American artist Paul Cadmus was BOTD in 1904. Born in New York City to artist parents, he studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, while working as a commercial illustrator. In 1931, he and his lover Jared French moved to Majorca in Spain. They returned to New York in 1933 where Cadmus became one of the first artists to be employed by The New Deal public art programme, painting murals in post offices. He caused a national scandal with his 1934 painting The Fleet’s In!, a highly eroticised depiction of firm-buttocked and well-hung sailors soliciting women (and each other). After an outcry from the US Navy, the painting was removed from public exhibition, but the resulting publicity made Cadmus a national celebrity. In 1937, over 7,000 people visited his first one-man show in New York City. Other prominent works from this time include YMCA Locker Room, Shore Leave and Greenwich Village Cafeteria, essaying the queer cruising culture of 1930s New York. He hit trouble again with his 1938 mural Pocahantas Saving the Life of John Smith had to be retouched, after officials objected to a particularly phallic loincloth. Cadmus and French were part of an elite homosexual artistic circle, with friends including Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, George Platt Lynes, Lincoln Kirstein (who married his sister Fidelma), Monroe Wheeler and E. M. Forster, whose portrait he painted while Forster read aloud from his novel Maurice. Cadmus negotiated a complicated relationship with French, their mutual lover his lover George Tooker and French’s wife, depicted in many paintings including The Shower. In 1965, Cadmus formed a relationship with Jon Anderson, a cabaret artist 32 years his junior, living together for the rest of his life. His work fell out of favour after World War Two as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art began to dominate American art, but he continued to paint at least two works a year. His work had a resurgence in popularity during the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, where he was recognised as the spiritual godfather of queer artists Tom of Finland and David Hockney. He died in 1999, aged 94.