Hiding in plain sight
Neel Bate stumbled across his first copy of
Bachelor magazine at a Hollywood Boulevard drugstore. It was March 1937, and Bate a Seattle transplant in his early twenties who worked as an erotic artist had just come into his sexuality. But he never saw stories about people like him on major newsstands.
Decades later, Bate wrote about his chance encounter with the inaugural issue of the magazine. “I picked up a copy and thumbed my way into it, barely believing my eyes,” he wrote, in the magazine
In Touch for Men.
Bachelor featured celebrities like Marlene Dietrich and Paulette Goddard, beloved in the queer community, plus men who Bate said were his idols: Buster Crabbe, Cary Grant, and Tyrone Power. Bate was particularly taken by one swimming-pool photo of Errol Flynn, who flashed what Bate called an “outrageously teasing smile” at the camera. On that day, Bate later wrote, “there were five or six of ‘us’ all looking at
Brooklyn Artist Louis Fratino Is Depicting Gay Male Sex and Intimacy in the More Chill Gen Z Era of PrEP
Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
To someone (like this writer) with only a middling knowledge of art, it’s hard not to immediately think “gay Picasso” upon first seeing the paintings of Louis Fratino, 27, the Brooklyn-based painter who’s gotten a lot of attention from the art world in recent years and just finished up his second solo show,
Morning, at New York City’s Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery. Fratino’s images of hunky, furry, young gay men having sex or lying around, alone or together, are decidedly non-naturalistic, boasting a lot of the Picassoesque features of modernism, such as body parts painted out of proportion or perspective, or broken up into cubistic components. The work also evokes Picasso contemporaries Marsden Hartley and Marc Chagall, as well as Fratino’s own well-known peers including Dana Schutz and Nicole Eisenman, artists whose work blends