Pic of the Day

Moment of Zen: Waterfalls

Here’s a bonus one since tomorrow is the beginning of Pride Month. 🏳️‍🌈

Pic of the Day

Friday Is Upon Us

It’s Friday at last, and I think we’ve earned it. Being at work yesterday felt never-ending, like the hours were stretching themselves out just to test my patience. But the weekend is finally in sight.

I’ve really enjoyed my vacation time over the past two weeks—especially Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week, which were absolutely beautiful sunny days. Even though Saturday is supposed to bring rain, I’m still looking forward to the chance to be lazy, catch up on some reading, maybe watch a movie—or take some time appreciating the quiet rhythm of my own thoughts… and touch, depending on what kind of movie I end up choosing.

There’s a certain heaviness in knowing it’s coming to an end. The slower mornings, the freedom to do things on my own time, the luxury of not living by an alarm clock—it’s hard to let that go. Isabella even let me sleep until after 5 a.m. a few mornings before demanding I get up and feed her, which felt like a rare and precious gift.

But there’s something to look forward to: Sunday marks the beginning of Pride Month. Even if it’s just a quiet acknowledgment this weekend, there’s comfort in knowing that June brings with it a celebration of identity, resilience, and community. A new month, a new beginning, and a reminder of joy—no matter the weather.

I hope you all have a great weekend!

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Disappointed

When I went for my workout yesterday, I found out that my trainer, who I was really enjoying working with (and not just because he was cute), got a promotion and will be the assistant manager and no longer be able to train. He said he'd always be there to answer questions, but he couldn't do the actually training anymore. Friday will likely be my last day training with him. I don't know if they will get another trainer anytime soon, but I hope if they do, he's just as good. I am happy for his promotion, I just hate that he can't train me anymore.

I'm also a bit disappointed because I have to go to work today. I still have Friday off to use up the last of my vacation, but I have to go in today. I'll be the only one there, so it won't be bad. This time of year, we are lucky if one person comes into the museum. Usually if someone comes in, they are either taking a shortcut to the library or on an admissions tour.

Anyway, here is your Isabella pic of the week. The first was taken from outside, the other obviously from inside. She becomes obsessed this time of year with the robins. She doesn't care anything about any other birds or wildlife, just the robins, which is what she was looking at through the window.

Pic of the Day

Brawn, Leather, and Liberation

Untitled, by Tom of Finland

In the pantheon of queer visual culture, few images are as iconic—or as unapologetically homoerotic—as the bulging, leather-clad figures drawn by Tom of Finland. With their impossibly broad shoulders, exaggerated musculature, and conspicuous bulges, these hypermasculine men were more than just fantasy: they were acts of artistic rebellion, crafted at a time when queer desire had to be hidden in the shadows. But Tom of Finland (born Touko Laaksonen) was not alone in reshaping how gay masculinity was imagined and celebrated in visual art. He belonged to a wider aesthetic tradition that blurred the lines between eroticism, protest, and artistic expression.

Untitled, by Tom of Finland

Tom of Finland began publishing his drawings in the 1950s, first in American beefcake magazines under pseudonyms before gaining cult status within underground gay circles. His men were not just naked—they were powerfully naked. Whether sailors, bikers, cowboys, or police officers, these figures projected confidence, dominance, and sexual agency. This was a deliberate rejection of earlier depictions of gay men in visual media, which often painted them as effeminate, sickly, or criminal.

Untitled, by Tom of Finland

Rather than conform to heteronormative expectations, Tom exaggerated the masculine archetype to subvert it. Muscles were drawn just shy of absurdity. Genitalia, while rarely fully exposed in early works due to censorship, were always implied to be monumental. Clothing—tight jeans, uniforms, leather—clung to bodies with sculptural precision. In this world, queerness was not weak or shameful, but fiercely virile.

Rainbow Falls, by George Quaintance

Tom of Finland was not the first to explore the muscular male form as an object of desire, though he certainly popularized it within queer culture. Earlier artists such as George Quaintance—whose idyllic, soft-lit scenes of sun-kissed ranch hands and swimmers in the 1940s and '50s also blended classical idealism with homoerotic themes—helped lay the groundwork. Quaintance's men were more polished and posed, evoking Greco-Roman statuary, but they shared with Tom a fascination with male beauty and strength.

Havasu Creek, George Quaintance

Morning in the Desert, George Quaintance

Others in this lineage include Etienne (Dom Orejudos), known for his bondage-tinged illustrations, and more contemporary artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photographic studies of the male body in the 1970s and '80s, gave fine art legitimacy to explicitly sexual gay imagery. These artists collectively expanded the visual vocabulary of masculinity—and queer masculinity in particular—by daring to eroticize it on its own terms.

Untitled, by Etienne (Dom Orejudos)

Untitled, by Etienne (Dom Orejudos)

Untitled, by Etienne (Dom Orejudos)

The hypermasculine male nude was, and still is, more than just visual titillation. For many gay men—especially those emerging from the post-WWII era through the gay liberation movement of the 1970s—these images were lifelines. In a world that demonized or erased queer identities, these artworks created an imaginative space of strength, desire, and belonging.

Dan S., 1980, by Robert Mapplethorpe

Tom of Finland's drawings inspired a sense of pride at a time when few public role models existed. His men weren’t victims or martyrs—they were in control. They gazed back at the viewer with a smirk, not shame. Leather culture, which Tom helped popularize, became a defiant and communal expression of this ethos, evolving into an entire subculture with its own codes, rituals, and aesthetics.

Untitled, by Tom of Finland

Today, the hypermasculine aesthetic pioneered by Tom of Finland and his artistic descendants is both celebrated and interrogated. On one hand, his work has been embraced by museums and collectors, with the Tom of Finland Foundation preserving his legacy as both art and activism. On the other hand, critics have raised important questions about body ideals, race, and inclusivity within this visual tradition.

Shore Leave, George Quaintance

Nonetheless, Tom’s work endures because it dared to imagine a world where gay men could be powerful, erotic, and unashamed—all at once. For those who still find strength in the curvature of a flexed bicep, the gleam of a leather cap, or the tilt of a winking smile, these images remain potent reminders that desire can be both beautiful and bold.

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About the Artist: Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen, 1920–1991)
Born in Finland, Touko Laaksonen served in the Finnish Army during World War II before working as a graphic designer. His first drawing was published in Physique Pictorial in 1957. Over his lifetime, he created thousands of images that celebrated queer desire with explicit muscular masculinity. In 1984, he co-founded the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles to preserve and promote erotic art. His legacy continues to influence fashion, photography, and LGBTQ+ visual culture globally.

Untitled, by Tom of Finland

While this last one might be Untitled, I think the message is clear, "Fuck the World." This image is not merely erotic; it is symbolic. The man doesn’t hide; he dominates the universe with sensual confidence. In a time when queer lives were marginalized and criminalized, Tom of Finland dared to draw a world where desire could orbit freely—where the weight of the world was no burden, but a thing to be held with love and strength. 

Pic of the Day

Beauty and Beauty

Beauty and Beauty
By Rupert Brooke

When Beauty and Beauty meet
All naked, fair to fair,
The earth is crying-sweet,
And scattering-bright the air,
Eddying, dizzying, closing round,
With soft and drunken laughter;
Veiling all that may befall
After—after—

Where Beauty and Beauty met,
Earth’s still a-tremble there,
And winds are scented yet,
And memory-soft the air,
Bosoming, folding glints of light,
And shreds of shadowy laughter;
Not the tears that fill the years
After—after—


About the Poem

Rupert Brooke is often remembered as the handsome golden boy of early 20th-century English poetry—a soldier-poet who wrote idealistic verses before his untimely death in World War I. But beyond the patriotic sonnets and romanticized nationalism, there are quieter, more intimate poems where something deeper—perhaps more revealing—emerges. One such poem is “Beauty and Beauty,” a short but evocative lyric that resists easy categorization.

At first glance, the poem reads like a celebration of romantic or sensual union—two abstracted figures (or perhaps lovers), meeting in a moment of rapture, dissolving into something transcendent. The language is lush and tactile: “naked, fair to fair,” “ecstasy double,” “clasp and the joy and the heat.” The entire scene evokes physicality, longing, and fleeting perfection. What’s striking is the absence of gender. The poem does not say he and she, nor even they in a way that suggests duality of sex. Instead, it speaks of Beauty and Beauty—two mirrored forces, equal in form and attraction. This mirroring—“fair to fair”—can be read as a poetic device, but also as something more intimate: a union of likeness, not difference.

Some scholars have long speculated about Rupert Brooke’s sexuality. He was part of Cambridge circles that included queer intellectuals like E.M. Forster and Maynard Keynes. His letters reveal emotionally intense relationships with both men and women, though concrete evidence of same-sex relationships remains elusive—partly because queerness at the time was veiled, coded, or suppressed altogether. But poetry has always been a place for what could not be said directly.

If we allow ourselves to read “Beauty and Beauty” through a queer lens, we can begin to see it not just as a love poem, but as a celebration of two men—fair and fair, entwined in a moment of passion and transcendence. There is no need to disguise desire in gendered roles. The love here is elemental, luminous, and fleeting. It begins with naked beauty and ends with the world asleep, spent from witnessing their union.

Brooke’s language in the poem is deeply sensual but avoids vulgarity. It is about the merging of two forces—perhaps two bodies, perhaps two souls. And the line “melt into one perfect sphere” feels almost mythic, like Aristophanes’ description in Plato’s Symposium of original humans as spherical beings split apart, ever longing to be whole again. That myth, often invoked in queer readings of classical texts, frames love between men not as deviation, but as origin—a kind of primal longing. Brooke may have known this, or at least felt it. His poem offers a vision of beauty that dares to be symmetrical, unashamed, and fleetingly divine.

“Beauty and Beauty” is a short poem, but its power lies in what it refuses to define. It leaves open a space for same-sex love—not overtly, but unmistakably. Whether or not Brooke intended it as a reflection of his own desires, the poem speaks to anyone who has ever found beauty in someone who mirrors their own longing. In that way, it becomes a quiet act of defiance. A poem that, in just twelve lines, opens the door to a love that dares not speak its name—yet sings, briefly, with crystalline clarity.


About the Poet

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) occupies a unique space in the history of English literature—a poet whose fame was built as much on his classical beauty and tragic death as on the haunting lyricism of his verse. A product of Rugby School and King’s College, Cambridge, Brooke rose to prominence just before the First World War with a body of poetry that was elegant, wistful, and suffused with longing. His early poems explored themes of love, nature, and transience, often in language that was sensuous and delicately melancholic. His most famous work, the 1914 sonnet sequence—including the much-anthologized The Soldier—framed patriotic sacrifice in romantic and spiritual terms, offering a vision of war that felt noble and redemptive. It struck a chord with a nation on the brink of catastrophe.

Yet there is more to Rupert Brooke than patriotic verse. Beneath the idealized imagery of sacrifice lies a poet deeply attuned to beauty and desire, whose emotional life was complex and, at times, tortured. Brooke had relationships with women, but his most intense emotional connections were often with men. He moved in intellectual circles that included many queer figures of the day—such as Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and E.M. Forster—and his letters and friendships suggest an internal struggle with identity and intimacy. While modern scholars stop short of labeling him definitively gay or bisexual, there is a growing consensus that his sexuality was fluid and that his poetry often masks or sublimates homoerotic longing.

Poems like "Beauty and Beauty" hint at a love that transcends gendered norms, offering brief, luminous glimpses of physical and emotional union that resist definition. His use of idealized forms—beauty, ecstasy, the merging of bodies—evokes classical and Platonic traditions that have long resonated with queer readers. That Brooke rarely wrote overtly of same-sex love is perhaps unsurprising given the social pressures of Edwardian England, but the emotional intensity and coded language of his verse leave space for queer interpretation.

Brooke’s life was cut tragically short during World War I. Commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division, he died of sepsis from an infected mosquito bite aboard a French hospital ship in the Aegean Sea in 1915. He was 27 years old. His death, just months before the slaughter of the Somme and the disillusionment that followed, helped enshrine him as the quintessential tragic youth—a symbol of innocence lost to war. Yet his legacy endures not only in patriotic myth but also in the more private, lyrical moments of his poetry, where longing and beauty converge in ways still deeply moving—and, perhaps, more revealing than even he intended.

Pic of the Day

Today’s Memorial Day “Pic of the Day” captures a striking moment of transition: young Navy recruits receiving their first uniforms at boot camp, likely in Great Lakes, Illinois, during the 1950s. Stripped of civilian clothes, individuality, and privacy, these men stood vulnerable as they were issued military gear—a symbolic rebirth into the rigid discipline of service. This ritual, captured in stark black and white, reminds us that military sacrifice begins long before the battlefield. It starts in moments like these, where young men are shaped into soldiers, sailors, and Marines—often scared, often brave, and always changed. Many of them would go on to serve in wars far from home, some never to return. On this day of remembrance, we honor not only the fallen, but all who gave themselves, body and soul, to the uniform.

The Story of Sgt. Frank Praytor

“In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.” — José Narosky

On this Memorial Day, when we pause to honor those who gave their lives in service to our country, I find myself drawn not just to the names etched in stone or the solemn rows of white crosses, but to a single image: a black-and-white photograph taken in Korea in 1953. A Marine sits in the mud of a makeshift trench, his pistol at his side, his helmet on his knee. In his hands is a tiny orphaned kitten, and he is using a medicine dropper to feed her. The Marine is Sgt. Frank Praytor. The kitten’s name is “Mis Hap.”

The photo became famous—circulated around the world and published in Life magazine—as a symbol of unexpected tenderness in a brutal war. It offered a glimpse of compassion in the midst of chaos, a reminder that humanity survives even on the bloodied edges of conflict. The image would later help define the Korean War in popular memory, a “forgotten war” made suddenly more intimate through a moment of care.

What few people know is the full story behind that photograph—and the man behind the camera.

Frank Praytor was a journalist before he was a Marine. Born in 1927, he had been a copy boy for The Birmingham News, and while attending Birmingham Southern College he was a sports writer for The Birmingham Age-Herald. When war broke out, he volunteered for the Marine Corps, and thanks to his background, he was assigned to a press unit where he worked as a combat correspondent and photographer.

His job was to document the war—but his heart was never far from the human stories unfolding around him. When a fellow Marine’s cat was killed by a mortar shell, two orphaned kittens were left behind. Praytor took one in, fed her, cared for her, and named her “Miss Hap”—a play on “mishap,” the unfortunate accident that orphaned her. He later joked that she had “earned her name by almost being stepped on a dozen times.”

The photo of Praytor and Mis Hap would become an emblem of compassion, but it nearly cost him his career. According to later accounts, he was almost court-martialed by a commanding officer who believed the photo projected weakness and distracted from the image of Marine toughness. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. The Marine Corps ultimately embraced the image, recognizing that in an age of rising television and photojournalism, humanity had become part of wartime narrative. Praytor was spared, and the photograph went on to become one of the most reproduced images of the Korean War.

After the war, Frank returned home and continued his life in journalism, working for The Albuquerque Tribune and The Associated Press. He married, raised a family, and remained a storyteller at heart. He died in 2018 at the age of 90.

Sgt. Frank Praytor didn’t die in war, but he gave a part of himself to it. His service—like so many others—was not only in bullets and orders, but in moments of grace. On Memorial Day, we rightly remember the fallen, but we also honor those who carried the burden home. Some came back with wounds you could see. Others carried scars deeper and quieter. Men like Praytor showed us that even in war, gentleness is not weakness. It is courage of another kind.

And sometimes, the most lasting legacy of a soldier is not a battle won, but a kitten fed.

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Called to Serve, Remembered in Truth

"You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love." — Galatians 5:13

On Memorial Day, we pause not just to wave flags or grill burgers, but to remember—solemnly and with reverence—those who laid down their lives in service to this country. They died in deserts, on beaches, in jungles and skies, in places known and forgotten. Each one was a person, not just a name etched into stone.

Among them were LGBTQ+ Americans who, in every generation, answered the call to serve—even when their nation would not serve them in return.

Some lived and died in silence, hiding their full selves to avoid dishonorable discharge, imprisonment, or violence. Under policies like Don't Ask, Don't Tell, they were forced into shadows, where honesty could mean disgrace. Yet they still fought. Still bled. Still gave everything.

Others served proudly after the policy ended in 2011—openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members who finally could wear their uniforms and their identities without fear. Their courage was not only on the battlefield, but in living truthfully in spaces where truth had long been forbidden.

And still today, many transgender service members fight battles on two fronts—one abroad, and one at home. While their competence and valor are unquestioned, their right to serve remains under political siege. Recent Republican-led efforts to reinstate a transgender military ban have made this painfully clear. These attempts to erase or exclude are not just policy debates—they are messages that say, “You do not belong.”

But in God’s eyes, they do belong. They always have.

"Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." — John 15:13

This verse reminds us that the greatest act of love is not found in slogans, but in sacrifice. LGBTQ+ service members—whether in silence or with open pride—have made that sacrifice. And on this Memorial Day, we must speak their names, even if history tried not to record them.

They were called to be free, just as we are called to be free. But let us not use that freedom to forget. Let us use it to serve one another humbly in love—as Paul writes in Galatians—and to advocate for those whose service has been overlooked, whose dignity is still contested.

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Moment of Zen: Jockstraps

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