Frequently, events collide to reveal ready-made, and often hilariously accidental, juxtapositions. Given the bizarre coupling of high-end advertising with the traumatic low-end editorial content that appears daily on page three of The New York Times - it should be fairly simple to appreciate the conceptual possibilities of seemingly arbitrary pairings. These sometimes disturbing, often evocative, formulations recall the ironic contrasts to be found everywhere in our culture. That these inadvertent narratives achieve a conceptual sum greater than the individual parts can be found in Four Queens, in which an old strip of photographic negatives brings together (quite by accident) a meeting of apparent opposites. Held up to the light, the individual images are bound together by an unspoken commonality. A literal reading shows the upper negative savoring an oiled and preening bodybuilder, evidently snapped by a photographer just prior to an official portrait session with Her Majesty Elizabeth II poised against the backdrop of an overdeveloped, Victorian-era neoclassical interior.

Yet the title demands a closer inspection, in part because it appropriates a dated and infinitely mutable code word from the Homosexual lexicon and the frames themselves are re-photographs of well-known images. By bringing together images by the high-strung British snob Cecil Beaton and the American fitness enthusiast George Butler,, the notion of "queens" is taken one step further. While the preferences of the designer of "My Fair Lady" have been widely known for years, his portrait of a head of state helps to unravel the mystery surrounding the remaining two characters in this little drama. The nature of their obsessions, though suspect, cannot be known. Nonetheless their worshipful voyeurism and exhibitionist vanity alludes to the possibility that this is more than a latent relationship.

This evocative and self-reinforcing union of contrasting images is further explored in Geschlechtsübergänge  where two photographs from opposite ends of the twentieth century are seamlessly brought together. Paradoxically, while the piece is almost pretty in appearance, its inherent voyeuristic and objectified approach is the hallmark of clinical, medical, and psycho-sociological research. This piece juxtaposes a 1906 photograph by the pioneering German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld of an effeminate she-man with one of a hulking, naked modern-day he-man lifted from the Internet. As a living specimen, the invert bolsters the doctor's theory of the third sex, a notion that gay people were neither wholly man nor woman, drawn from the ancient Greek creation myth detailed in Plato's Symposium by Aristophanes. This added a degree of historical credibility that is simply hare-brained today. While the third-sexer stands in profile, held motionless for the camera by a steel brace up his spine, the stud confronts the viewer head-on but is trapped inside the sprocketed framework of a filmstrip. Even with its incomprehensible title (drawn from one of Hirschfeld's published works and roughly translated as "On STDs"), it suggests the heavy barrage of 20th century history and plays into the shock of recognition for every gay man aware of his perennial outsider status.

With a nod to Jasper Johns and his punning " Painting with Balls", Geometry with Balls  runs both hot and cold. This self-portrait, created by sitting on a scanner, butts up against its mechanical twin, an arrangement of pencil, compass, and protractor. This geometry set is as large, cold, and logical, as the giant pair of testicles to its right is hairy, steamy, and in your face. The grid structure dividing the piece reduces this superficial self-obsession to something far more ambivalent. Just as a successful artwork used to "have balls", the assumption of being blessed with a set of low hangers is a cross-cultural assurance of masculine superiority. Yet the geometry set becomes the pseudo-eugenics master - measuring, objectifying, and categorizing a body in accordance with a set of predetermined (yet elusive) rules.

The heroically scaled hands and forearms of little dolls thrust up into the air in Ravenous  unite two extreme emotional states. Perhaps the exuberance on display celebrates the thrill of religious-like rapture often felt at communal events, but it also implies the desperate pleading of defeated resignation. But hedonism and capture seem to cancel each other out, or do they?

Troublingly aggressive and confrontational to some, Two Demonstrations  explores two very different types of public display. An all-male orgy captured on film is juxtaposed with a staged political photo-op from the Middle East The viewer is simultaneously cast in the role of passive connoisseur and terrorized object of assault. (Dependent as it is on your own personal world-view, the question of who exactly is doing the terrorizing is left amusingly vague.) The intent is to force the viewers to align themselves with one of the two opposing camps, but they find themselves placed into a paradoxical situation. Some will find one side or the other shocking, perverse, and repugnant - but the alternative choice is perhaps far worse. Closer examination of this closed universe reveals it to be a carefully articulating series of opposites (male and female, nudity and concealment, Western and non-Western, free-flowing private sexual expression and regimented violent public protest, and one assumes self-segregating homosexuals and heterosexuals).

Given the ongoing neo-Cromwellian morality campaigns - accompanied by the Greek chorus of media hand wringing - the propensity for sex panic among conservatives is always hilariously ham-handled. Just as Dr. Henry Frankenstein shrieked It’s Alive  when his attempt at micromanaging a program of biological engineering proved successful, the hyped up emotions of the cartoon character occupying the upper half of this photo assembly result from his having made an unanticipated self-discovery. Realizing, perhaps for the first time, that his lower body seems to have a mind of its own is both startling and hilarious.

Doubling is a psychological state adopted by the traumatized as a means of stepping outside of themselves when faced with a situation in which, under normal circumstances, they would go mad. As a form of managed schizophrenia, it is a technique of self-survival in which a task at hand is viewed as distant and abstracted, and has been found to be common among slaughterhouse workers and concentration camp guards. An inversion has taken place in which individuals become simulacra of themselves. While the doll is a stand-in for something living in Double Doppelganger , the design within this bondage tableau featuring the naked and tensely muscled G. I. Joe finds its double in the mechanical construction of angled compasses and thrusting pencils to his right. He has been reduced to nothing more then a machine. The negative space where his round, firm bum should be is echoed by the arcing ruler at the center of the compass. These basic geometry tools extend the doubling one more generation away from something thinking and breathing by creating a simulacrum of a simulacrum.

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Is Four Triangles - a studio portrait of a cocky naked man on his knees with arms akimbo (made anonymous by a large paper cone over his head) - an unrepentant dunce, a naughty Klansman, or an elaborate formalist gag? While the image forces the viewer to confront an aggressive naked man (albeit one unfamiliar with the inside of a gym) the title, as always, serves an ironic purpose: it demands that the situation be approached in purely formalist terms. Drawing the viewer’s attention away from any potential psychological interpretation of this self-portrait, the title brings to the fore details - a symmetrical arrangement of geometric shapes, in addition to the paper cone, found in the negative spaces between my legs and arms - that render the content inconsequential.

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Double Self-Portrait Measured Twice  at once critiques our unrelenting obsession with age and body image and extends the parameters of a form as traditional and ego-driven as portraiture. With a nod to the implicit homoeroticism of old master "Saint Sebastian" paintings, the crisply recorded body measurements are joined with the (sadly underdeveloped) body parts by a barrage of sneering, accusing arrows. As an additional insinuatingly bitchy put-down, it is paired with a running mathematical breakdown of my age - in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years (plus fragments of a century and millennium).

The unzipped and shackled slave displayed in an ad hoc exhibition of sadomasochistic technique may be a willing performer, but the title Two Triangles  is the star of the show. While the object within this marriage of the horizontal and vertical may be an outré  showoff, the subject is rational and analytical. His ankles restraints - running parallel to the lower frame of reference - provide a base for the triangular negative space between his legs, which is further echoed in the inverted mirror image above. The apex of this inverted triangle points toward the masochist's crotch while it is topped off by a particularly fierce-looking dog collar.

Legal maneuvering in the 1860s led German physicians to invent the word heterosexual in an effort to explain the biological basis of rape, and to denote the psychological pathology of straight male compulsive sexual behavior. At the same time the notion that gay people were members of an actual third sex led to the coining of 'homosexual' as the catch-all term to accommodate a burgeoning awareness of sexual orientation. Yet these early theories received serious international scientific currency and were the basis for many (not unsuccessful) legal/political campaigns, foreshadowing the debate of us versus them  continuing to rage today. While the rapists of a century ago gradually came to be accepted as’ normal’, the others - forever trapped in their limbo world between men and women - remained of interest to pathologists until 1973. When the American Psychiatric Association, prompted by gay activists, decreed homosexuality was no longer to be regarded as a sickness in need of a cure, it was a short honeymoon before gay men were dragged back into the realm of medical research. 

When the famed Kinsey Institute for Sex Research released yet another study during the Reagan years concluding that sexual minorities are no more dysfunctional - no 'less normal' - than members of the approved orientation, they lost their government funding. Their conclusions were unacceptable in a landscape tainted by Christian fundamentalism. The clinical voyeurism of Lab Rats  speaks to the issue of people dehumanized and objectified in the interests of scientific progress. In this juxtaposition of sex and science, a trio of surgeons in gowns and masks in a sterile operating theater is paired with an image of a rather mundane non-procreative sex act. In a starlit high-contrast black and white photostat the protected and sterilized doctors are contrasted with the naked bodies and luridly tinted photograph of the blowjob below.

An on-going project has been to photograph every inch of the surface of my body. Forced to scrutinize naked expanses of flesh one is more likely to approach the concept of humanness - exposing all the accompanying vulnerability and decay, as well as the strength and vulgarity we all possess - in a new way. In this potpourri of fragments, they are abstracted by their loss of context and assume metaphorical implications greater than their original simplicity and commonality. The photographic contact prints of my hands and feet in Untitled Self-Portrait #45 , like the hand-prints so often employed by our Neolithic ancestors, are the simplest means available with which to record one’s fragile existence. With their heavy frames, arranging the prints into a simple grid imbues the structure with a religiosity that would be lacking otherwise. But the subject of this little icon's design is cast into doubt, and becomes far less Christ-like with the realization that perhaps this creature is not fully human, as it appears to have claws.

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Who's Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue?   Tossing out mostly everything except the rhetorical title from that old chestnut by Barnett Newman, this three-panel work was made at the height of the AIDS epidemic. At a time when the arts were being decimated and talk of quarantine was in the air, it is an assault on the liberal pieties of those who felt that wearing the ubiquitous red ribbon was equal to taking a political stand. Marrying the culture's obsession with sex and violence, the piece re-sexualized a sexually transmitted disease that was too easily sentimentalized. The upper half of each panel is a video’s-eye view of concentration camps matched up with shots covered with colored cellophane of two men engaged in the good old bouncy-bouncy. Although the scenario pictured here is an imaginary one, it reflects on our collective history, and in spite of external pressures that often descend into brutality, we are able to maintain a level of comradeship - no matter how fleeting it may be. On a more formal level, the serial imagery and disruptive juxtapositions - the merging of the hot and sweaty with the cold and clinical -- reappear in my work time and time again.

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As an artist, I have been involved with projects in various media in which language and number systems become charged metaphors. Throughout history, oppressors have used numbers to dehumanize people , and nowhere was this more deliberately practiced than during the Holocaust. The Circumstances Surrounding the Untimely Death of Herr L.O. found as its genesis a paragraph in an old issue of The New York Review of Books. In concise language, it detailed the tragedy of one man - Leopold Obermayer -- a Swiss Jewish gay man living in Germany at the beginning of the Third Reich.

The text reads:

"In October 1934, the Wurzburg wine merchant Leopold Obermayer, a practicing Jew and a Swiss citizen, complained to the police that his mail was being opened. He was taken into custody and, when it was discovered that he was a homosexual, subjected to an endless series of interrogations and beatings and incarcerations. Despite his courageous protests and petitions, the Swiss government found it inexpedient to intervene on his behalf. He was given a secret trial, sentenced to life imprisonment, and died in Mauthausen in 1943."

Appropriating and enlarging this text to blunt two-inch tall sans serif letters, the original work is reproduced on nine small heavy paper panels in brownish-gray oil paint. Evoking the clinical bureaucratic capacity of governments to reduce human beings to catalogued statistics, the letters are gradually replaced with numbers following a logical system (A=I, B=2, C=3, D=4, etc.) until by the last panel all that remains is a sheet of solid numbers. Overlaying the text on each panel are three narrow evenly spaced black bars.

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Olympia  is a reference to Edouard Manet's 1863 painting of the same name. And, yes it is photo pixelated to death, the cliché of modern censorship; a technique used both against and by gay culture for a variety of reasons. When Manet's work was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1865, it caused a furor with its frank depiction of a contemporary, non-idealized, woman, actually a courtesan. While it drew upon iconographic references going back to Titian and others, Manet's depiction of the nude was outside of the then-popular classical tradition. Because of the reactions it drew, the painting was moved higher on the wall out of reach. Nowadays, if a more frank work of art is illustrated, the more timid in the media [or perhaps the Mayor of New York] will pixelate the offending body parts. Indeed gay artists and galleries afraid of offending the non-gay audience will do the same. And even more common in commercial uses, especially on the world wide web, gay porn distributors will pixelate the good stuff so you need to 'pay to play'. Bruce's artwork is a play on all these things. [ - Gay Art Gallery]

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