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, more than 60 years later.  The moustache turned white in 1990; note how big the old ears have gotten.

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 to download them for FREE in various sizes suitable for coloring and/or framing. Second, you ought to check out my writings (novels, memoirs, short stories, plays and poetry) and my artwork (other drawings, sculpture, and photography), again all up for FREE downloads.

The other purpose of this website is to be my digital avatar, a virtual wonder that might even survive my physical being.  Since I believe we live on in the memories of the living, this avatar might even help me achieve an ethereal immortality.  That would be cool.

I also 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 almost 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 almost eight decades I’ve evolved through that many distinct personas, each quite different and living in quite different realities.  Click on the link to go directly to that persona:

1. Cute, clueless kid in the backwoods of Arkansas (18 years)
2. Sexy young faerie in New Orleans’ unreal French Quarter (5)
3. Reluctant father and scholar in northern universities (5)
4. Hippie poet, footloose and feckless (2)
5. Courtesan in a grand Victorian house in Washington DC (8)
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. Venerable old queen, retired as an artist and writer (8 and counting).

By now in mid-2020, my sporadic blog has accumulated well over a hundred 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.

In spite of the current viral scourge, with my good genes a ninth persona may well lurk in my future, hopefully even a tenth as I’ve never been a cat-person.  But if this eighth incarnation is all I get, I’m going to spend it writing and drawing as much as I can.  Because that’s what I do and therefore who I am.

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