A soldier in Grant Wood's 1927 pencil study for a stained glass veterans' memorial window in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is queer desire incarnate. Okay, maybe not the first thing you think of when the name of the "American Gothic" painter comes up, yet there it is, right out in the open.

The subject is a lanky young artilleryman representing the War of 1812, his bare torso lean and wiry -- you can imagine the grunt work of loading, positioning, and firing the big guns would've sweated the last traces of baby fat off of him. He's wearing only a crotch-hugging pair of bell-bottom trousers and a small hat with a flat brim, and he stands in a flattering contrapposto pose, alert but relaxed. His right hand holds his ramrod erect as it rises out of the frame. There's nothing of exhaustion, fear, desperation, or any other emotion in his expression; his face is neutral, calmly meeting the viewer's gaze with his own.

If that ain't a gay fantasy pinup, I don't know what is. Talk about sexual objectification! There's no proof, but plenty of speculation, that Grant Wood was a closeted gay guy in a sham marriage, but for me this picture's the clincher -- there's no way in hell a straight guy would've chosen to draw a young man in a come-hither pose that blatant, not in Jazz Age America. (I repeat, I'm writing about the pencil study; the figure executed in stained glass stands in a rigid, academic pose devoid of the study's arresting individuality. Even half-naked, the stained glass cannoneer is, like his five fully-clothed comrades representing conflicts from the Revolutionary War to World War I, both impressive and uninteresting to look at.)

Wood's paintings always had more of the magazine cover than the Musée des Beaux Arts about them, and their earnest sentimentality stretches even our postmodern taste for trashiness to the limit. "Death on the Ridge Road" is pure melodrama, "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" is pure kitsch, "Parson Weems's Fable" and "Daughters of Revolution" are grotesquely comic (The latter transforms Macbeth's three witches into tight-lipped American dowagers), and his numerous, rolling Midwestern landscapes are more like backdrops for an Aaron Copland ballet score than commentaries on anything in the material world. "American Gothic" (1930) is Wood's masterpiece, the painting in which his struggle to transform himself from a second-rate Impressionist into an American disciple of the medieval Flemish portraitists had succeeded beyond question. Twelve years later he was dead, from pancreatic cancer, just shy of his 51st birthday.