The local arts community is throwing considerable support behind Mayor Sam Adams in the wake of revelations about his star-crossed affair with hunk-a-licious Beau Breedlove. A group of arts leaders including PICA’s executive director, Victoria Frey, and Regional Arts & Culture Council Executive Director Eloise Damrosch, has circulated an open letter to the public supporting Adams. The letter holds that “an episode in [Adams’] private life, that has become a lightning rod of distraction from the real work at hand, should not be allowed to derail our entire leadership, and our community, from the important work ahead.”
Meanwhile, in the blogosphere, local arts website PORT goes on the record in a post called “Sammy Stays.” In the post, curator Jeff Jahn declares: “PORT just doesn’t care about sex scandals; we do care about art, design, and aesthetics, and we will evaluate [Adams] on those matters alone.” More feistily, artist TJ Norris writes on his blog, unBLOGGED: “Do I really care whether the partner that [Adams] chose was a teenager or a retiree, for that matter? No. What matters is the job at hand, and what’s in the best interest of the people of greater Portland.”
Above and beyond the view that Adams is arts-friendly, artists’ support of our beleaguered bürgermeister should come as no surprise. More than any other community, the art world is in touch with the dark fiends that lurk in the unconscious, threatening at any moment to come out and gobble us up. Visual artists, novelists, playwrights, and the like charge themselves with channeling the secret desires that haunt us, and setting those demons loose, where they make effect pathos in the rest of us. Witness Abstract Expressionism, whose spurts, splatters, and oozes ejaculated onto the canvas and into the history books, dredged up from the painter’s hand as an act of transfiguration. It is no stretch: Artists are sympathetic to Sam Adams because he, in his transgressions, enacted literally the boiling catharses that artists commit symbolically in their work.
Artists, too, know the long tradition of the Beautiful Boy, the male Lolita whose siren song has transfixed sculptors and painters for millennia and led many a hapless older man (and more than a few women) astray. With his not-a-boy, not-yet-a-man body, which commingles baby fat and burgeoning musculature, the Beautiful Boy appeared in Ancient Greek pottery and sculptural masterpieces such as the Kritios Boy (circa 480 B.C., see image above). In these works it is difficult to distinguish the pure aesthetic gaze from the prurient one, seeing as how the Ancient World, for all the gifts it bestowed to us, was a hotbed of pederasty (a word famously rhymed with “nasty” in the song “Sodomy” from the musical Hair). Whether Platonic or earthly, jailbait, it would seem, is in the eye thighs of the beholder.
Fast-forward to the Renaissance and Donatello’s David, (circa 1440), and you’ll see a younger, less ripped David (image below) than Michelangelo’s more famous version. Donatello’s ephebic charmer could be a prototype for young Master Breedlove emerging from the sea in a widely circulated photograph from his MySpace page.
A hundred years later the Beautiful Boy reappears in the homolicious Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545-53) by the scandalous metalsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, himself four times accused of sodomizing young boys and girls, most of them models for his sculptures. In one instance, Cellini was sentenced to four years imprisonment for violations, a sentence eventually lessened when his supporters in the local art scene of his day—the powerful Medici family—intervened on his behalf.
A final exhibit: Caravaggio’s sultry Bacchus (circa 1595), with his bedroom eyes, his wreath of grapes and leaves, fingers unknotting the black cord to his skimpy toga, and most of all that brimming, quivering wine glass extended toward the viewer in invitation to taste the forbidden fermented fruit. The cruelty of it! The dangling carrot-ness of it all! Is it any wonder that Beautiful Boys from Bacchus to Breedlove have brought powerful men from Cellini to Adams to, ahem, their knees?
There is no excuse for it, of course. Men who chase younger men, or women, or both, are chasing their own vanishing youth and ought to know better. There are bound to be problems aplenty when older men sleep with protégés. Young’uns are never discreet; they kiss and tell, and then the people they told tell other people, and finally, when the affair is exposed, the junior party is exonerated by the naïveté of youth, while the older is forever besmirched as “the dirty old man.” These things end badly, plain and simple, as art and literature show us. At the beginning of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the artist Basil Hallward, enraptured by his subject’s jaw-dropping beauty, predicts that, for “Dorian Gray’s good looks, we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us—suffer terribly.” And indeed, Hallward does, as does nearly everyone else in the enfant terrible’s path. This lesson found a sad parallel in Wilde’s own life, when in 1895 he was tried, convicted and sentenced to two years hard labor for engaging in “the love that dare not speak its name” with a randy, indiscreet twink named Lord Alfred Douglas, who was 16 years his junior (Wilde was 37 when the affair commenced, Douglas was 21).
But nowhere is this much-repeated tale more tragically put than in Thomas Mann’s 1912 novel Death in Venice. It is the story of one Gustav von Aschenbach, an intellectual in his fifties, who is struck dumb with love and lust over the winsome adolescent Tadzio. “His face,” Mann writes of the boy, “recalled the noblest moment of Greek sculpture: pale with a sweet reserve, with clustering honey-colored ringlets, the brow and nose descending in one line, the winning mouth, the expression of pure and godlike serenity.” Poor Aschenbach: He’s got it bad, and that ain’t good. He winds up dead of cholera on the beach, infatuated to the end, his final vision the sight of Tadzio frolicking in the waves, “a remote and isolated figure with floating locks, out there in sea and wind…”
We wish a better fate for Mayor Sam, who must be feeling a bit Aschenbach-like these days. My own opinion, by the way (not that anyone asked for it), is that Adams has suffered enough; that all investigations criminal and journalistic should henceforth cease; and that the mayor, as an act of penance and purification, should be made to don a glitter-spangled crown with the word “CHICKENHAWK” inscribed across it, and wear it as he runs around City Hall three times, singing Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy” at the top of his lungs. Then and only then, all will be forgiven, and we can all move on to meet our great civic destiny.
Click on links in the text to see images in their original webpages and context.
- Breedlove The Beautiful Boy It’s
- Beau Breedlove Tells Oregonian He and Mayor Sam Adams Kissed Twice When Breedlove Was 17 Beau Bree
- TBA Diary: Richard Speer does the Works Dateline:
- Beau Breedlove Tells KGW That Mayor Sam Adams Lied About What Happened And That He’s Mad About It (UPDATED with comment from Adams’ spokesman) Beau Bree
- Adams’ Admission Reaction: Breedlove Interview With CBS Upcoming on Thursday CBS News
Tags: Historical trivia
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This is not a sex scandal. This is a scandal involving lying (which is scandalous regardless of the subject when it involves an election) and potential hiring abuses. Art, design and aesthetics are but one aspect of human life – among the lowest aspects, to be sure – they’re superceded by aspects such as character and judgement. This is why the matter should continue to be pursued, in an official investigation by qualified people, and in the interim those on both sides of the "issue of Sam" would do well to keep thier judgement open.
The prison system is full of people who think the investigation should have stopped before it did.
In my opinion it is disturbing that such a romantic spin is put on being a pedophile and then called "art". This article also shows that all thru history, it was a crime to abuse children but the sickopeds keep doing it. Float that out to sea on your curly locks…..
The arts community, to which I belong, is dead wrong to support Adams. His PRIVATE life is not the issue. His PUBLIC life is the issue. In his PUBLIC life, he lied and manipulated others to lie in order to win an election. This makes the election fraudulent. Wake up, arts people! Wake up, Portland!
"[P]enance and purification?" Gosh, Dick, sounds like faith-based artcrit. Nothing new about the analysis. Margaret Walters’s "The Nude Male" appeared in ‘78, Dutton’s "The Perfectible Body" in ‘95. I’m sure there are other, better references that you can name: it’s not an area of immediate intrigue for me.
As so many have observed, the sex in this matter is tangential to the corruption of trust in the body politic — specifically the bodies that occupy the Council Chamber. More specifically, one body and any others who would support that body and assert that lying is the best of all possible behaviors, or even just the best that we should expect.
Lying with malicious and self-profiting intent, not lying — prone — for the carnal desire of an aging male, is the rot that must be extirpated.
Sam has suffered enough? Hmm, I see no evidence of this at all. He had a 2-3 month relationship with a teenager, lied his way into the office of Mayor, told a portion of the truth in a mea culpa that was much more of a defense than an apology and now has queers and hipsters all over Portland being apologists for him. Exactly where is his suffering? Suffering or not, the man just needs to lose his job. He screwed up…SEVERAL times over SEVERAL years…anyone else screwing up in the manner and in direct relation to their job would lose their job. Period. Stop finding new and elaborate ways to defend this skeezy liar.
Thanks for an enormous truckload of irrelevant. There’s no more reason to link gay to unethical politics than there is to link gay to art and literature. This could very well be the most intellectually confused thing written about the Adams affair yet, and maybe I’m being too kind.
This isn’t a joke and it isn’t part of some grandly tragi-comic heroic narrative. Adams deceived the electorate to gain public office — and his assertion that the public wasn’t mature enough to be trusted with the truth truly is an additional absolutely shocking insult.
It’s probably easier to be glib about it if you feel that he was lying to and insulting somebody else and not you.
Since Adams is unwilling to even contemplate apologizing to those he slandered, there’s no way he would humble himself enough to "don a glitter-spangled crown…..and wear it as he runs aroung city hall three times…" So maybe he could resign instead….but I did enjoy this little essay – quite amusing!
Maybe a crown isn’t such a bad idea, he could be Queen and the 2nd floor City Hall toilets could be his throne.
I don’t think it is precisely accurate, dja, to say that Adams "is unwilling to even contemplate apologizing to those who he slandered." When asked if he was sorry for what he did to Ball, Adams said — and this is on the video — he was not, but that he would think about it.
Which explicitly means that he is willing to contemplate the possibility that he might be wrong about not being sorry that his lying (for which he IS sorry) had destructive consequences for other people. For the record.
And an additional note on the article, because this attempt to give the Adams affair dimension by viewing it through the lens of homoeroticism in art is so particularly obnoxious:
The epic and fearless gestures of abstract expressionism provide little insight into the wincing spectacle of a Sam Adams’ delicately constructed buffoonery blowing up in his face, not to mention his hustling back from the inauguration and locking himself in his house, texting his gratitude to Thomas Lauterdale. If you’re looking back for a painter with a greater understanding of such a situation you can’t do better than George Grosz. Take "The Lovesick Man," for example. Or "Eclipse of the Sun."
That reads pretty weird. Did this group get their Sam party idea on before or after they heard Sam had accused Vezina of raping Beau?
RE: "A group of arts leaders including PICA
I find it curiously appropriate to find an ad for Miminko Children’s and Baby Apparel accompanying this story.
And once again, the initial question was NONE OF OUR BUSINESS! Get off your moral high horse – the skeletons in your own closets are getting nosebleeds!!
Isn’t that a bit like diving into water without knowing if there is a treacherous undercurrent or not?
The letter came out just 4 days after the story first broke. Some of the signers of the letter work in areas depending on public funding. Seems a bit careless attaching one’s name to that piece so early
what’s wrong with liking boys if they are of legal age? I mean this may or may not be your idea of a good time, but why would you care?
Exactly. I don’t care Whatson. Never. Ever. Ever. Never. But then, an entire thinking group either got beyond that point weeks ago, or never ever ever never were stuck on it in the first place. I suggest you might do the same. This is not a case for "thinking small".
I am not sure of the art form of Adams’s hiring at $55,000/yr a reporter, amy ruiz, to provide her an alternative to investigating him and telling what she found out…. Perhaps hiring her as the mayor’s advisor on urban planning and sustainability (though she has NO credentials, education or experience in the subjects) is more aesthetically pleasing than hiring her to be the mayor’s chief advisor on the arts with similar dearth of background..which arts folks just might find bothersome.