Salman Toor (Pakistan, b. 1983) is one of several emerging New York-based artists said to form New Queer Intimism, a movement that draws on the early twentieth-century practice of depicting domestic scenes that intimate social bonds, communal identity, and emotional states, but reconstitutes the prior tradition through representation of queer communities. Based upon his lived experiences in Brooklyn and Lahore, Toor’s paintings depict fictional scenes of domesticity and conviviality amongst young men and occasionally women in snug apartments, crowded bars, and bustling streets in both cities. Thematically, stylistically, and compositionally the paintings emulate the work of earlier Intimists as well as seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European portraitists, yet Toor populates his works with young, queer brown men. In some cases Toor even directly quotes canonical European paintings, such Édouard Manet’s "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" which serves as the source for his "The Bar on 13th Street," but here Toor replaces Manet’s main subjects, a bar maid and her white male client, with a young man with long braided hair, another young man as possible client, and a couple in embrace. By decentering the heterosexual couple, Toor recasts the dynamics of patron-client and the sexual connotations this carried in the original painting as a relationship of homosociality, equity, and intimacy amongst his subjects. This paper analyzes how Toor, in laying claim to multiple traditions and identities, uses a dual process of emulation and revision to challenge prior conceptions of beauty focused on whiteness by appropriating the very canon of its depiction and using it to new ends, while simultaneously eroding the dominant heterosexual desire of canonical European paintings by replacing their sexual object, the female model, with young men. In doing so, Toor creates a world of queer intimacy and community that radically reconceives not only the art historical canon, but also notions of beauty, sexual desire, and masculinity.