For T’s spring travel issue, I wrote about the legacy of the painter Paul Cadmus, his lover Jared French and French’s wife, Margaret French (a trio of artists who called themselves PaJaMa, a combination of the first syllables of their names), who, for about 20 years beginning in the late 1930s, took highly choreographed, often nude photographs of one another and their circle of friends, family and various romantic partners on the beaches of Nantucket and Fire Island. Other pioneers of gay art — Tom of Finland, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol — would later recognize the defiance of Cadmus and his peers; the Pictures Generation, an unofficial group of New York artists, straight and gay, who emerged in the late 1970s and early ’80s — and whose work engaged with cinema and the characters people play in their daily lives — likely wouldn’t have existed without them. Well over a half-century after PaJaMa disbanded, they continue to influence new generations of queer artists, including TM Davy, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Erdem Moralioglu, who are all in the piece. “There’s this feeling that the greats, because they touched on something so deeply personal and transcendent, are there with you,” Davy, who has taken his own version of PaJaMa’s offhandedly sensual pictures, told me. As part of a conversation that ran in Graham Steele’s 2024 book, “Paul Cadmus: 49 Drawings,” the artist Oscar yi Hou even credited Cadmus for the naked selfie: “It’s nice to think that when you send a nude on Grindr, you’re actually participating in an entire lineage of erotic exchange, coterminous with the whole history of human desire.” 🤳 Thanks, also, to the documentary filmmaker Sam Shahid and the gallerist Edward De Luca for being so generous with their time.