Michael Broderick was born in a dreary little burg in upstate New York. Despite the shrill consternation of his decidedly mainstream parents, an insatiable passion for his sister’s Fashion Plates consumed his childhood and the traditional red blooded propensities for cars and football never developed. The Fashion Plates mysteriously disappeared one summer while Michael was at camp, the Style-Me Barbie head ran away with the spoon, and, to this day, everyone in Michael’s family swears the pink Play-Doh never existed.

Denied those modes of expression, Michael, like most little gay boys stranded in the god-forsaken suburbs, turned to movies and television for solace. Adolescence had lifted a curtain and the strobe of flickering screens, large and small, illuminated a procession of square-jawed gods who fought, loved, and occasionally danced across the boards of young Michael’s burgeoning sexuality. Hunks like Mike Henry, John Gavin, Guy Madison, Gene Kelly, and Sean Connery thrilled while making love to sirens like Lana Turner and Joan Crawford in exotic locales but there was one missing component: an overtly gay context.

Fortunately, Michael wasn’t just ogling—he was inspired. He collected a smile, cataloged a stance, captured a pair of roguish eyes and locked them away until he was able to flee the middle American wasteland, move to New York and get a BA in Graphic Art and Drawing. With each piece Michael seeks to conjure the situations absent from those nights by the fire presenting a revisionist history of sorts for those of us who grew up gay in America.