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).
