Hugh Steers, who died of AIDS at the age of 32, painted and sketched intimate portraits of men in domestic settings, drawing on the tradition of Edward Hopper, Paul Cadmus, and Pierre Bonnard. Steers’s poignant vignettes reveal the artist’s own hopes and fears as he bravely and unapologetically lived life and made art under the specter of AIDS. Painted shortly before the artist’s death in 1995, White Gown (1994) celebrates Queer identity. The composition features a Black man attired in an elegant white gown and platform heels posing in front of a mirror. Steers’s anonymous figure appears both empowered and unstable. His precarious stance alludes to the treacherous emotional, social, and political landscape gay men were forced to navigate as a results of the AIDS epidemic. Reinforcing this allusion, the man’s billowing white gown recalls that of Steers’s Hospital Man avatar, which the art historian James Smalls once described as “… a superhero fighting for the sexual rights of the sick.” Ultimately, works like White Gown (1994) were deeply personal for the artist and helped him simultaneously accept and explore his sexuality and illness. As he wrote to a friend, “Remember how we talked about one’s art creating one’s consciousness rather than exposing some pre-existing truth?”