About a week ago, at the beginning of Pride Month and the unofficial start of summer, the Albany writer Alan Bennett Ilagan wrote a post on his blog in which he mused on the duality of the season. For an audience that he says visits the blog a combined million times a month, Ilagan wrote, in his typically lush prose, “Summer often opens portals to the past,” saying that the warmest months of the year “can burn or hiss or soothe or wimper. … Midsummer madness is much more than mere alliteration.”
The blog post interweaves Ilagan’s reflections with an examination of the Taylor Swift song “Cruel Summer,” cites his teen niece’s reaction to the pop tune and includes a dozen links to past posts from the blog, now in its 20th year. Illustrating the summer-is-here post are three 2005 photos of a hunky Ilagan in an electric-blue Speedo at his backyard pool. (Like almost all of his blog photos, he took the portraits himself.) The images so fevered the imagination of a painter who specializes in the male form that his pastel on paper of Ilagan in the blue swimsuit is for sale for $3,900.
A decade ago, in the last week of June alone, Ilagan — who now has a senior H.R. position for a state agency as his day job, from which he can’t access his own blog because of the content — posted more than 20 photos of men in Speedos. A dozen of them were of himself, though that week he also celebrated the pleasures of awakening early, wrote about Ilagan’s husband swimming with their then-preschool niece and nephew, penned a paean to quinoa (recipe included), recounted a salvage operation for a drowned iPhone and rhapsodized about a rose campion, or lychnis, one of the many flowers in his beloved home garden in Loudonville.
Like his view of summer, Ilagan, who turns 48 in August, is a study in contrasts.
“I love to write, but I don’t like to be assigned to write. I always hated that in school,” he…
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