Originally from Washington DC and educated at the Cornish School of Art, Carlyle Kneeland Bate, who called himself Neel Bate in everyday life and Blade for his illustration work, joined the United States Merchant Marines and sailed on tankers around the world, spending his free time sketching his shipmates.

Arriving in New York in the late 1940s, he earned a living as a designer, creating residential wall patterns and interiors. He was also creating homoerotic art for his own enjoyment and that of his friends, but deliberately kept it underground.

When his first series, The Barn, was created and distributed, it was quickly confiscated. The New York Police Department arrested those who attempted to circulate copies of the images. Shortly thereafter, bootlegged copies of these prints were made and traded underground with none of the proceeds going to the artist. In addition, all of his original work done prior to the mid-1950s was stolen from him at gunpoint in 1956.

Bate/Blade is often considered a precursor to Tom of Finland and others, as many of these artists trace their first consciousness of genuinely and overtly gay images to the badly photocopied editions of The Barn. Into the 1970s and 1980s Bate created work for many gay magazines, including Mandate, Skin, and The Advocate. He also wrote fiction which often accompanied the illustrations.

In 1980 the Stompers and the Leslie Lohman Gallery, the commercial precursor to the Leslie Lohman Gay Art Foundation, reconstructed and republished The Barn. After his death Bate left his entire artistic estate to the Foundation, and the museum houses more than four hundred pieces of Bate’s work, including many photographic slides believed to have been taken by George Platt Lynes (1907–55), a close friend of Bate.