Is there still a perception that sex with another man is a smoldering gun or have we grown beyond that? Today is world AIDS Days and being a gay man who has lived and loved his entire adult live throughout the epidemic, it has had the greatest impact on my sexual life. I first came out and began exploring my sexuality before anyone ever heard the words HIV or AIDS. We thought living in a rural area like Montana we were pretty much immune from it hitting us here and that we were safe. But looking back over the years and seeing that most of the members of the community I first grew up in, were lost somehow during the course of it’s rampage. People began to just disappear, into a seemingly shameful, unspoken oblivion, from which they never returned, no information or details available. I remember how sex suddenly become a danger zone that no one was talking about and something everyone just tip-toed around. Much of the community was still having sex, yet denying there was much danger in it. Heck, even the government wasn´t acknowledging that it was a national crisis until it got completely out of control. The Regan Administration never uttered a word for months and months even with the fact that thousands of people were dying in the major metropolitan areas like New York or San Francisco. It was not until Clinton’s Administration in the 90’s when a young kid named Ryan White who had been infected by a blood transfusion went to the White House and the then passed the Ryan White Act, that it became a clear message that it was not just a gay virus and awareness and prevention needed to be supported. I remember it was a very bitter time in our community and we became consumed with remorse and resentment.
Would we have heeded the warnings earlier if we had known? Would it have changed our behaviors? It’s still hard to tell, we as a culture had just gained our sexual liberation. With all the awareness today do people still heed the warnings? I am still not sure anymore. It almost feels like the pervasive attitude, especially since the anti-viral drugs have came out to make the virus more manageable, that it doesn’t seem to still be a threat. It seems the rates of infection are still rising.
I became an advocate early on and spent a great part of my life involved in the political shadow of its wake. While I was a student at the University, I produced and directed a film for the University that became a campaign across campus. I became a member of the Governor’s Advisory team, and a member of all the regional, state and community based groups and organizations to promote its awareness and several years ago was given a Governor’s Award in recognition for the work I had given over the years. In the beginning I became consumed by my efforts and in the end it consumed me and I was bitten by the community accusing me of conflict of interest by having my hand in too many pieces of the pie. And eventually I was back stabbed and ridiculed by the very community I was trying to support. For my own sanity, I had to eventually walk away to regain my life, and now use my energy to reach out to those most in need or struggling. Throughout my life AIDS has been a painful road to wander as a gay man. There is still a lot of fear, doubt and anxiety that surrounds it. After all these years it still remains hidden and unmentionable, at least in Montana. Though the leaders of the past who remember the struggle are fading, who is present to still sound the alarm? It remains one of the areas that still divides our community and I know the organization who receives the funding to support the community as leaders and who should be the ones looked to and trusted have been the ones through gossip and the release of supposedly confidential information to hurt the community the most, especially those infected. There is no longer a trust or respect as dignity has been compromised and a devastating shock wave has rippled through our small peaceful community, creating more internalized discrimination and fear than education and or awareness. People are even more afraid then every to be tested and a fear we all felt in the beginning still exists, maybe even more so, 20 years later.
I am an artist and I still support my community however I can but it is all still a painful reminder that haunts the very core of my existence.
I saw a video on Facebook that actually moved me and got me thinking about this whole concept of gay marriage. I have been very mixed on the subject, not sure where I stand on either side of the debate. I sense my own security in my own relationship seems to be enough to bind us. Everyone around us on both sides of our families acknowledge and respect our relationship and know what our ultimate desires are if something happens to the other. Being gay and growing up in Montana I had never even considered the possibility of being able to marry someone of my same sex. Working for UPS, they have a strong policy supporting same sex partnerships, and though I only work part time in the evenings for the company they acknowledge Glenn as my partner and give him full benefits along with me. Of course we have had to prove our relationship and actually establish we were in a partnership. But over the years as we have attended the weddings of all our straight friends our age, joining in union, and photographing the marriage of all my nieces, and then to see my father at one of the happiest moments I have seen him in decades remarry after my mother’s death, there is a tug in my heart to unite with a man I have adored for so much of my adult life now that I can’t imagine a life without him. We committed in our early thirty something’s to watch each other grow old and that we have done. This video captures all the stages of our relationships, with warmth and tenderness and told the story of my own life. It reminded me of where I have been and I must say brought a tear to my eye to see the reflection of my life and know in the end I have been loved.
As much as I tried yesterday I could not find a half hour of time to even get on my computer. It was Montana State vs Montana Grizzlies, Brawl Of The Wild Game at Montana State in Bozeman. The biggest game of the season, the Grizzles being the underdog ranked #7 in the nation against the #1 FCS team. Needless to say it was an upset and the Griz beat the Bobcats 36-10. Since the game was in Bozeman, Glenn planned a party in the studio to watch it on television. So my day began with a breakdown of all my lighting equipment and hauling to the basement.
I am writing this morning from a remote cabin at 57,000 on top of a mountain in Northern Idaho. Glenn had been planning this weekend for months and I said once I got the website up I would go. We took the weekend off and come over to visit our friends Forrest and Beth and their black lab Sprocket in a small mining town called Mullan, just over the mountains and the Montana-Idaho border. We then proceeded to a cabin in the mountains miles above Wallace. Their place is very rustic and I was not sure that we would even make it to the destination. The higher we went the deeper the snow got until we reached the cabin and the snow level was about a foot deep. The cabin, more a pole lodge, so far is only covered by exterior sheeting and was very raw within. It has a little wood stove in the center of the room that we instantly fired up and within a half hour could no longer see our breaths. I put a pot on the stove and made a hearty chicken stew with carrots, potatoes, and mushrooms flavored with tarragon, a pinch of basil, and rosemary. It turned out fantastic for my first time of cooking an old fashioned wood stove.
We ate, drank, and chatted and watched the world around us envelop into a secluded darkness and the one gas lantern they had seem to fail us. Then we all climbed to a loft to sleep. There was a draft of snow and ice particles blowing through the cracks, which Forrest tired to seal before we went to bed. I drifted in and out of consciousness as Forrest got up throughout the night to feed the fire. At one point that fire had gone out and I hunkered deeper into my bed, snuggling closer to Glenn for warmth as a draft that felt good when I first went to bed now chilled the core of my body. In the wilderness the night seems eternal as I kept waking up looking for some signs of daylight. The morning came early gradually illuminating the outline of the open rafters barley above my head.
I was the first one up because I wanted to watch how the light began to fill the valleys far below us. As rustic as it all seemed it really awoke a side of myself I have completely forgotten. It reminded me of my youth and growing up on the ranch. It feels like the ongoing theme of this week has been a return to simplicity and a greater connection to my natural heritage. Although the website is a culmination of my existence, it is my connection to the future as I move into the future. Today I am stripped on all the essentials of a modern life, no running water, no electricity, dependent on the life my computer laptop battery, now running in the red. Here we are against our own elements. There is something poetic about the sound of the snow smattering against the side of the building, of not working from the moment I rise to well after midnight each night. We must exist only within the expanse of the natural day.
Yesterday I began a discussion about analyzing light in a photograph to use it to your advantage. The discussion began with my looking at a book of rare vintage nudes from the 60’s. And there was a prime example of what I wanted to talk about in one of the images but I can find a decent enough image of it online to show my examples so I am going to take this image of Travis. It’s harder to do on an image that I already know and have created. To me my own lighting techniques are so simplistic that they are hard to describe but here goes. My concept for the image was to show a gritty dirty mechanic sort of guy who had been working in a shop possibly most of his life. Growing up in small towns in Montana there are guys I know well and in high school I was particularly drawn to one kid who really exited me. He was a smart kid from a poorer family and work to help supplement and support his family. I watched him struggle most of the time and often worked instead of having fun with some of the rest of us his own age. He had an alliance to duty and I felt he often felt trapped in that world longing to be out from under its burden. He always seemed to live in a very fractured world. Yet there was something sexy and sensual in his honesty and how humble his work in the garage became. Every time I would visit he would just dirty in his coveralls, grime smeared across his face. The smell of the grease and mechanic dirt somehow become intoxicating to me and I found a strong desire to somehow be closer to him and somehow ease his fractured world.
I used Travis as me subject for this study because he so much reminded me of the person I used to know. So now that you know the history of the image I want you to begin looking that the image and analyze to see if I have indeed captured the properties of my intent tough the use of light. Typically I do this with images I don’t know the story behind and try to discover the artist’s connection to the subject though their use of light and exposure. The first thing I look at is the overall feel of the image. What does it stir or evoke within myself? There is a distance yet longing with in his eyes and a power and a strength in his hands that embrace the chain the bind him around his neck with a sort of comfort while he stands back, distant, yet there is a longing in his bloodshot eyes to connect to something different. Once you have established the over all mood, you must search the image for what supports that feeling. How does the light impact the psychology of the image? How many lights did the photographer use and where were they placed. The first place to begin to look for how a photographer uses light is to look at the catch light in the subject’s eyes. If you can zoom in close it will give you a lot of detail what the shape of the light was and where it was placed. On Travis you will see I used two lights in the front one a very long narrow light with a soft filter almost straight out in front, slightly to the right. You will also see just a faint small secondary light to the left that fills in the shadows on the left side of his face. This is what captures the longing in his eyes. I then used two very strong lights one to the left, not very high to sculpt the right side and a secondary light with little filter over his left shoulder. These are slightly behind him because I wanted there to be shadows on his face that represented and fractured light coming from different angels across his face, enhancing him being pulled in different directions accentuation his own fractured world. To discover the placement of these lights you look at where the highlights hit and the shadows fall. You see dappled patches of highlights across his face that mirrors the dappled grime on his face. Look at how the shadows fall on the veins of his hands and try to visualize where the light would need to be outside of the image to create such an effect. Then the image is slightly underexposed to give it a pervasive darkness that was really the mood I remember about this kid.
