MASS0029
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.