It wasn't an ordinary art opening. Feature's main gallery was packed with men in leather biker jackets, boots and the coded signifiers of desire--keys, chains, and cuffs dangling from the appropriate loops. Their dress seemed an elaborate homage to Tom of Finland's homoerotic drawings hanging on the walls but known mainly through reproduction in porno magazines. Or perhaps art was imitating a life no longer possible but once inspired by art like this. The gathering of the thirty- or fortysomethingish clan was a poignant reminder of how distant the heyday of that Saint-ed past now seems: As one friend observed wistfully, "You'd think there'd be some sexual tension..."

In Feature's rear gallery, a group show called HoHoHoMo offered decidedly more "mainstream" gay artworks by five artists who usually show in East Village or Soho-style venues: Arnold Fern, Richard Hawkins, Kevin Larmon, Johnny Pixchure, and Kevin Wolff. If the juxtaposition of their "high art" and Tom of Finland's pop cultural "artifacts" is rare, the regular exhibition of gay art in a mixed, mainstream context is unprecedented in the art world. Hudson, the pioneering integrationist behind Feature, is beginning to garner a national reputation. Just a few months ago, he moved his four-and-a-half-year-old gallery from Chicago to its present location on Soho's Broome Street.

Despite its much ballyhooed liberalism and generous financial response to AIDS, the art world may be only slightly less homophobic than most professional communities. The number of lesbian and gay artists who populate it is, of course, legion. Those who make gay and lesbian art are few and their exhibition opportunities are slimmer than Oprah Winfrey. Plenty of dealers feel comfortable showing conceptually oriented artworks such as Kevin Larmon's canvases with overpainted gay porno backgrounds. Tenderly drawn images of homosex lovemaking are something else entirely.

Gay galleries come and go in New York, most notably gone is the ambitious Robert Samuels Gallery. Ghettoization has been their modus operandi, whether they've focused exclusively on homoerotic art or on more "high art" gay production. Feature is not one of these: gay group shows and Tom of Finland's suave and soulful drawings are atypical Feature fare. In the case of Tom of Finland, Hudson wished his drawings did not trigger art world homophobia: "If you want to discuss Tom's work in terms of simulation or codification you can. It's the [gay] content that's being discriminated against."

That only 20 percent of artists he shows make gay art seems natural to him. "Of course, I want to see gay representations, but that's not all I want to see. I like diversity." Much of Hudson's reputation derives, on fact, from his knack for spotting the moment's best and brightest artists of any ilk. Debora Duez Donato, director of the State of Illinois Art Gallery in Chicago, observed that "Hudson had the best--the toughest--eye in town."

Hudson opened his Chicago gallery on April Fool's Day, 1984, with a Richard Prince show, then featured Haim Steinbach, Sherrie Levine, and Jeff Koons during the next year and a half. At that time, these artists were still emerging. Hudson asserts that he sold Steinbach's work before any other dealer and gave Jeff Koons an early show. "Richard Prince told me I sold more of his work than Baskerville + Watson or Richard Kuhlenschmidt [/Simon Gallery in Los Angeles], but that wasn't much. No one was buying or talking." He paused. "Collectors only have ears, not eyes."

No longer drawn to the Koons/Steinbach brand of commodification-oriented art, Hudson is currently attracted to what he terms "Softer-edged, less slick art with a poetic criticality about it." That difficult-to-imagine characterization makes sense in connection with upcoming shows: Peter Huttinger's ambiguous abstractions of festering surfaces and objects, and Jeanne Dunning's photographic gender-plays on woman with facial hair and images of hard-to-identify orifices.

Hudson's taste for aggressively edgy art also applies to his own work as a performance artist. The 38-year-old MFA-painter with the shaved head danced professionally with Contemporary Dance Theater and the Judy Gregg Dance Company from 1974 to 1980. By 1979 his choreographic gestures and theatricalization of everyday activities led to solo performance works. The five-minute climax of one performance: While walking between two rows of chairs to the accompaniment of a punky rendition of Strawberry Fields Forever, he carried signs citing the consequences of AIDS and recited Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade ("Into the valley of death rode the six hundred").