around that point.

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

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

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

Symbiosis.

Fall and Winter 1974

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

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

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

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

Very Good Friends Digital Collage

1958: Jack and Jill meet in high school in New Rochelle, New York. He carries her books. Everyone agrees they make a handsome couple.

1959: They go steady. Jill wears Jack's class ring on a chain. Her mother calls him the most respectful boy in town. He never pushes for anything.

1960: They enroll at the same college. Jill joins the glee club. Jack joins a fraternity and spends most weekends with his brothers.

1961: Jack proposes at Christmas. Both families are relieved.

1962: They marry in June at St. Absalom Church in New Rochelle. They have waited until the wedding night. Jill finds the wait romantic. Jack is in no hurry to see it end.

1963: Katie is born. For Jack, it is one and done.

1964–1968: Jack sells insurance, plays golf on Saturdays, and hosts card night with the men from the office. Jill keeps the house. Katie starts school.

1969: Jack takes a new job in Phoenix. While Jill and Katie unload boxes, Jack hops the fence to meet the new neighbor, Tyler. Both men know immediately. Jack knows it is time to have a new best friend. He hasn’t had one since his roommate in college.

Girls Night In

The ground of this collage is a jigsaw puzzle of a 1950s bedroom. Floral wallpaper, oval portrait frames, a vanity mirror, and dresses hanging in the open.

In the 1950s, this room belonged to the woman of the house. It is where she dressed, rested, and kept her private life.

Five men now occupy it. One sits and scrolls his phone. One flexes in front of the hanging dresses. Two kiss. One tips his head back with his eyes closed.

"Girls night" names a gathering of women. Gay men have long used "girls" for each other. The title applies the phrase to them and places them in the room the phrase came from.

The puzzle lines run across the entire image, including the figures. Room and men become one surface, cut from the same pieces.

The blue moon, for desire and transformation, sits in the vanity mirror. The Jupiter 3, for freedom and movement, hovers over the room.

Kittens a Go-Go

Three new collages bring together kittens, an atomic mushroom cloud, and a man flexing his bicep.

The kittens come from paint-by-number canvases. The hobby began in the early 1950s and filled American homes with sentimental, domestic images..

The mushroom cloud comes from the same decade. It is the defining image of the Cold War, the threat that existed alongside postwar comfort.

The flexing man comes from social media today. He displays his strength in front of the blast.

Two recurring symbols complete each piece. The blue moon stands for desire and transformation. The Jupiter 3, the next version of the Jupiter, built for gay people, stands for freedom and movement.

Together the five elements form a sequence: comfort, threat, strength, desire, escape. The 1950s told men to protect the home and to fear what could destroy it. These collages place a contemporary gay man at the center of that picture and give him a ship to leave in

Is it Live or is it Memorex?

In the 1970s, a blank cassette tape asked America a question. Ella Fitzgerald sang a note so high that she shattered a champagne flute, but the voice that broke the glass was a recording on Memorex audiotape, which produced the tagline "Is It Live, or Is It Memorex?" In a 1974 spot, Count Basie sat with his back to a recording booth, trying to tell Fitzgerald's live voice from a tape of it. Fifty years later, the question has moved from sound to faces. Is he real? Is he AI? How do we know for sure?

Mostly, we do not. In a study at Lancaster University and UC Berkeley, 315 people sorted 400 AI-generated faces from 400 real ones and were right less than half the time, 48.2 percent. A second group trained to spot synthetic faces reached only 59 percent. The same researchers found that people rated the AI faces 7.7 percent more trustworthy than the real ones. A 2023 study went further. Participants judged AI faces to be human about 65 percent of the time, while correctly identifying real faces as human only about 51 percent of the time. The people fooled most often were also the most confident in their answers. Even experts fall short: "super recognizers," who identify human faces with over 90 percent accuracy, managed only 57 percent with AI faces.

The examples are already in the culture. In 2023, an image of Pope Francis in a white designer puffer coat circulated as a real photograph before it was traced to an AI image generator. In June 2025, a band called the Velvet Sundown appeared on Spotify out of nowhere and drew more than 500,000 monthly listeners. On social media, the group denied using AI. It later revised its Spotify bio to admit that the music was composed, voiced, and visualized with AI under human creative direction. That fall, an AI "actress" named Tilly Norwood debuted at a film conference in Zurich, and her creators announced that talent agencies were competing to sign her. With her polished Instagram feed and comedy sketches, she could easily pass for a rising star.

Which brings us to Petyo Pramov. His images circulate widely across YouTube, X, Tumblr, and Pinterest, always credited to the same name. His TikTok calls itself his official account and lists his work as fitness modeling and fashion. His accounts are new, and new accounts fit both explanations: a real model starting over, or a persona built from scratch. The best tests are the old ones. Does he move on video? Does he appear in photos taken by other people? Do the tattoos and scars stay put?

"Stallions" does not wait for the answer. These collages set his figure among horses: a chestnut at his shoulder, two stallions nose to nose above his raised arms, a pink unicorn behind a man scrolling his phone, a carousel horse in roses beside a man in eggplant-and-banana shorts. The stallion has stood for male power in art for centuries. Here it shares the frame with a man who may or may not exist. The blue moon rises, and the Jupiter 3 hovers, as always.

Collage has always been an honest fabrication. The artist cuts, combines, and shows the seams. The new question is whether the source material was ever live at all.

— Behan

Citations available on request.

Balla Duchamp Behan

Duchamp in 1912, Balla in 1912, Behan in 2026: three artists, more than a century apart, working on the same question: how to show the figure in motion on a two-dimensional surface.

Behan, Leg Day (2026). The repeated legs fan out in arcs that echo the dog's feet in the Balla. Duchamp and Balla painted their motion studies in muted tones from an observed or imagined model. Leg Day builds its motion from a photograph in the feed, in full color, with the figure a man at the gym.

Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). A single figure broken into overlapping planes as it moves down the stairs. The painting caused a scandal at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where one critic mocked it as an explosion in a shingle factory.

Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). Painted the same year, it shows motion as repetition: the dog's feet, the tail, the leash, and the walker's skirt all multiply into blurred arcs. Both painters drew on the chronophotography of Muybridge and Marey.

New This Fall: Designing Man

COMING THIS FALL:

Designing Man,

Season 1:

Paint by Numbers: A Gay Affair, Friday nights at 9.

New episodes follow gay men through landscapes and interiors, living their best lives, free from discrimination, harassment, and religious intolerance. It is pop art about living rather than products. Warhol painted soup cans; this show paints the men in your feed.

Season 1 heads outdoors. Each episode is a digital collage that sets men from social media into vintage paint-by-number scenes found on Etsy, from mountain lakes and pine forests to desert mesas and the Golden Gate Bridge. They flex, rinse, stretch, and kiss in stages across the ground, just as they do on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and OnlyFans. Bing, bing, bing. Muybridge, bing, bing, bing.

A blue moon rises over every landscape for desire and transformation. The Jupiter 3, the next model of the Lost in Space ship, appears in every episode, ready for freedom and movement. A few classic film stars drop by along the way.

Pilot opens at the lake, where a swimmer in navy briefs strikes a Greek contrapposto as another man moves under the pines.

Creekside brings the bather, one of painting's oldest subjects, back to the woods, with one man rinsing his hair, another waist-deep in the creek with his shirt open, and a face in the corner looking straight at you.

Desert Flex stacks three men in sunglasses into one many-armed body, a nod to the Futurists, while Walter Pidgeon, captain of the Forbidden Planet saucer, watches the Jupiter 3 cross the mesa.

The Echo finds a man flexing in front of his own repeated image as a waterfall pours down behind him, phone tucked in his waistband, ready for the next post.

Cooldown follows a runner in blue shorts peeling off his shirt after a run, à la Muybridge.

In Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart is back in San Francisco and still cannot stop looking, and this time the view is one man in three poses beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

The season continues with The Cabin, the full paint-by-number vacation of lake, rowboat, woody wagon, and cabin, where the same two men kiss again and again.

Michelangelo, Jonah's Wide-Mouth Whale, Rock, and Just What Is a Brojob? Twenty new collages. Each one connects gay experience across five centuries.

The anchor figure is Michelangelo's Jonah, painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling above the altar. He leans back, looks up, and sits beside the great fish that swallowed him. A putto rests against the fish's head. Michelangelo painted the ceiling between 1508 and 1512. He also wrote poems and letters of devotion to Tommaso dei Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman. Historians have documented that attachment for centuries.

In these collages Jonah sits among men taken from today's social media feeds. They lounge on couches, flex, hold beers, take mirror selfies, and walk through a crowd of men in bowler hats on an Edwardian street.

Jonah sits with his legs spread wide. So do many of the contemporary men around him: the seated flexers in brown shorts, the man on the couch with the beer, the figure crouched over the fresco.

The pose has a long history. Seated male figures in Greek and Roman sculpture take it. Michelangelo uses it across the Sistine ceiling, for the prophets and for the nude youths seated above them. In the twentieth century it appears again in physique magazines and in Tom of Finland's drawings.

The current word for it is "manspreading," a term that came into wide use around 2014. In general usage it is a complaint about men taking up too much room on public transit.

In gay iconography it is read differently. The spread legs are an invitation. In my reading, that invitation can be for up to ten hours of oral sex.

Michelangelo painted the position onto a chapel ceiling. Men now post it to their feeds. The pose has stayed the same across five centuries, and so has the invitation.

A set of recurring elements runs through all twenty: a goldfish, a full moon, a flying saucer, and a mushroom cloud with a man clutching his head. They repeat from piece to piece so that the images read as one connected set.

Rock Hudson appears again and again across the set, his head tinted blue, turned upside down, and smoking a cigarette, taken from stills of the 1968 film A Fine Pair. Hudson was one of Hollywood's leading men in the 1950s and 1960s, and he was gay, a fact the studio system worked to keep private, including through his arranged 1955 marriage to Phyllis Gates. In 1985 he became the first major American celebrity to make his AIDS diagnosis public, and he died that October. Here his inverted head hangs among the men of the feed, who post their bodies openly in a way Hudson never could.

Then there is the handstand figure with his shirt fallen over his face. His body is on display while his identity stays hidden. That is the subject of the last question in the title.

"Brojob" is current slang for sexual contact between men who identify as straight. The term keeps the act inside friendship and outside gay identity. The man takes part, and the label lets him say it means nothing.

The practice is older than the word. Men have long had sex with men while describing it as something else: youthful experiment, military necessity, a classical ideal, a study of the nude. Michelangelo worked within that same structure. The ceiling is sacred art, and the male bodies on it are taken as devotional.

These collages place that subtext beside today's version of it. The covered face and the exposed body appear in the same frame.

The words "cheers" and "mine" appear in two of the pieces. Both come directly from the source images. They represent a revelation of personal freedom.

Twenty collages. One history, still being written.

Making Endurance Pay

Every morning begins with my feed, which brings me images and spaces to consider for collaging. This collage uses three of them.

One comes from an outdoor shower. One comes from a gym. The room comes from a news article with tips for decorating a small space.

An algorithm selects each one and sends it to me.

Each presents a version of the good, at least to the people who made it.

The collage places them in one composition. The flexed arm is the foreground, the showering figure the middle ground, the furnished room the background. Three flat images produce the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface.

Editing on the iPhone unifies them. Focus, sharpness, and softness are adjusted until the three sources read as one space.

At the bottom edge, a fragment of caption remains from the source: "Solid G…" I leave it in because it identifies the image as coming from social media, and because the word states what all three sources promise. "Solid" means firm, full, and complete: a solid body, a solid build, a solid home.

The source of inspiration is an artwork seen in the same article on best practices in home design: in a pink bathroom, a reclining figure in red on a desert highway, reflected in a mirror. Two things in that work hold my attention: the intensity of the color and the relation of the figure to the ground. As an artist, it is important for me to find other artists who are pushing the same boundaries, each in a distinct way.

For many artists, the payoff is found in the long road. It may come as a future audience, a better understanding of the purpose behind the work, or both. Endurance is critical to building a successful portfolio. Artists make endurance pay by defining a unique visual point of view and by finding the audience that connects with that view.

10

Heavy black-framed glasses and a blue

Shirtless

HUNK briefs in the background come

Waistband

Public heterosexual… private gay…

Head repeats, turned upside down

Cigarette hangs from his mouth, and his shirt is open to the chest

Fin

Fin Again

Final Fin

Jeremy's Annual Halloween Weekend

Every October, Jeremy packs one bag and flies to the Cocomos.

He goes with the same group of best bros every year. It is a tradition. Nobody misses it.

The weekend has a schedule. Friday is the beach. Saturday is costumes. This year the theme is the Stone Age, with leopard print, fur, a blue neckerchief and one yellow handbag that nobody claims.

There is swimming. There is time in the water and time on the rocks. There is coffee on the balcony the next morning.

Halloween is a festive holiday, and Jeremy and the boys take festivity seriously. Some of it gets messy.

On Monday, Jeremy flies home to his wife and kids.

He is happy. The weekend settles him. It carries him through Thanksgiving, Christmas, spring break, summer vacation and back-to-school.

Then it is October again.

Jeremy has everything a man could want: a wife, five kids, a house, great job, wonderful church, and one weekend a year in the Cocomos with the boys.

Classic Collage Wednesday

Classic Collage Wednesday

Classic Collage Wednesday: classically styled collages of the inundating male form.

These collages are built from what the feed delivers. Catalog models from the 1980s in striped pajamas and robes stand beside men from this week's Reels. A Ken doll in a tuxedo, a peaked cap, a moon and a basketball appear among them.

The same figures repeat at different scales. A face appears large in one corner and small in another. A torso fills half the frame and then returns as a background figure. The repetition is the point. The feed does not present one man. It presents the same type again and again until he fills every edge of the screen.

The interface text stays in. "Tantalizing." "Sparks." "Just going." "Reels." These fragments show where the images came from and how they arrived.

Collage has a long queer history. Hannah Höch, one of the founders of photomontage in Berlin Dada, lived with the Dutch writer Til Brugman for nine years. Joe Brainard made collages in New York in the 1960s and 1970s that drew on popular imagery and his own life as a gay man. In 2020, the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena offered a class on how artists have used collage to interpret queerness. The class examined how collage strips images of their original social and political context and how the practice moves between public and private. Peter Platel's 2026 book Collage Fantastique! goes further and calls collage an inherently queer art form.

These works take advertising, toys and social media images made for a general audience and reassemble them around the male figure. The original context is removed. The new context is stated openl

When I came out in 1981, homemade queer collaging including formal work and guerrilla collaging in men’s public restrooms were the only visual form I could see that hid me I was not alone. That was important.

Sources
Vitalicio, Andy. "Discover the History of Queer Collages at Armory Center for the Arts." Published November 5, 2020.
Platel, Peter. Collage Fantastique! Quercus Publishing, 2026. ISBN 9781529447569.

Swapping Spit (Diptych), 2026

Swapping spit is an act of intimacy and connection in gay culture. It is the sharing of body fluids between two men. This act is both poignant and celebratory after decades of HIV, when gay men were taught to fear and avoid the exchange of body fluids. Saliva has never transmitted HIV, but for years the fear extended to any fluid exchange between men.

Intimacy through Exchange

This diptych recreates that act of intimacy by swapping the images of two single shirtless men between their original settings. A young man in jeans stands barefoot in a motel pool at night. An older man in striped swim trunks stands on a terrace above the sea with his two poodles. Each man is placed into the other's scene. That exchange is the only action.

The action creates what painting has traditionally called pentimento: traces of the former figure remaining in the original setting, partly covered by the new figure. Behind the older man in the pool, the younger man's arms, jeans, and bare feet remain visible. Behind the younger man on the terrace, the poodles remain.

The viewer is left to consider the intimacy of entering another person's space: how each figure is changed by its new environment, and how it stays the same.

Swapping has a long and celebrated history in American culture.

From the 1960s onward, suburban heterosexual couples held key parties, where married couples swapped partners for an evening. This activity was treated as harmlessly as a Tupperware party.

One of the most popular films of the late 1960s was Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), in which a wealthy California couple decides to try swinging and wife swapping and brings their best friends into the idea. It was an enormous success and showed that swapping in heterosexual culture had moved into the mainstream.

Ironically, gay men in similar settings were often raided and harassed for the same behavior, which continues today. In April 2026, Dallas police served a search warrant on a warehouse hosting a party for gay men, detained 48 people, and arrested the two promoters.

The deeper contradiction is that while gay men were condemned for swapping body fluids, heterosexual couples were swapping themselves. What is apparent is a lack of understanding and empathy in the dominant culture, and an inability to see its own part in behavior it considered unnatural or unsavory.

The diptych Swapping Spit is about making a connection where there was none, whether through a body fluid, a partner, or a setting, creating intimacy through exchange, popular with gay and straight people alike.

— Behan

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"; KWTX/KLTV, "Dallas police raid 'sexual encounter center'" (April 20, 2026).

Leg Day

Six from This Morning

I woke up at 5 AM this morning to take my BP med. Then I made six collages while my BP returned to my normal 115 over 70. Collage work centers and calms me.

I make six to ten digital collages a day, and I have for more than two years. These six come from the feed: beaches, a boxer, a handstand, a diver, a shower, and a man in leather beside a can of DAK ham added.

The Blue Moon and the Jupiter 3 appear in each one, standing for desire and for escape, and as witnesses to both.

The first two made today share the same beach as their ground and appear up front. The first is minimal, with only a few figures added. The second is maximal, with the same beach filled with figures. It is an exercise within the daily exercise: one source, two approaches.

The only way to get better is to make the work, and to not be afraid to make the work.

See more at behanworks. Just add (dot) com and stir.

— Behan

PS oh and today was leg day at the gym.

The Feed

On a daily basis, millions of people move through the images, advertisements, and stories contained in social media, the feeds themselves becoming self-portraits of the viewers. In my own case, from that encounter, I gather grounds and figures to create collages that express a specifically queer point of view. And in these collages, I see both myself and the larger culture, revealed through what other people choose to make and to post. This is communion.

— Behan

Arch and Obelisk: The Eiffel Tower as Androgyne

Arch and Obelisk: The Eiffel Tower as Androgyne

When one looks at the Eiffel Tower, two major architectural forms are present: the arch and the obelisk.

Throughout history, these two forms have carried opposite meanings. The arch, open and enclosing, has been read as feminine. The obelisk, upright and rising to a point, has been read as masculine. Each form has served as a symbol of one sex, echoing its genitalia.

In the Eiffel Tower, the two forms do not stand apart. They merge. The great arch at the base rises and narrows into the obelisk above it, in one continuous structure. The symbols of female and male are joined in a single figure.

That joining is the mark of the androgyne: a figure that unites the masculine and the feminine in one identity. The Eiffel Tower is an androgyne in iron. It is also a portrait of a new kind of person, one that Paris was beginning to imagine at the end of the nineteenth century.

Two Monuments, 1836

The arch and the obelisk are among the oldest forms in architecture. Egyptian obelisks date to about 2500 BC. Arches appear in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the same era, and Rome later made the arch monumental. For more than four thousand years, the two forms carried their meanings through Egyptian, Greek, Roman and European culture.

In 1836, Paris completed its two most famous examples. In July, the Arc de Triomphe was inaugurated at the top of the Champs-Élysées. In October, the Luxor Obelisk, carved around 1250 BC for the pharaoh Ramesses II, was raised in the Place de la Concorde at the other end of the same avenue.

Both monuments celebrated the old order. The Arc honored Napoleon's armies. The Obelisk was a gift from Egypt, displayed as a sign of French prestige. They stood about two kilometres apart, the feminine form and the masculine form, separate.

In 1836, the androgyne was a subject for a few Romantic novelists. Honoré de Balzac's Séraphîta (1834) and Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) explored figures who were both male and female. Over the next fifty years, that literary curiosity moved to the center of French culture.

The New Person, 1880s and 1890s

By the 1880s, Paris was asking what a person could be.

The first organized feminist movements had appeared, along with the figure of the "New Woman": educated, independent and unwilling to accept the roles assigned to her. The boundary between male and female was under public question.

Writers took up the question. In 1884, Rachilde published Monsieur Vénus, a novel that reverses the roles of a woman and a man. The same year, Joris-Karl Huysmans published À rebours, the central novel of the Decadent movement, which set out to break down traditional categories, including male and female. Also in 1884, Joséphin Péladan began his novel cycle La Décadence latine, which in 1891 included L'Androgyne and La Gynandre.

From 1892 to 1897, Péladan organized the Salons de la Rose+Croix, six exhibitions of Symbolist art in Paris. For Péladan and his circle, the androgyne was the perfect human being: the complete person described in Plato's Symposium, before the division into male and female.

Artwork Spotlight: The Face of the Androgyne

Cover of Joséphin Péladan's L'Androgyne (Paris: E. Dentu, 1891). A single face floats above the sea, beneath the book's title. The cover advertises a "hundredth edition," a sign that the book was sold as a popular success. The androgyne was not a private subject. It was on the bookshop shelves of Paris.

In the decades before, Paris had already seen real androgynes. The novelist George Sand wore men's suits and top hats and smoked cigars in public. The painter Rosa Bonheur held a permit from the Paris police, a permission de travestissement, allowing her to wear trousers so she could work in livestock markets. Both were among the most famous artists in France. They were early examples of the new person.

Science arrived at the same subject. In the 1860s, the German writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs described men who loved men as a "third sex," with a female soul in a male body. The word "homosexual" was coined in 1869. In 1872, the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a French intersex person raised as a girl and later reclassified as a man, were published in Paris, raising public questions about how sex itself was defined. In 1886, Richard von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis, the most widely read work on sexuality of its time.

Novelists, painters, critics and doctors were describing the same figure: a person in whom masculine and feminine are combined, and who did not fit the old categories. It was not an idea at the edge of Paris culture. It was at the center.

Architects worked in the same city, read the same books and visited the same exhibitions. If the new person appeared in literature, painting and science, it is reasonable to look for it in architecture. The Eiffel Tower is where it appears.

The Tower, 1889

In June 1884, the same year as Monsieur Vénus and À rebours, Maurice Koechlin, an engineer in Gustave Eiffel's company, sketched a plain iron pylon 300 metres high: four legs rising to a point. To show its height, he drew famous monuments beside it at the same scale. One of them was the Luxor Obelisk. From its first drawing, the tower stood beside an obelisk.

The company's architect, Stephen Sauvestre, then gave the sketch its artistic form. He added the great arches between the legs at the base. Those arches carry almost no load. The structure did not need them. The engineers explained the curve of the legs as a calculation of wind resistance, but no calculation required the arches. The feminine form at the base was an artist's choice.

The design history follows the visual reading. First came the shaft, drawn beside an actual obelisk. Then came the arch, added by the architect. The finished tower joins the two.

The tower was built for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the world's fair marking the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, the revolution that declared the rights of the individual. It was built of iron, the material of the modern age, and at 300 metres it was the tallest structure in the world.

The tower itself celebrated no army or conquest, as the Arc and the Obelisk did. It celebrated engineering and the modern age.

It stands across the Seine from the Arc de Triomphe and the Luxor Obelisk, almost directly south of the Arc. The three monuments form a triangle. In 1836, Paris set the arch and the obelisk apart, at opposite ends of an avenue. In 1889, it added a third point that joined them.

Artwork Spotlight: The Face of the Androgyne

Odilon Redon, Closed Eyes, 1890. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Redon painted this work in Paris one year after the Eiffel Tower opened. A single face rises above the sea with its eyes closed. Its sex cannot be determined. It is one figure that holds both.

Reading the Form

Stand at a distance from the tower and look at its outline. The lower part is the arch, wide and open, spanning the ground between the legs. The upper part is the obelisk. Above the first platform, the four legs draw together and rise as one tapering shaft toward a point.

The legs that form the arch are the same legs that form the obelisk. There is no seam. One form becomes the other.

This is a reading of symbols, not of anatomy. A hermaphrodite, in the language of the nineteenth century, is a body that is biologically both male and female, a condition now called intersex. The androgyne is different. The word comes from the Greek andro, man, and gyne, woman, and it describes a person who combines masculine and feminine qualities in appearance, behavior and identity. In current terms, the androgyne is gender fluid.

The tower joins the symbol of the feminine and the symbol of the masculine into one identity. It is the new person of 1880s Paris, given architectural form.

(On the builders' intentions, see the author's note at the end of this essay.)

Artwork Spotlight: The Face of the Androgyne

Jean Delville, The School of Plato, 1898. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Plato teaches in a garden, surrounded by nude disciples with long hair and feminine features. Delville paints Plato in the manner of Christ, with twelve disciples, giving the androgyne the status of a sacred ideal. Delville exhibited at Péladan's salons.

A Structure Ahead of Its Time

The tower was not welcomed. In 1887, as construction began, a group of leading artists and writers published a protest calling it useless and monstrous. It was granted a permit for only twenty years and was expected to come down.

The new person met the same resistance. Sand and Bonheur were mocked, and Bonheur needed police permission to dress as she did. The writers of the androgyne were attacked by critics. Each challenged a settled idea of what was proper, and each was ahead of its time.

The tower was not taken down. Over the following century, it became the most recognized structure in the world.

From the Canvas to Daily Life

The conversations of nineteenth-century Paris did not end with the century. The novelists, painters and doctors who wrote about the androgyne and about intersex bodies raised questions that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries continued to ask: what makes a person male or female, and whether a person must be only one.

Those questions moved from the canvas and the page into daily life. In the twentieth century, women entered professions once closed to them, men and women wore each other's clothing, and the law began to recognize same-sex relationships and changes of gender. In the twenty-first century, many people live outside the fixed roles of man and woman, and the terms gender fluid, nonbinary and intersex are part of ordinary language. Others still hold to the rigid roles of the past, and the debate continues.

Spotlight: The Androgyne Today

Rad Hourani, unisex collection. Hourani designs clothing for no particular sex. Men and women wear the same garments, cut to the same line. In 2013, he became the first designer to present a unisex haute couture collection in Paris, more than a century after the city's writers and painters first pictured the androgyne.

Image via The Rosenrot, "Defining Androgyny and Elimination of Gender Codes in Fashion" (2019).

In this sense, the Eiffel Tower looked forward. Built in a city absorbed by the union of masculine and feminine, it joined the arch and the obelisk into one figure at the start of a new age of sexual independence, gender expression and individual freedom.

That is why it remains an important architectural moment in Western civilization. The Eiffel Tower still looks modern because the person it represents is still the person of the present: free to combine the masculine and the feminine as they choose, and free to define themselves outside imposed cultural norms.

It still stands for that today.

Postscript: A Note on Method from the Author

There is no record that Gustave Eiffel, Maurice Koechlin or Stephen Sauvestre spoke of the tower in terms of androgyny or gender. Their documented explanations concern engineering, height and appearance.

This essay is a reading of form, made by an artist looking at a structure. Since the late 1960s, beginning with Roland Barthes's essay "The Death of the Author," critics have held that the meaning of a work is not limited to its maker's intentions. Meaning is also produced by the viewer. Art history adopted this view in the 1980s, opening the field to readings its makers did not state, including feminist and queer readings.

The tower's builders did not need to intend androgyny for the tower to express it. They worked in a city preoccupied with the union of masculine and feminine, and the form they built joins the two.

Sources: Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, toureiffel.paris; Swiss National Museum blog, "The Swiss Magician of Iron" (2025); The Architecture Professor, "Early Designs for the 300-m Tower"; Plato, Symposium; Honoré de Balzac, Séraphîta (1834); Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835); Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus (1884); Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (1884); Joséphin Péladan, L'Androgyne (Paris: E. Dentu, 1891); Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886); Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (1967); Odilon Redon, Closed Eyes (1890), Musée d'Orsay; Jean Delville, The School of Plato (1898), Musée d'Orsay; The Rosenrot, "Defining Androgyny and Elimination of Gender Codes in Fashion" (2019).

Behind the Process

These two collages start with images from 1899. Two men in straw boater hats stand on a racecourse lawn, with a woman between them. A grandstand full of spectators sits behind them. It follows the usual format: boy, girl; boy, girl.

Then the woman steps out while the two men stay to meet up with some new friends. In the space between them, men from 2026 appear. One pulls his shirt over his head to wear even less. Another takes a phone call, or is it a mirror selfie? The Blue moon and Jupiter 3 witness it all.

The new seating arrangement: boy, boy; boy, boy.

The result is the same image, queered. Like squared, but queered.

The clothing shows 127 years of change. In 1899, the men are fashionably dressed in high collars, waistcoats, jackets, ties and straw hats. In 2026, the men leisurely don tank tops, shorts and briefs, or nothing above the waist at all. In 1899 they carry canes and pipes. In 2026 they carry phones.

The original images had room for one story. Now they have room for another.

— Behan

Homage to Hartley and His German Lover

In 1914, the American painter Marsden Hartley was living in Berlin. There he loved Karl von Freyburg, a young Prussian lieutenant. In October of that year, in the first months of the First World War, von Freyburg was killed in battle. He was 24.

Hartley responded with Portrait of a German Officer. The painting contains no face and no body. It is built from flags, epaulets, military insignia, letters and numbers. For decades it was described as an abstraction about war.

The painting is a portrait, written in code. "KvF" is von Freyburg's initials. "24" is his age. "4" is his regiment. The Iron Cross is the medal he was awarded after his death. Hartley put the man he loved into the painting in the only form the time allowed: as coded information.

This collage brings the code out. Hartley's composition remains, and in front of it stands Dirk Yager, a German gay adult film star. His head is framed by the painting's central yellow triangle. He wears a black leather harness, shorts and gloves, and the straps over his shoulders follow the lines of a uniform. Beside him, the number 24 is still visible. The painting Hartley built to leave the body out now contains a living, breathing body.

Making this collage further revealed something in Hartley's painting. Beside Yager hangs a form from an officer's uniform: a tassel with a long shaft above a rounded base. The painting is composed as a torso, and this form sits where the groin would be. As a painter, I read it plainly as genitalia. This then is not only a portrait. It is a nude portrait, which makes sense, as Hartley was painting his lover.

I have not seen this formally discussed. That is not surprising. Art history has a long habit of looking away from queer sexual content. A coded language is also meant to be read by very few people: the artist, and those closest to him. Hartley coded his lover's name as initials and his age as a number. He also coded his body.

The two figures, von Freyburg and Yager, are two German men separated by more than a century. During his lifetime, von Freyburg could only be recorded as initials and numbers, while Yager is photographed openly as a gay man by his own choice. The collage places them in the same frame to honor both of their realities.

Layering onto an existing work is not new. In 1919, Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. I also work on a reproduction, in my case a digital one.

This is the method of all of my work: take the subtext, the code, and make it context, make it legible. Hartley named his lover in letters and numbers. This collage brings the idea of him into corporeal form, so that we can see him the way Hartley no doubt saw him when he looked back at this painting. Hartley did not see numbers and initials. He saw his beloved, Karl.

Sources: Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer (1914), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection; Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919).