An Undiscovered Gay Masters Presentation
of The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foudation
The Passion of Christ
The Gay Vision of Doug Blanchard
By Christian Bain

Mel Gibson’s much discussed movie won’t be the only controversial Passion opening in New York this spring. Another Passion opening on March 9th [2004] at the Leslie Lohman Gallery is also likely to stir up controversy, but for very different reasons.

The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision by Doug Blanchard presents a starkly contemporary gay reimaging of the Passion as you’ve never seen it before. Painted in oil over a two-year period on 20 wood panels, with four more panels in process, this Passion features a strikingly handsome, sexy and totally approachable Christ bent on challenging the institutions and habits of power.

“My paintings emphasize the reality of flesh–that spirit and flesh go together,” says Blanchard, a practicing Episcopalian who teaches art history at Bronx Community College (CUNY) and Suffolk Community College. “This Jesus is someone who is beautiful and charismatic, who people can and do touch and who stands on the same ground with all of us. He draws crowds of people who wouldn’t normally associate with each other, but who come together around Him.

“Men and women fall in love with him and he loves them back, in every sense of the word. He’s a magnanimous and magnetic liberator, a great monkey wrench in the machinery of established power, challenging the priests, the businessmen, the law, the military in their modern roles. If someone like that appeared today they’d probably kill him.”

Gay Origins of the Traditional Image of Christ
“How do you paint someone who is fully a man while He’s also God incarnate?” asks Blanchard, who was inspired to undertake the daunting task by Albrecht Durer’s 36-panel Passion series. “For this project, I’m mostly making an image of Christ that’s satisfying to me. I’m not trying to start another tradition–it’s something particular to my own vision.

“Everyone who does an image of Christ takes that liberty. There aren’t any historical descriptions of what He looked like–He might have been fat and bald for all we know.”

Fortunately, early 3rd century Christian artists borrowed freely from the Greco-Roman world around them. “One of the earliest images of Christ, found in a catacomb under St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, shows Him as a handsome and athletic young man standing in a chariot with rays of light coming from His head–
images clearly adapted from the Greek sun god Apollo,” Blanchard explains.

“Rome and its gods were also deservedly famous for their libertine sexual mores. Although Apollo was generally described as preferring women, the famous Roman writer Ovid reported that the god also loved the handsome and athletic Hyacinthus. After Hyacinthus died in a discus throwing contest, Apollo is said to have transformed his blood into the hyacinth flower as a living tribute to his memory.

“Scholars have suggested that early images of Christ also closely resemble portraits of Antinous, lover of the celebrated Emperor Hadrian, whose rein Gibbons said marked the high point of the Roman Empire,” Blanchard adds. “When the strikingly handsome Antinous died suddenly under mysterious circumstances in the Nile, the grief-stricken emperor had the Roman Senate declare him a God and built popular temples featuring his statues throughout the eastern Mediterranean.

“It is only later that Christ begins to have a beard, thought to be borrowed from the father of the Roman Gods, Jupiter. Lovers of ancient mythology will remember that it was Jupiter who in the guise of an eagle kidnaps the beautiful young shepherd Ganymede and takes him to live (and love) on Mount Olympus.
“It’s only in the 6th and 7th centuries that the image of Christ beomes cannonical,” Blanchard adds. “You don’t get the absolute official image of Christ set in stone until the end of the 7th Century, after the iconoclastic period in which the Byzantine Empire, sparked by the challenge and example of a rising Islam, removed and destroyed images of Christ from it’s churches. Only a few early Christian images survived on the periphery of the empire to inform us today.”

Why the Passion?
“I’m interested in the Passion as a story that people live by,” explains Blanchard, who has been involved with the Episcopal Church “off and on” for more than 20 years. “It’s probably the most famous death and resurrection story in the world.

“All gay men and lesbians, regardless of our backgrounds, share the experience of being excluded. The sense of being turned upon by religion and state authority is an ongoing reality for us. We know what it’s like to be the object of someone’s violently passionate hostility, but we don’t have to accept that. One of my most important objectives in this project is to show that experience as essentially spirtiual–
that we can and should embrace the challenges we face as gay men and lesbians and take them seriously.

My Passion is saying that those challenges are moral experiences that we can find ways to turn to our advantage. For me the Passion story is saying that love is stronger than death or hate, and we’re going to continue challenging the established prejudices and institutions of the world regardless of how they respond.

“As a gay man, it is important to me that this Christ be attractive in the fullest sense of the word–physically, sexually and spiritually, and emphatically charismatic–someone who draws people to him and who understands what it is to be an unwelcome outsider.”

Blanchard’s informal theological studies over the past 15 years have been guided by Peter Manat, a specialist in early Christian history and the church fathers, and James Harbaugh, a Lutheran pastor knowledgeable in modern and liberation theology. While Manat recomended works on the early development of Christianity, Harbaugh steered him to leading modern philosphers and theologicans including Kierkagard, Tillich, Karl Barth and even Hanna Arrendt, whose writing in turn guided Blanchard to Mellville’s novel Billy Bud.

“In Billy Bud, Mellville posed a question. If absolute goodness appeared in the world, what would we do about it? Melville resolves the story by having Billy Bud killed by the authorities as an act of self preservation.”

“One of my issues with Christianity is that it hasn’t come to terms with its own history of violent persecution of anyone who hasn’t agreed with the established dogma of the time. I deliberately made the priests look like Christian clerics who use religion as a stick to beat people over the head and dominate them, just as Mullahs and Rabbis often do.” In the same way, Blanchard’s police bare an uncomfortable resemblance to storm troopers. His judges and courtrooms are disconcertingly American and his businessmen seem to have just stepped out of a meeting of the Republican National Committee. His crowds mill about like ordinary 21st century people. “I’m probably the first painter to show a Passion with people smoking,” says Blanchard, “and I may also be the first to paint Jesus with a lawyer. And of course he won’t accept a plea bargain.”

“Despite all of that, what holds me to Christianity is its very radical character–something that fundamentalists and religious authorities have always tried to bury. In this Passion, Christ is telling the people who make up the establishment that they have failed in the basic enterprise of human happiness. As Tillich said, the Christ story inverts the conventional ideas of success.”

A New Public Art
Much as Renaissance and Baroque artists painted murals designed to be seen and enjoyed by thousands of viewers, Blanchard’s Passion is intended to serve as public art. His classically inspired compositions and heroic poses drawn from photos and movies of the civil and gay rights movements will remind many viewers of another more recent genre of public art, 1930s WPA murals, but with a surprising immediacy that brings the Passion into the here and now.

“I didn’t have the WPA murals in mind when I did these paintings,” says Blanchard. “More the Renaissance and Baroque. But as utterly retrograde and technically old fashioned as my pictures are, I’m not anti-modern–I was also influenced by such 20th century artists as German painter Max Beckmann and American painters Leon Golub and Phillip Guston.

“I have a very meticulous way of painting from thumbnail sketches through drawing to drawing to drawing. Some things don’t get worked out until I paint or repaint them. I think of myself as being a history painter in the old sense of the world–not like You Are There [the 1950’s and 60’s TV recreations of historic events] but in the sense of showing deeply human stories–human dramas.

The four unfinished final panels of Blanchard’s Passion give viewers an unusual glimpse into his artistic process. This open-ended quality also breathes new life into a ritualized tradition–challenging viewers to rethink the meaning of this most famous account of life, death and resurrection in the here and now.