Midway places gay men at the State Fair of Texas, held each fall at Fair Park in Dallas. The scene brings together the parts of the fair that people come back for every year: fast cars on display, fried foods of all kinds, multi-ticket carnival games, and an electric crowd moving between it all. The men here are that crowd, out and proud.
The work responds to Paul Cadmus's celebratory paintings The Fleet's In! (1934) and Coney Island (1934) and takes from them the structure of dense crowd scenes. Cadmus arranged his figures in a shallow horizontal row, leaning on one another. The Fleet's In!, which shows sailors on shore leave, was removed from its 1934 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery after the Navy objected.
The diorama follows that horizontal arrangement. A pink convertible and a beach buggy anchor the two ends. Between them are a game booth, a cotton candy stand, a food counter and the sideshow: a Ken sealed in his box, with a barker in a robe standing beside him. At the center, a limp figure is lifted by his friends, and paired men occupy the edges. Cadmus included women as a cover for the closeness of the men. In the diorama, the men's closeness is no longer obscured and becomes the subject itself.
Midway: Interactive sculpture with Mattel and other 12-inch fashion dolls, playsets, and accessories. The figures are movable, and the scene can be changed.
— Behan