In his newest visual project, The Queer Garden of Eden, artist and visionary Barry Brandon returns to the beginning, not just of creation, but of narrative control. Reclaiming one of the most iconic stories in Judeo-Christian tradition, Brandon reimagines the Garden of Eden as a queer, QT/BIPOC sanctuary, a dreamlike place where pleasure, truth, and divinity converge.
This stunning photoshoot and accompanying film mark the first installment of Brandon’s bold “Holey Week” series, a queer reinterpretation of canonical spiritual stories that centers those historically excluded from them. And in Eden, Brandon isn’t just tweaking the myth—he’s rewriting it from the roots up.
“If the beginning itself is flawed,” Brandon tells Gayety, “then everything after becomes a reaction to that. I wanted to go back to the origin story and say, what if the ‘fall’ wasn’t a fall at all? What if it was a rise? What if the fruit was knowledge, and knowledge was liberation?”
A New Genesis, Born from Divine Defiance
The Queer Garden of Eden expands on themes Brandon explored in his earlier work Divine Defiance, which challenged systems that silence queer voices. While that piece was about resistance, Eden is about transformation.
“This project came from a very personal place,” Brandon shares. “It was about reclaiming stories that have been used to shame us, to tell us that our existence is something to hide or ‘heal.’”
In Brandon’s retelling, Eve isn’t punished for seeking knowledge, she’s honored for it. The truth flows not from God to man, but from a queer, feminine lineage: from Satan to the serpents (cast as AFAB women), to Eve (portrayed by a transgender woman), to Adam, and finally to queer men.
“It just made sense,” he explains. “Women as the first truth-tellers? Of course. A trans woman being open enough to receive that truth and follow her intuition? That’s divinity. The truth had to come from the girlz.”
Building a Visual Language of Liberation
The film’s aesthetic is rich, surreal, and steeped in spiritual iconography, yet unmistakably queer. Apples, cherries, pomegranates, and live snakes (yes, real ones) appear throughout the set as symbols of forbidden knowledge. But here, that knowledge is no longer dangerous—it’s sacred.
“I wanted it to feel like stepping into a dream you vaguely remember having,” Brandon says. “Surreal, yes, but deeply familiar. A soul memory.”
Biblical and religious art were reference points, but Brandon intentionally queered these elements, reshaping them into something both reverent and revolutionary. “We twisted them, softened them, made them ours,” he says.
Every casting choice and visual decision was intentional, from who played which roles to how bodies were positioned. The goal wasn’t just aesthetic beauty, but to create a visual language that declared: This space is holy because we are here.
From Collective Energy to Cinematic Dream
For Brandon, creating the ethereal tone of The Queer Garden of Eden began long before cameras rolled. “It started with energy,” he says. “We had deep conversations about what Eden meant to us, not just the myth, but the feeling of it. Safety. Expansion. Play.”
Every performer brought their full self to the project. Brandon wanted presence, not performance. “I wanted the camera to capture embodiment, not acting,” he explains. “The dreamlike quality came from trusting the moment and letting it breathe.”
As with much of his work, Eden introduces individual characters through a shared narrative. “It’s individuality within togetherness,” he says. “That’s always been part of my visual language.”
Holey Week: Queer Divinity Unleashed
The Queer Garden of Eden is the first chapter in Brandon’s “Holey Week” series, his own subversive, spiritual remix of Christianity’s Holy Week.
“Holey Week is about reclaiming the sacred gaps—where religion tried to cut us out, we now insert ourselves back in,” Brandon explains. “It’s about the sacred holes in our stories, our identities, our bodies. Where there were wounds, we make altars.”
Each piece in the series reclaims a different part of the queer spiritual journey, and Eden lays the foundation for a radical re-envisioning of what divinity can look like. “This is just the beginning,” Brandon says. “We are rewriting everything.”
From Repression to Reclamation
Brandon’s own upbringing in a religious environment deeply informed his need to reclaim spiritual space. “When you grow up queer and religious, you learn that parts of you are wrong before you even know what they are,” he says. “I spent a long time trying to find peace with a version of spirituality that excluded me.”
That journey ultimately led him not to compromise, but to create a new form of spiritual wholeness. “I realized, I don’t need their peace. I need my own.”
Reimagining Eden wasn’t just a creative act, it was healing. “It was about saying: we exist. We have always existed. And if there is a divine story, queerness was there from the beginning.”
Sacred Bodies, Divine Truth
At the heart of The Queer Garden of Eden is a reclamation of QT/BIPOC bodies in a sacred context, images still rarely seen in mainstream visual narratives.
“QT/BIPOC bodies have so often been painted as sinful, hypersexual, dangerous—or erased entirely,” Brandon says. “To center them not as supporting characters but as divine protagonists is an act of rebellion, and of love.”
He hopes the work acts as a mirror for those who’ve never seen themselves reflected in sacred stories. “I want people to look at this and feel seen. Not just tolerated – central. Not just surviving – divine.”
Sensuality as Sacred Wisdom
Brandon rejects the binary between sensuality and spirituality, calling it a false division used to control marginalized bodies.
“Our bodies are not the opposite of our spirits—they are the entry point to them,” he says. “To feel pleasure, to explore your identity, to choose your truth—these are sacred acts.”
In Eden, the sensual is spiritual. “That’s what has always scared institutions,” he adds. “Free people cannot be controlled.”
Responses, Resistance, and Revolution
The work has sparked deep emotional responses, and some resistance. “I’ve had people cry, write to me about how it helped them rethink their childhood faith,” Brandon says. “And yes, I’ve had pushback too.”
But that tension, he says, is part of the process. “Reclamation will always come with resistance. My job isn’t to appease. It’s to provoke. To expand. To invite.”
“Honestly, if everyone agreed with what I was doing, I’d probably be doing it wrong.”
A Garden to Belong In
Looking ahead, Brandon hopes The Queer Garden of Eden finds its way to the queer youth who need it most—particularly QT/BIPOC audiences still searching for sacred reflections of themselves.
“My hope is that this feels like a homecoming,” he says. “That younger queer humans can see themselves not just surviving, but glowing. Ruling. Being divine.”
