Making pictures of men: painter Marcelino Goncalves and the art of the manly gaze.

Marcelino Goncalves has a queer eye: not for the pumped-up beefcake that has become synonymous with gay art and photography but for the more subtle and soulful aspects of male sexuality. The 37-year-old San Diego--born oil painter renders football players, highway patrolmen, camp counselors, businessmen, and boys next door bathed in the hazy brilliance of summer light. His imagery and style are a world away from the homoeroticism of Abercrombie & Fitch and the explicit promises of "straight college boys go wild" Web sites.

"It's just not sexy," the artist says of the rapidly dissolving line between advertising and pornography. He is bringing back another kind of sexy--the one that lived in the imaginations of 20th-century novelists like Thomas Mann, author of Death in Venice, and the portraiture of English painter David Hockney. Goncalves's work, which was recently shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles (through December 16), shows men as "idealized but humanized." His paintings may incite desire but are much more likely to inspire curiosity.

A visit to his Los Angeles studio, not far from the campus of the University of Southern California, also raises questions. Who, for instance, is the handsome soldier staring out from the half-finished canvas on the wall, and why does he look so much like the young man wearing what appears to be a prom tuxedo?

Both images are of Pat Tillman, the 27-year-old NFL player who two years ago was killed by friendly fire as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan. In Tillman, Goncalves has found a man who pushes both personal and political buttons. "He is the typical G.I. Joe," Goncalves says, "scary and sexy, square-jawed in an almost unreal way." Tillman's equally unreal-seeming death, whose circumstances were initially covered up by the U.S. government, is a painful symbol of conflict, Goncalves says, not just in the global theater of war but also within our selves.

Growing up a first-generation American, one of six children of a Portuguese immigrant fisherman, Marcelino Goncalves had some struggles with his burgeoning sexuality. "I went to an all-boys school and I wasn't a big flaming queen; you couldn't be. So I became Mr. Everything. I lost my virginity to a girl at 15. I was friends with the smart geeks, but I could also play sports, and I could have my hair a foot high and wear black eyeliner and sneak out to see the Cure in concert."

After graduation he moved to New York City, attended New York University and the School of Visual Arts, and watched his East Village community of the late 1980s get torn apart by AIDS. "It was very important to be political at the time," he says of the art scene then. "I shied away from that; being so young, that wasn't what I wanted to talk about."

After a trip back home to California, Goncalves realized that New York depressed him, so he moved back in with his parents, enrolling in a fine arts program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he joined the rowing team. "I didn't have that kind of college experience in New York," he recalls. "I wanted to do something that was very structured, and I wanted the experience of that fraternal initiation to be able to understand that side of being a man."

For the past seven years he has come to the studio to work on paintings that explore the tensions between being a man and loving another man. Outside the studio, he and his boyfriend are California domestic partners. "I'm a registered homosexual," he says laughing.

In art as he did in sports, Goncalves returns to the same elemental game of truth or dare: "The sticking point is always, Where do I fit in? Or do I fit in?"

He looks around his studio walls. They are covered with soldier paintings and studies of winter landscapes and the pigeons that roost in the eaves of his balcony but also decorated with rowing medals from college meets and the Gay Games.

"My work is very traditional in a lot of ways," Goncalves acknowledges. Yet, much like the gay member of a rowing team, it provides different strokes. "I think artists are now at a real juncture about how to react and how to apply ourselves, particularly when we talk about masculinity. I don't want to be confined to a category, but if a label gets put on me, then so what?

Keeps writes for the Los Angeles Times Home section.