Odalisque

artwork, NSFW

In the category of Things Found While Looking For Other Things, while searching through my archives for photos of Lake Superior from when I lived in the Twin Cities, I ran across some older homoerotic photography and artwork which I had made during that era.

This image is a Photoshop collage of several photos, originally made by Paul Nixdorf, that I collaged into a Cubist photographic version of the classic odalisque theme in European erotic portrait paintings. The Eduard Manet painting “Odalisque,” erotic and provocative in its time, was the direct inspiration for this artwork.

I worked with Paul Nixdorf for a few years in his studio at that time in downtown Minneapolis. We did collaborations where I made Photoshop art from his studio nude photo sessions. We also set up and photographed sessions together. We put on two gallery shows in a few years of our work in his studio and the gallery space next to it, including a show titled “Adam,” which was our homoerotic photography and artwork.

Paul was a gay man of the generation a decade or so older than mine, who like many others lived a life that followed a closeted narrative till late in life. Like many others—this is common story in the gay male community prior to Stonewall and the modern LGBTQA rights movement—of marrying a woman, having children with her, raising them, then later in life coming out as gay, having an amicable divorce, staying friends with children and ex-wife and even still doing holiday dinners together, and now leading an out gay life among out gay men, and feeling for the first time happy to be living as his true, honest self. After his divorce, Paul moved to Minneapolis and had a successful as photographer in the community. We met through artwork before working together as queer photographers in collaboration. We did work together for a handful of years. I enjoyed every hour we worked together.

Odalisque is an experiment in Cubist photography. The camera was on a tripod, so the setting stayed still in the frame, only the model moved, and changed position. This is one of a handful of nude men who modeled for Paul at that time. I layered the various pose in Photoshop to assemble this Cubist collage.

This was an early experiment for me in this kind of homoerotic art-making. I am grateful for my time working with Paul because we were both coming out as queer artists, and queer photographers making erotic artwork, albeit we were more than a decade separated in age. This was a fertile period for me, artistically, especially as a photographer, and opened the door to exploring make nude photography on an ever-increasing frequency in my time since.

These were my first baby steps towards being an openly queer artist creating nude male photography, putting sexuality and sex into my artwork. Look where I am now, here, with this newsletter, some 20 years later, having fully embraced making queer erotic art, drawing men having sex, masturbating, writing a book on masturbation, writing erotica that is getting published regularly, only a few stories short of having a full story collection of homoerotic fiction.

I celebrate my days in Minneapolis as the time I embraced my desire to make homoerotic art, became brave enough finally to go public with in print and in gallery shows, to pursue nude photo work ever since.

Finding these older artworks and photos was a pleasure, this week. And I think they have held up, artistically, as well.

•