First Persona, sweet sixteen at summer camp: my enduring self-image, rather blurry and grainy after so many reiterations, but it still does the job.

Richard Balthazar, at a mere 75. Now in my early 80s, I’ve a white goatee and very long hair (my COVID Coiffe). An updated photo to come soon.

Don’t worry, this website won’t try to sell you anything. As a matter of fact, its main purpose is to give away my handiwork. That’s right, my gift to the world. You’re most welcome.

First and foremost, if you’re interested in my icons of Aztec deities, click here for them or here for my pages of the Aztec Calendar. And please do check out my writings (novels, memoirs, short stories, plays and poetry) and my artwork. all up for FREE downloads.

I believe that one is as one does, both in how we cope with our lives and in what we create.  I am what I do.  So, this website will also be all about who I am and what I’ve done in my long life as a gay man.  Frankly and humbly, I believe that my life has been extraordinary and constitutes an important story in gay history.

In my now ninth decade I’ve evolved through eight distinct personas, each quite different and living in quite different realities.

1. Cute, clueless kid in the backwoods of Arkansas (9 years)
2. Wild faerie slut in New Orleans’ unreal French Quarter (5)
3. Reluctant father and scholar in northern universities (6)
4. Hippie poet, footloose and feckless (2)
5. Courtesan in a Victorian mansion in Washington DC (9)
6. Mature gay gentleman working in the arts in various glamorous cities (16)
7. Grandfatherly gay character, the Used Plant Man of Santa Fe (16)
8. Widely unknown elder writer and artist, retired as an artist and writer (10).

My sporadic blog has now accumulated way too many posts running on about whatever clutters up the mind of this gay elder.  It’s a bunch of egregious essays on my scandalous life and writing, esoteric art, intriguing historical ideas, and questionable philosophy.  Browse its list on the right for some good reads.

With my good genes (and having ceased for all intents and purposes being a sexual personage, gay or otherwise), my ungendered ninth persona has now begun. I’m calling it the venerable iconographer, researcher and/or historical theorist. Hopefully a tenth may lurk in my future as I’ve never been a cat-person. But I no longer feel the need to count.

By the way, the florid figure in the page-banner above is the Aztec god Xochipilli, the Prince of Flowers, in an image I imagined for my 1993 book on the calendar–based on the style of Codex Nuttall.

By another way, the motto up there is the subject of an early blog post.

By yet one more way, besides the Aztecs, another intellectual/artistic theme of my life has been Indian Mounds.

Your comments on any of these pages, images, or whatever are warmly invited.

Enjoy,

Contact me:  rbalthazar(at)msn.com