Paul Thek’s “Time is a River”, painted on a sheet of found newspaper, is one of the artist’s final works before dying of AIDS-related illness in 1988 (fig. 1). A burst of water–painted in hectic strokes, and glittering in bright hues of blue–obscures most of the newspaper’s contents. As if pausing it in motion, hovering just over the imminent splash, Thek has inscribed into the wet paint “time is a river”.
 
Between 1962 and 1976 Paul Thek spent much of his time in Italy.  By way of boat, Thek would repeatedly travel between Europe and the United States.  Much of his work attests to his desire to be close to water, like landscape paintings of open sea, or his many divers glowing red against stark blue. When installing his show at Brooke Alexander Gallery in 1988 he decided to scrap an earlier hanging of the works, in favor of repositioning them lower on the wall. This transformation, and the work itself–again painted primarily in blue–suggest a point of view from inside a swimming pool, looking towards its perimeter. Considering this affiliation to water I presume it was Thek’s favored choice to travel by boat, styling him a sailor between the two continents. Mid journey–from a harbor of Maracaibo, Venezuela–Thek wrote in a letter to his then partner Peter Hujar: “The trip has been so beautifully exciting, certainly the most exciting week of my life. […] I really had no idea the beauty of this earth was so immense. […]
I miss you very much [and] do so much wish you were here to this everything”

In 1963 Thek and Hujar visited the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo together.  Descending a broad flight of stone steps, one enters the catacombs’ system of tunnels and chambers. Interconnecting back into each other, sheltered, and enclosed from the outside, they house an Other; Some thousand skeletons and mummies inhabit the catacombs. Grouped by profession, sex, and social status, they are propped with open jaws, facing each other to allow for future talk.
Their visit to the catacombs marks Hujar’s starting point for “Portraits in Life and Death”, 
published thirteen years later in 1976. Here, Hujar groups photos taken in the catacombs,
alongside portraits of his friends, taken between 1974 and 1975. Arranged on the consecutive pages of the book, the likeness, and intimacy both imagery shares in composition, and affect towards its subjects is unifying. “Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death.”
Speaking of the catacombs’ influence on his “Technological Reliquaries” Thek recalled in 1966: “I hope the work has the innocence of those Baroque crypts in Sicily; their initial effect is stunning you fall back for a moment and then it’s exhilarating. There are eight thousand corpses–not skeletons, corpses–decorating the walls, and the corridors are filled with windowed coffins. […] It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers. We accept our thingness intellectually, but the emotional acceptance of it can be a joy”

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Introducing Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film adaptation of Jean Genet’s “Querelle of Brest” the narrator states: “The thought of murder often evokes thoughts of the sea and of sailors. What naturally follows thoughts of the sea and murder is the thought of love or sexuality”
Querelle’s is a story that ponders between virile sexuality, and scheme. When Querelle murders his accomplice Vic, after ensuring an opium deal, Fassbinder has framed them a flirt. As Vic unclothes and washes himself from his crime, their talk of sex arouses Querelle enough to press his body onto Vic’s and cut his throat. Sinking to the ground, now clothed only in his briefs, Vic thrusts at his crotch.   It is a morbid line between desire, and death that Fassbinder instructs his characters to dance.
The port city of Brest glows in hues of orange and blue, stuck in unending nightfall. Its passages, and corridors seemingly wind back into each other, ending abruptly into the sea. Rather like an island, it seems to consume those who have sailed for its labyrinth.
Towering over Brest, end to all its alleyways, is La Féria: a brothel and bar to sailors cruisingby. While Genet describes it a “Cave of Harmony”   Fassbinder has constructed La Féria of mostly windows, engraved with ornaments of bouquets of flowers and erect cocks. His camera often hovers through the windows, scanning its ongoings in voyeuristic fashion, with Brest’s peculiar characters flirting in between the flowers. Spotlit into place, Querelle and his comrades seem the appropriate decoration to La Féria’s vitrine. Fassbinder has said of the set design: “Querelle will take place in a kind of surreal landscape.”
This surrealism is only enhanced, when he ends the movie, like it started, with sailors working the decks, only this time, looping backwards into Brest’s own haunted limbo.   “Within this landscape”, he continues: “there will be several walls for projection. They will enable us to project particles of the real world into this artificial world, and thereby to expand it infinitely.”   So although it seems, La Féria’s visitors are encased in and bound to it, like to a windowed coffin, they rather become a projection beaming from the lighthouse that La Féria really is. And “[w]hile […] he [draws] away from La Féria”, Genet assures us: “never for one instant did [Querelle] cease–very much the reverse–to feel himself a sailor”

 
Rainer Werner Fassbinder died of a drug overdose in June 1982, only two months before the premiere of “Querelle”.

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One of Hujar’s photographs from the catacombs shows Thek posing next to the corpses,
arranged on its towering wall. In seductive poise, leaning against the open coffins, Thek’s eyes, and pouting mouth are flirting with me (fig. 2). His portrait is strikingly similar, in composition and attraction, to that of “Querelle”’s Brad Davis, posing on one of Brest’s jetties against the sun setting over the open sea (fig. 3). “Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also–wittingly or unwittingly–the recording-angels of death. The photograph–as–photograph shows death. More than that, it shows the sex-appeal of death”   .

Both Thek and Querelle have sailed for their destinations, and both have found a place that is decorated with beautiful people, dancing with death. And though both the catacombs and Brest are contained to themselves, their lights beam outward for sailors to find.

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In his foreword to the 2023 reprint of Hujar’s “Portraits in Life and Death”, Benjamin Moser notes that of the twenty-nine portraits of living people only few are still alive.   Many of them gay artists, it is true their lives were ended untimely by the HIV/AIDS pandemic that began in the 80s. Myself a gay man born in 2000, I often feel I have been denied their company, and with time, their stories have become islands, lost out of sight.

 
In 1969–nineteen years prior to “Time is a River”–Paul Thek painted “Swimming in the River” (fig. 4). The entire piece is covered in blue acrylic paint, slight waves foaming unbroken into the sky. One can make out a figure towards its lower right corner, floating calmly. The water that seemed splashing toward me in “Time is a River”, now has surrounded me completely. And swimming in time’s river, I too, want to be a sailor.
I want to be a sailor in time; For the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo to see what Thek and
Hujar have left for me; For Fassbinder’s Brest to share a drink at La Féria. For all the work of gay artists, that will whisper of my own personal genealogy. And flirting with it I will know, that to me, to sail through time, means cruising death.