How Did We Get Here

"How Did We Get Here"

Charles Baker Strahan Oil on canvas

This painting draws from queer history and employs counterclockwise compositional movement to articulate a looping, reflective sensation. The viewer's eye is pulled from the right across to the left, then down, and finally back up toward again—mirroring the cyclical question embedded in the work.

Starting at the top right, the legend of Abraham Lincoln's possible same-sex relationships hovers as a monumental, ghostlike presence—queer history often felt but not fully acknowledged. That current moves toward Stonewall, where a man is thrown from a bronco. Horses in my language represent emotion; here the bucking form throws off The Man, signaling both the riots and the violent upheaval that catalyzed gay liberation.

Vintage photographic imagery of queer intimacy follows, grounding the viewer in lived history rather than myth. Beside it sits the reference to Bert and Ernie as they appeared on the New Yorker cover after the legalization of gay marriage—figures whose coded queerness quietly shaped cultural imagination long before it was openly named.

From there, the eye tracks toward J.C. Leyendecker's rowers, whose athletic figures were famously queer coded in his advertising imagery, before descending to the central figure: a nearly cartoonish contemporary man raising his phone to take a selfie. His presence interrupts the historical current—asking whether we remember the lineage that made this moment possible, or whether self-absorption and cultural amnesia make us vulnerable to losing hard-won progress.

The painting circles back to its title's question: How did we get here? And—perhaps more urgently—Are we paying attention as we move into an uncertain future? Is history repeating, or are we too distracted to see the signs?