MISSION: COLLECTING

“As you see, I have a lot of phalli lying around,” quips Charles Leslie, who co-founded the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York with his late partner J. Frederic “Fritz” Lohman.

Leslie sits, legs crossed, on a couch in the museum’s foyer, where a recreation of his 1,800-square-foot SoHo loft, just around the corner, has been staged as an exhibition titled “Male Gaze: Life, Legacy, Legend.” He motions toward a glass case filled with crystal and ceramic penises, scrimshawed whale-bone dildos—the various explicitly pointed objects for which his apartment, where homoerotic art in all styles and media