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
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