Gilbert is heavy on my mind again today. I have not connected to his memory in quite some time, but this project seems to be stirring lots of old thoughts and memories. Gilbert was probably one of the kindest and genuinely generous person I have ever known and was filled with so much passion it become infectious to all those around him. He was forward and blunt, some times to the point that he would just blurt things out almost to shock you. He was passionate about everything he approached or worked on. He had a fascination with movies and this is how we become life long friends and we had a weekly ritual of Saturday afternoons at the cinema. When I returned to Montana I began to hang out with Gilbert a lot. So much in fact I eventually become his personal assistant and organized all of his record keeping on the computer and brought him into the modern era of electronics. We had elaborate parties and fund raisers at his Victorian Mansion. Anytime some sort of celebrity was in town, Gilbert hosted some sort of event in their honor. I was one of the organizers for a festival in Missoula called The Five River’s Festival of Film. A brilliant concept started by a woman named Cinda Holt who had worked with Robert Redford on the Sundance Project. We would screen a series of films and then have the artists and behind-the-scenes craftsmen come and talk about their work and their process of art. Cinematographers, art directors, directors, costumers, writers, and such. The project didn’t last long but was a huge success while it did. Gilbert was an avid supporter on anything having to do with film and one of the reigning moments of his life was when he got to host the actress Janet Leigh at his house for dinner. He was completely in heaven.

The side of Gilbert not many saw was that he was a very reserved and private person and preferred dwelling in solitude. Very few people were actually allowed into his inner world. Sometimes we would plan big elaborate events and he would completely disappear. He would love to attach him self to just one person and pull them off to some remote part of the garden or house and just spend the entire time with them leaving me to handle the details of everything else. Gilbert and I instantly hit it off and were somehow bound because we were both gay. Though we were from different generations, we found a kinship and trust within each other that I have never felt with any other. Our relationship remained purely professional. We idealized and respected each other and learned and grew so much from the others life experience. Gilbert’s deepest fears and innermost anxiety surrounded issues of being a homosexual, which he ever really came to terms with. It was something he struggled with all of his life and he was haunted by to his last breath. He lived vicariously through me and I sensed envied the open and honest way I lived my life. You see Gilbert didn’t think anyone could see him as gay, although it was quite obvious to anyone who encountered him. Then one day, when one of his long time women friends come to the house and asked him if he was gay. He was aghast with indignity that someone would even think so and went off, shutting himself in the house and ranting for weeks about the incident. Gilbert had a terrible temper and could become obstinate if things would not go to his liking and would become obsessive on the issue allowing it to consume him. When he would get in one of these moods I would come to work, see the fit he was in and walk back out the door telling him: “I would not work with him he until he get over it and to call me when it had passed.” I always got a call a couple of hours later asking me to come back to work. But for the most part I think Gilbert was a lonely man. He was a man who had the resources to do or obtain anything in the world and yet he was trapped in an inner struggle of obsessive collective behavior, to surround himself creating a mask to cover his insecurities. I know he loved me and nurtured me as an artist. He was fascinated by my images, especially the nudes, and I would tribute new pieces to him. I would not be here today if it were not for Gilbert. He has taught me so much about myself because, though his internalized homophobia, I found strength within myself. It made me face my own fears and anxieties allowing me to step outside myself, recognize my own connection to it, and explore these themes though my on images. Gilbert I forget how much you haunt me. Thanks for giving me such a precious gift of art.

Thinking of Gilbert I am reminded of a musical production number from the Broadway Production of The Boy From Oz where High Jackman sings: “WHEN EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN”.

I woke up in a bit of a panic this morning. This time of year tends to create a lot of anxiety in me as I struggle with personal issues. It’s that time of the year when finances get tight as things slow down and we are still shut indoors due to yet another day of snow. Four years ago, this time of year, I was diagnosed with Lymphoma and had to spend a summer in chemotherapy. So every year, about this time, a remembrance of that fear begins to grip me and I am overwhelmed by my fear of some unforeseen impending doom as I am reminded of my mortality. Often life feels like it is too much of a struggle. I have always marveled at why it has to be so complicated. When I was younger I tried to live a simpler life; a life without possessions. Becoming a wandering vagabond of sorts, never quite settling into one particular thing. Of course working in theatre you are constantly in motion. But life was a struggle then too. Years later: now I have a studio, equipment, and talent and it still all feels like a struggle. Is life in general a struggle for everyone? Is it just the nature of our existence? I had a dear friend named Gilbert, who was my friend, mentor, and a patron of me as an emerging artist. In fact I owe my life of photography to him. Some time earlier, I had reached a point where I was at wits end with my life and lost direction. (Which seems to happen to me frequently.) I was at a crossroads; I knew I wanted to settle back in Montana and I came to stay with my friend Gilbert. I had met Gilbert many years earlier when I was a young student at the University of Montana and had rented the guesthouse in the back of his estate. Gilbert and I had so much in common, being gay, a passion for the arts, a love of gardening, and a mutual fascination with movies. He owned a big Victorian House and was obsessively consumed with collecting art, paintings, drawings, sculpture, and movie memorabilia. Come to think of it, there wasn’t much Gilbert didn’t collect. Gilbert was a man of great resources; his family had invested in real estate and he inherited many rental properties; but his real love for movies got him into the video rental market during its peak. Gilbert was not an artist but had a deep fascination with it. So when I returned home from one of my adventures I visited or stayed with Gilbert and would help him in his gardens, organize and catalog his massive collections, or just spend a Saturday afternoon at the movies. At one particular crossroad I recognized my intense passion toward photography but didn’t really think I had neither the talent nor resources to become a photographer. But Gilbert somehow saw this within me and helped me realize it within myself. He helped me through photography school and helped me obtain equipment in exchange for helping him with all his “little projects”. Gilbert did nothing little. He was generous and extremely active in all the various factions of his life giving to and cultivating the arts for Western Montana. I will talk about his amazing influence on me in more detail throughout this project because there is so much I have learned from him and need to share. But the point that I was really trying to make is that even a man who has all these resources, talents, friends, spent his entire life in struggle. One fall when he announced his intentions of retirement was shortly thereafter diagnosed with a brain tumor and was gone by early summer. I was there and nurtured him to the end and now it has been eight years since his passing. It took me two years to clean out and find homes for all of those collections and in the end the bulk of his multi-million dollar estate was divided amongst four art’s organizations within our region. I now see I am so much like Gilbert. I still don’t always recognize the talents within myself but help to cultivate others. Perhaps, at this moment, I am meant to struggle so desperately. Perhaps these struggles become the markers in our journeys. I am beginning to see my images through the eyes of others and am seeing remarkable things emerge that I have only felt. This is the legacy we leave behind; because in the end nobody recognizes the struggle, they only see the beauty that remains.

I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the world and all the extraordinary connections I am making now on Facebook in regards to this project. I now feel a surge of creative excitement growing within my heart and soul. I don’t want to sleep, eat or move away from my computer. I only wish there were more time in my day to fit more in. I am remembering things long lost or forgotten that I want to revisit, so many films, so many books, so may images. Creative passion is coursing through my veins as excitement grows within me. I am finding a peaceful calm I have never known before. Where my identity as a gay man can finally be honored and is allowed to emerge from me as a viable expression from my art. It seems nothing else exists but art and creation. I have finally found a place I belong. Though I dwell in a remote part of the world and the culture within my own community does not honor or recognize my talents I reach out to so many magnificent friends across the globe. It seems my struggle is universal and recognizable to everyone. Yesterday I received about 200 emails and it seems to keep growing and moving. The vision is extraordinary, beyond myself. So many people share their warmth and brilliance, a thank you to all, I am moved beyond what words can express.

My connection to the Minotaur is bringing me back to a time in my life I had forgotten and a connection to a man I was absolutely obsessed with in my youth: Jean Genet. I put on a collection of Edith Piaf songs in the studio this morning and hear that melancholic voice of France ringing within its walls. When I was a student in theatre back in my twenties I fell in love with the French playwright Jean Genet. A man born of a prostitute in poverty; spent his youth in a dark world of seduction, thievery, eventually ending up in prison. Not only did he write plays, but also wrote some of the darkest, most poetic novels ever written. The first one I was drawn to was Querelle de Brest. About a sailor caught in a web of lust, homosexual seduction and murder. The novel was written in 1947 and was originally banned in the USA. In 1982 Rainer Werner Fassbinder made it into a film just titled Querelle with an all-star international cast and with the American actor Brad Davis playing the role of the sailor Querelle. This is the moodiest darkest, most theatrically cinematic film I think I have ever seen and I think is a fairly good adaptation of the original narrative style of the novel. Back when I was a student at the University of Montana I was one of the arts coordinator for the campus. I brought this film to the campus as part of my film series and it was one of the most attended events of season.

To me Genet represents the darker side of seduction within myself. He holds a mirror up to the world and says dare to look into your darkest secrets and desires. Being a gay man in the early eighties the world definitely seemed dark mysterious and seductive. It was like we had no place to call our own and therefore lurked on the edge of shadows. Desire became a hypnotic aphrodisiac. Encounters were inevitably with strangers in dark secret places, without the possibility of a real connection or relationship. Genet knew this better than anyone and it was like reading the stories of my life through his works. I had forgotten the power Genet had on me and how it shaped the way I saw the world. In returning to this master yesterday I had an epiphany that THIS IS the core of where all my art currently springs. In so many ways I am on a quest to return to that dark world I once cherished. I feel very dissatisfied in my current world and the way our openness has commercialize being gay. I long for those moments when dark seduction ruled my desire. When everything seemed dimly lit by candlelight; and a connection to flesh, taste, and sweat was intoxicating. It seems the new culture, though we now have the freedom to speak of it openly, is drawn to become a clone of its self and we are all losing any sense of personal identity. Men now meet on electronic devises and communicate with such a minimalist impression; text rules supreme. The art of seduction is lost as the world evolves toward self-fulfilling sexual gratification without personal connection and porn rules the Internet. I long for the moment when passion overwhelmed all of our senses and we become aware of our total self through such experience. It was shared and sacred. We could dwell in an extraordinary moment that could linger in our thoughts for an eternity, and then slip away as strangers into the foreboding darkness. To me this is the crux of finding myself as an artist and revealing to the world my longing for that lost passion. Genet you have touched me at my very soul and I have never recovered and
I am sorry I have forgotten you.

I did actually meet Jean Genet for a brief moment near the eve of his death. I was in Paris during a cold winter break while I was student. I was in love with the French absurdest and existentialist theater movement and went on a pilgrimage in search of its origins, which of course was Paris. I wandered into the Le Comédie-Française one winter afternoon to view a rehearsal for a production of one of Genet’s plays, I believe “The Screens.” I turned around to see this man sitting there and gazed upon the darkness of this figure seated in the back, perhaps it was only his ghost, as I was being evicted from the theater for being where I wasn’t supposed to be. A few nights later he died. I have been touched by your presence and am eternally blessed.

“Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.”
— Jean Genet (The Thief’s Journal)

Yesterday I somehow tapped into a European homoerotic Facebook page that suddenly sent my computer into hyper drive as my Facebook account was suddenly being bombarded with male erotic art from France, Italy, and the UK. The page is listed under “DIARY OF A MINOTOUR” and seems to originate out of Italy. I am not exactly sure what the page is actually about but there are lots of gay men contributing lots of images, constantly. In some ways it feel like I have hit the jackpot on a slot machine as my mail keeps dinging with something new about every 5 minutes. The page is a bit confusing and perplexing because there is no description of purpose or intent and much of the images contributed are not original art. Nobody seems to be tagging info to these images like who the artist is or where the image comes from. The pervasive theme seems to be male erotic without going or becoming pornographic. Some of the images I recognized from other homoerotic artists I have studied in the past and a few are from movies, or posters. But overall I have to say it has been one of the most exciting adventures I have been on in a long time. I feel like Alice who has just crossed over into a strange new Wonderland in a whole new world of exploration. Most of it’s foreign produced making it exciting to see something beyond norm of what I have been seeing here in the USA. Much of it is aligned with my own style and the way I see and view my art, very unconventional and poetic. There are so many stimulating images on this site that I feel an erotic surge touching something deep within myself that I have not felt in many years. There is a freshness and a boldness to so many of the images that is startling and challenging my way of examining homoerotic art. It is beginning to make me see my own art from a different perspective and helping me see the honesty and truth within my own work. It’s almost like watching a really interesting foreign film where you don’t need the subtitles, which I love anyway, so I am totally sucked in. Some of it feels so surreal that it begins to feel like an out of body experience, my brain is on overload trying to soak it all in and absorb what I can. It feels like a very fast flicker across my subconscious psyche. I am actually engaging in conversations, via chat, with so many of the contributors and artists. Though many of them are French and Italian and do not communicate in English I have enough background in the languages to read and understand what they are writing. The only drawback is it’s all becoming so overwhelming that I have actually had to shut down my Facebook account and mail in order to get work done and remain focused. My friend Giorgio keeps telling me that we, as artists, must network and make the connections in order for our works to be seen. I have been working hard this past month to make that happen. But there is a point where the networking and connections begin to interfere with the actual creation of art. There is a fine balance I am currently trying to maintain. Giorgio you are a genius when it comes to maintaining this and thanks for all your advice and support. Every time we chat you are working in the studio and seem so connected to your process. I look to you with admiration and inspiration. Perhaps it takes a long time to cultivate these connections and resources. I am so new to it all, because I have remained hidden for so long, that I am currently overwhelmed by how massive these potential connections can become. I feel like I want or need to connect to everyone at once. Ideally I would like to have a show with some of my images in it somewhere and think this is the best possible way to get my art out there. But it is like suddenly the world has connected to me and I fear losing myself within my own labyrinth of Internet buzz. It fascinates, captivates and scares me all at the same time, I must strive to find the balance and remain true to myself.