Thomas was born in 1948 in Elizabeth, NJ, and spent much of his childhood in nearby Linden. His talent for sculpture emerged young, when he built a detailed model altar for his Catholic school that was featured in local newspapers. He became acutely aware of his sexuality at a young age when he was rejected –often violently– by both classmates and his own father. A formative incident occurred when Thomas was in fifth grade, when he spent his paper route money on a flower-petal-thin pink opalescent pink teacup, which his father accidentally smashed. This moment went on to inform virtually all aspects of Thomas’ art, from the materials he’s inspired by to his preferred subject matter, a mix of the sacred and the profane. 

From 1965-66, Thomas went to art school, at Pratt Brooklyn,NY, but had to drop out due to financial constraints. His father tried to rope him into a manly and butch ditch digging crew with the hope a future in the NJ construction union in Linden, but when Thomas saw that he’d be working with “everyone that ever wanted to murder me in high school,” he ran away to New York for good. He spent some time on the street, panhandling, but the community of fellow young queer runaways that he found was grounding for him. 

Thomas, found a brand new gay social circle, which included downtown artists like Charles Ludlam, Jackie Curtis, and Jack Smith. He also was friendly with Marsha P. Johnson, who he met when they both were living on the streets. Marsha knew everyone, and like Thomas, would to go to the Flower District in the winter to see tropical plants at 4am. Thomas was part of the community partying at the Stonewall Inn, witnessed the birth of numerous drag houses including the House of LaBeija and the beginnings of what would later become vogueing. He took part in the Stonewall uprising in 1969, and was photographed there by Village Voice photographer Fred W. McDarrah. He is one of the few recognized Stonewall veterans still living. In the years following the uprising, Thomas would work closely with McDarrah to identify and humanize the other people in McDarrah’s Stonewall photos so they weren’t just “generic f*gs [with] no names.”

In 19679, he started exhibiting his artwork in his apartment, where he’d guide guests through the show in deliberately-bad drag as a collector named Ethel Dull (mocking a famous art collector named Ethel Scull.) During this era, Thomas would give his art away rather than selling it, out of a sense of Franciscan modesty. This practice eventually led to his first major sale to a well-known art collector named Holly Solomon, who was intrigued by Thomas’ gold rat sculptures, which she noticed in a friend’s bathroom. The piece she later bought from him, “The Cuckoo Egg Cup Under Spilling Plastic Flowers,” is now displayed in the Museum of Modern Art. His works have also been exhibited in the Whitney Biennale, the Whitney Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum, as well as a solo retrospective show at MoMa PS 1. Thomas’ status as a beloved community figure empowered him to get a job teaching in the MFA program of the School of Visual Arts, where he has taught for 30 years. He refers to his artistic career as “miraculous” and the opposite of Jackson Pollock. Where Pollock “is about the big shoulders, moving, throwing; mine’s about a limp wrist.”

Bio Author: Charlotte Lang-Bush