[2] He attended the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut and graduated from Yale University in 1985.

His mother was the half-sister of writer Gore Vidal and a stepsister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

In 1974, his parents divorced and later that same year, his mother married her second husband, Michael Straight.

[1] He painted in a style that mixed dreamlike allegory with Expressionist-tinged realism and incorporated art history references.

In the 1990s, his work increasingly dealt with AIDS and many of his paintings showed male figures alone nearly nude or clothed in women's attire.