0028MASS
I mean, there aren’t a lot of ways of talking
about, like, the sex you’re having or something,
and it feels weird...
My work right now, and this project especially,
is not based around queerness as an identity so
much as it is [based around] this single practice.
Can you tell us about that?
he scene of this practice is basically that cit-
ies with major gay populations (London, New
York, Sydney, Melbourne) have large groups of
gay men who take pretty intense drugs to have
long sessions of group sex, and it’s treated as
a “public health problem.” But then there’s this
whole subculture that’s developed around it on-
line. In these cities there’s this “party and play”
culture that’s underneath regular gay culture,
and that’s something that’s not getting talked
about in broader discussions about identity and
queerness happening right now.
It’s something that a lot of the time is affecting a
lot of men who are maybe more comfortable in
their gender, these successful, macho cis men.
There’s no framework really for talking about
it, and that’s what I’m interested in in my work:
seeing why this practice has developed and
what we can learn from it.
T
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Is it more of a political/social statement or spreading
a message to the wider public or the community
that you’re in? Is it your identity in it more or just
opening up a discussion?
do think it’s starting the discussion in a sense.
There’s very little writing about it, maybe a
handful of medical journals that write about HIV
conversion rates and it’s pretty standard writing,
like, moral panic* type writing about gay men’s
sexual health.
There isn’t a lot of critical writing about it.
There’s a Vice documentary* (made 2-3 years
ago) that is kinda gross, it’s made by 2 straight
dudes who come in and they film everyone who
is high on meth and everyone looks really scary
and they overlay this ominous, ambient music.
It’s not a bad documentary, but there are a lot
of people looking at this thing that’s happening
where otherwise functional “normal” men are
taking kind of insane amounts of drugs and put-
ting themselves at risk. But they’re continuing to
do it, and some people are asking, “How can we
help this?” But you’ve gotta start a discussion
around why this is happening some other way
than that these people are disgusting or deviant
or something. So I kinda want it to be a discus-
sion.
I
Coming back, do you feel like your choice to not
make it super public or published helps the whole
concept, since you want it to spread a message?
aybe, it’s hard… So the first time I did this
project and presented work about it peo-
ple kind of jumped to conclusions really quickly.
There was a piece of writing I did where I was
talking about different forms of
engagement
and forms of consumption, and I was saying,
“What if we could look at this not in the frame-
works of addiction or compulsive behaviour but
as just another way of engaging with media?”
And everyone was like, “Oh, so you’re saying
we should all take meth etc.”. And because it’s
so provisional... It’s really intense subject mat-
ter, and I’m worried about it coming off as just
like a promotional thing or coming off like some
charity thing – like, helping the poor meth ad-
dicts, or whatever. So I think for me, for now it’s
still a work in progress. It’s also a very person-
al project in some ways, and I like that people
that come to see it get to witness me thinking
through it, but I’m not ready to send this baby
out into the world.
M
Does your art define you? / It is said that you can never assume that the artist is this person that’s talking in
the first person (literature), do you feel like this principle could be seen in your work or is it just pure “I’m in
this and I’m going to tell you how it actually is”?
n this case, it is something that I have experience with. Most of the discussions about this culture
revolve around the role of technology in it and there are a lot of “emerged after AIDS” frameworks
for discussing it, and those frameworks are the only ones I’ve known. A lot of people will be like,
“Well this thing happened because suddenly there were these hook-up apps where you could find
people within a minute of you,” but that was the context I came into sexual maturity in while growing
up in London. I was immediately exposed to this, and I’ve never known a world where this wasn’t
a thing.
I
So is it safe to assume your art based off of your own
experiences?
ell, I think it’s totally fair for people to make
art about things that they have no expe-
rience with, and I don’t wanna be like “No one
can do that”, but I think I would feel weird talking
about something I don’t know. I personally only
feel qualified to speak about what I have expe-
rienced.
W
So what actually differs your approach to this top-
ic (as mentioned, there are different frameworks
around it)?
bviously I’m generalizing the main ways of
approaching it.The main ways people talk
about it are, firstly, the conceptual frameworks
around addiction and drug use, and secondly,
existing frameworks of thinking about gay male
sexuality that emerged culturally and socially af-
ter the AIDS crisis*. Those are the two main ways
of talking about it.
The majority of queer theory of the last 40 years
has been pretty psychoanalytically driven, so
people will be writing about death and desire
O
being in this eternal dance with each other be-
cause people were literally dying because of the
sex they were having - it’s understandable that
that’s the way people have often thought about
it, and there’s this high-stakes trauma to those
discussions, but that’s only productive up to a
point. I think there’s something kinda sad about
an approach to queer sexuality that ends with
deep pessimism, and that it’s always gonna be
this sad, nostalgic thing that can never be the
same because of this cultural trauma, or a situ-
ation where you’re forced to imagine some sort
of utopic elsewhere. There’s a lot of queer writ-
ing that I love that’s about utopia and futurity,
but I think it fails inadequate when considering
this topic specifically. There’s some reason that
people, gay men in particular, are doing this right
now, and I think it has to do maybe with the vio-
lence of masculinity and I think it has to do with
homophobia.