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.