TOM BIANCHI [SHAMAN TO GAY SOULS] byRolandWise

Photographer Tom Bianchi presents his latest work, Men In Blue Water, at Exposure Gallery, Palm Springs, November 5th, 2005, but I got a sneak preview when I caught up with the creator in his Hollywood loft earlier this month. Standing there looking at these life size photos of nude men frolicking in blue water, each one unfolded before me as I was realizing the ripples of water were actually the light dancing off the contours of nudity. By the end of my viewing, there was sameness and calmness and awareness, a playfulness wanton of expression calling to me. This work beckons us to show up without the old forms of societal clothing that no longer fit, a wardrobe that need be tossed in a pile for goodwill.

Tom is definitely the creator of many different forms of art; all of which are shapely, and timely, and well built with the natural curves you’d expect from an artist, with the strategic moves of an attorney, combining to summon the onlooker’s vision to evolve and rapture or get left behind. His body of work includes several well-known photography books, one in which Tom gracefully shares with us his experiences with past lovers amidst the structure of some amazing poetry and prose he crafted specific to each photo. He also has many sculptures out there, as well as drawings, and paintings. And, he designs and builds his own line of furniture, which I was able to get a good look at while visiting with him and his partner at their Los Angeles home.


Tom is a creative guru for sure, but Tom Bianchi is a shaman of sorts in that he is a veteran of the earliest days of the HIV epidemic, which from his telling of the stories was like an atomic bomb going off in the gay community, fostering a spiritual awakening like none other within many gay men of that day, himself included. And with the devastation of AIDS in full swing, the pain and loss Tom was experiencing had mounted toward unimaginable heights. He carefully tells of the routine back then, how there would be a funeral service to attend every other week, but it wasn’t until the epidemic took his then partner, New York model David Peterson, that Tom was fully vested in the pain it would take for him to rise up and prepare himself for the artistic action to come. Once through David’s passing, Tom faced his own mortality when he found out that he to was infected. This new knowing charged him somehow with a very specific spiritual task within the relief efforts to follow, and it was then he began to groom himself toward being the healer of gay men (and humans alike) by using his unique vision and brand of seeing the nude (gay) male body as beautiful and good, just as if he were God seeing Adam for the first time in the early pages of Genesis.

Tom understood all too well the alpha and omega of what was happening, and that there was a high proportionate vibration within the AIDS epidemic that was entirely spiritual. He knew the illness was not only physically playing itself out, but that the deep seated shame and lack of acceptance that gay men carried from their old time religions made them weaker than they might have been otherwise. And Tom saw first hand how the old out dated religious bullshit and negativity, and down right meanness, had burdened men while they lay sick and dying, as the hate slowly became the primary killing machine. The name-calling and the accusations claiming AIDS was a gay disease or god’s punishment to gay men fed off these negative vibrations not only building a lack of immunity, but damming up mountains of shame in the gay soul. Tom knew that if he went down this road of shame that it would kill him, and he knew that if he didn’t use his creative ability to show gay men a clear and positive version of themselves, this killing machine would simply be passed down like a family heirloom from gay generation to gay generation, and that instead of shame being eradicated that the gay man would be eradicated instead.

So as a means to a healing end of the gay soul, and giving the viral part of this deadly infection a fair chance to subside with the development of medicines and various healthy patterns of living coming onto the daily scene, Tom began capturing positive self-images for gay men all around the world to see and draw strength from. It was a pictorial essay of the beauty of yesteryear for many as they lay dying, looking onto these images of what they once were and how they once frolicked and expressed themselves without shame in the hey day of sexual freedoms years earlier. Tom’s photos not only soothed many dying men, they replaced the heirlooms of shame with a gentle motherly sort of hope chest filled with beauty for generations to come, giving many the needed hope to live again, and to live honestly, and to be proud of who they are and how very lovely their desires are when it comes to sexual expression.

Tom had nothing to loose at that point, and like he said, no one back then knew if they would live two years, and this photography, in his mind, was likely going to be the last thing he did and that it would serve as his legacy on the way out of this world, hopefully showing the beauty that was being lost here and how we humans are all made in one another’s image and likeness for good reason, that our deity wakens from its slumber. So after publishing the first book, Tom began to have very different thoughts about living and dying, and although he still had no clue that he would live a long time with this disease, it was then he decided that he would adjust his own vibration and set himself as far out toward his “end” as possible. That was almost 20 years ago.

Tom lamented about the two camps that developed back then. There were the “I AM living” with this camp and the “I AM dying” from this camp. Tom told of Paul Monette, well known writer and good friend of his and how they were in opposite camps. I AM going to die from this Tom, Paul would say. And Tom would reply with, well, Paul, then I AM going to live with it. In tears Tom tells of Paul’s funeral and how in a strange way they both were right, and that they were both Gods in their own rite, each with very different perspectives on their versions of “I AM”

With that said, I AM sure that Tom’s photography has single handedly eradicated more hidden shame surrounding the beauty and revel to be expressed within sexual expression than any other artist to date doing male nudes. And there are many out there doing nudes, but from what I can tell they are not veterans of anything all that far back and they don’t have near the back story, nor have they survived the war stories or do they come from this powerful perspective that allows Tom to suggest what he is suggesting here. I was reading some interviews, talking with some folks, and many suggest in their own fears that Tom is getting a little too close to the notions of porn for their taste, and the critics wonder if he is straying from what we humans are comfortable with calling art. Because this culture has perhaps hit its evolutional ceiling, it may be simpler than that. Perhaps we are just projecting our own unresolved issues onto this artwork, in which case Tom is producing time capsules of work for the generations to come. My take is that Tom is in tune with our good friend evolution and knows well and has lived the terrible rift between the physical and spiritual that we carry about day by day. In knowing the details of that, Tom creates photography pulling us all in one way, in hopes we that look back toward the other. And only when the two are melded back together again, or more correctly said, when they are seen as impossible to keep apart, can humans come together and do so without any sense of personal shame.

So when you visit Exposure Gallery and partake in this latest showing of Tom’s work, you may experience an internal nudge or struggle. You should dress down for the event, and only wear your good sense of personal self-acceptance and wholeness; otherwise, the old out dated shame in relation to looking at such erotic nakedness may creep in and get the better causing the experience to become one of separation, not the internal matrimony that nudity naturally calls us into. This work is a place where homophobia and separation are working themselves up and out toward the surface, showing up not in protest, but only to be healed and integrated into societies new versions of itself for the greater good. And that is what Tom hopes for, to call forth the worn out has been homophobias and have them all rise again and come on out into the light for healing, or in the case of his Men In Blue Water, he would have them get in the pool and be christened once and for all with the love and self acceptance found in this body of work.


SIDE BAR: Tom Bianchi - Men in Blue Water Exposure Gallery 436 North Palm Canyon Palm Springs, CA 92262 760-327 5995 Event Date Saturday Evening November 5, 2005 7-9 pm (it will run over) Sponsors - Mischief Cards and Gifts, Tom Bianchi.com, Smirnoff Vodka, and The Bottom Line