When I moved to Chicago in the 1990’s from a small college town in Ohio, I was anxious to enjoy all the aspects of the big city I had visited many times before but was now calling home. Being part of a larger art community was exciting for me, and the gay community was thriving in the Lakeview neighborhood and elsewhere in the city. I realized that there was an absence of images of same-sex couples in mainstream media, but also within my own consciousness. Gay couples and gay people in general, had been invisible and/or stereotyped for so long that I realized the most disruptively powerful thing I could do as an artist was to simply portray these couples – hearth and home, mundane, everyday-life, intimate, loving, but not sexualized, commodified, or minimized.
