"New York City "captured" Odom as a wonderfully hedonistic fantasy world-one which would sadly turn upside down around 1985, when the AIDS crisis took hold. One of the ways Odom survived and made sense of the horrific destruction of AIDS was through his artwork. As AIDS decimated his friends and fellow artists through the 1980s and '90s, Odom created beauty from pain, often immortalizing loved ones in his drawings."
""I never separated who I was from what I drew," Odom says. "This total kaleidoscope of wonderful things, horrible things, disease, creation, death. I mean, it was like all these things happening simultaneously. I just thought, no one's ever going to believe this. This sounds like a crazy person made the story up, but it was my life.""
"One of Odom's other coping mechanisms for the terrible losses in his life was to dive into designing the Gene Marshall doll modeled after a fictional glamorous starlet of the Hollywood golden age. The doll was a huge hit. But hidden behind its success was that the doll was named after Odom's then boyfriend who was dying of AIDS during the doll's creation."
Mel Odom created intricately detailed, unmistakably homoerotic imagery that reshaped queer visual culture across magazines, novels, albums, and a Time Magazine cover. He discovered art early, trained in fashion illustration at Virginia Commonwealth University, studied in England, and moved to New York City in 1975. New York became a hedonistic fantasia that was upended by the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s. Odom coped by channeling grief into his art, often memorializing lost friends and lovers. He also designed the successful Gene Marshall doll, named for a dying boyfriend, and a short documentary about his life is now in development.
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