That come every year,’’ said Brent Clevidence, a co-owner of Level, a sleek, year-old restaurantĪnd bar in the Short North that is popular with the gay crowd. The nation’s gay-friendliest campuses.) ‘‘You have this new crop of hot young guys (Campus Pride, a national gay college group, just ranked O.S.U. The campus, adjacent to the Short North, is a youth-driven city unto itself that draws thousands of young peopleįrom all over the Midwest each fall, among them lesbians, gays and transgender students hungry for the relative openness of the city and the campus. That’s due in part to Ohio State, the nation’s second largest university, with 55,0000 students. like the Short North, German Village and the lesbian stronghold of Clintonville - the gay quotient is far higher than 6.7 percent. That’s a farĬry from more than 10 percent in San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, Minneapolis and Seattle, but it’s higher than most Midwestern cities, including Chicago (5.7 percent). In Ohio’s capital city, gay men, lesbians and bisexuals make up about 6.7 percent of the population of about 750,000, according to a 2006 study by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. New York - and made my environment what I wanted.’’
Rather than move to New York, Reaume said, ‘‘I turned Columbus into He’s also the father of an 11-month-old son, Thadeus, having been the sperm donorįor friends, a lesbian couple, and he lives in a four-room 1948 Lustron ‘‘kit home’’ that he bought for $63,000. With income as a window-display builder for Victoria’s Secret, whose owner, Limited Brands, has its headquarters in Columbus. ‘‘There’s so much opportunity to show work here.’’ Reaume has found a market for his abstract canvases and sculptures along ‘‘Iįell in love with it,’’ he told me at his shop. But his brother, already in Columbus, needed a roommate for a year. Reaume, 37, grew up outside Detroit and 10 years ago was on his way to an artist’s life in New York. His tatty-cool neighborhood isn’t Bushwick or the Tenderloin it’s Kenmore Park in northeast Columbus, Ohio, in, as he put it to me onĪ recent visit, ‘‘a very good pocket in the middle of the ghetto.’’ And that funky strip with his shop, Birchwater Studios, is North High Street in Columbus’s Short North, which has goneįrom sketchy to stylish in the past 15 years. Two years ago he created ‘‘There’s No Truth in Silence,’’ an installation in his studio - which isĪmong a warren of artists’ spaces in an old warehouse - that drew thousands one weekend with its controversial use of the American flag, a swastika, a cross and a chair emblazoned with the word ‘‘fag.’’īut the life that Reaume leads isn’t in Brooklyn or San Francisco.
He collects with the shop’s co-owner, Nancy Carlson, who lives upstairs. In a small shop on a funky strip of cafes, bars and galleries, he sells his paintings along with the vintage housewares that Neighborhood, in a house filled with midcentury furniture and quirky art by him and his friends. He lives in what real estate agents call a ‘‘transitional’’ Lean, tattooed and hunky in the way of a young Henry Rollins, Brian Reaume is living the life of a gay indie Brooklyn or Bay Area artist.