BODYELECTRIC - ONE (Jonah Almost Cover)

BODYELECTRIC

JONAH ALMOST by SAM WAXMAN

ONE Cover Star: Zane Phillips Photography: Adam Washington Collage: Portis Wasp

Cover Star: Jonah Almost Photography: Sam Waxman

BODYELECTRIC Editor-in-Chief / Creative Director TJ HADDOCK Featuring BRUCE LaBRUCE JEFFERY SELF JONAH ALMOST SLAVA MOGUTIN ZANE PHILLIPS Contributing Conversationalists JACOB MENDEL BROWN JOEY GRAY JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL PETE ZIAS Contributing Photographers ADAM WASHINGTON ALEXIS ROBARDET BLAKE BALLARD CHRIS FUCILE DIEGO URBINA EMIL KOSUGE FABER FRANCO KEVIN SIKORSKI MAXWELL POTH ROGIER ALEXANDER SAM WAXMAN SHANE REYNOLDS SLAVA MOGUTIN STÉPHANE GIZARD TYLER UDALL Contributing Artists PORTIS WASP Contributing Stylists IVAN RAMIREZ JULIAN BAUTISTA DEL TORO TYLER UDALL Featured Models ANTHONY LA ROSA DAVID HARMAN DT JOHNNY & WILLIAM DE COURCY KOLE PARCHMAN KOTA WHITE ŁUKASZ LEJA MASON MORROW RITSE DE JONG SERGIO PERDOMO Special Thanks A/POLITCAL, BARON BOOKS, BRAD SAENZ-CHRISTOPHERSON, CHARLIE BY MZ, EDMUND ENTIN, FERNANDO WEBB, JACLYN BLUMAS, JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL, JESSE HASKO, KYLE DEAN, MATTHEW HOLROYD, MATTHEW ZINK, NICK IKIN, PORTIS WASP, STÉPHANE GIZARD, THOMAS DEKKER, TYLER UDALL Published in Los Angeles, CA. All interviews are edited for length and clarity. bodyelectricmag.com © BODYELECTRIC 2024. All content copyright remains with the author and reproduction of any material without express written permission is strictly forbidden.

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Photography ROGIER ALEXANDER Model RITSE DE JONG

Photography FABER FRANCO Model SERGIO PERDOMO Fashion IVAN RAMIREZ Grooming ANGIE ALMAH

Photographer KEVIN SIKORSKI Model DAVID HARMAN Photo Assistant ALEX RANCMAN

Electronic music maker, enfant terrible, and bona fide selfmade sex symbol Jonah Almost is entering a new chapter.

The pioneering and singular New York-based beat master, known to have his finger on the pulse of all things throbbing in the rave and club scene, opens up to us about his musical process and the repercussions of himbo performance art.

Jonah Almost: Spectrum, that was one of the last gasps of cool underground.

I mean, there are still cool underground parties going on, but I remember when I got here, that moment of discovery for me was like, “Wow, this is the real New York club kid scene that I dreamt of finding.”

Jacob Mendel Brown: Before you started going out on the scene, what did you imagine it was going to be like?

JA: Well, I think I saw “Party Monster” when I was 14 or 15, so I was kind of hoping it would be like that. More underground than it is. I remember the first time I went to Berlin and thinking that my experience going out there was what I had imagined New York to be when I was in my teens. The reality of it was not the same, it wasn’t as edgy or interesting. But I also realize that when I first came to New York, I only dipped my toes in the surface. I went to some Meatpacking District clubs. You have your very basic kind of experience, but it takes a while to find the movers and shakers. The ones who are keeping a pulse of what’s cool and what’s next. I met this kid Cole, who was throwing a lot of these Fundravers for the migrants who were stuck at the border in the detention camps. We met on some gay app in Texas when he was visiting his family, and then we just became friends. At the time, he was going to NYU. So when I came to visit New York that fall, he was like, “Go to Le Bain on a Thursday or Tuesday.” It was when Sophia Lamar had that party “Zigzag Thursday,” and he was like, “Say you’re with Sophia Lamar to get in.” And it was Ian Bradley at the door. That was kind of one of my first nights out. I have a photo of me on my Instagram, it’s archived, if I scroll all the way back, it’s like 2012 or something and I’m taking a picture with Andreja Pejic, the model who later transitioned.

JONAH ALMOST Photography SAM WAXMAN Interview JACOB MENDEL BROWN

JMB: How long until you DJ’d or had a nightlife gig in New York?

JA: A while. Because the first time I came to New York, I was 16. I didn’t move here until the following year when I was 17, and then I didn’t really get my toes in the world until I was probably 19, 20.

JMB: So, were you living in the city at 16 or just visiting?

JA: We were just visiting, and then I moved here at 17. I had a boyfriend and I moved in with him, and then I lived with my grandma for a while. I was kind of just bobbing around.

JMB: I know that your grandmother lives in Queens, and I’ve seen her on your TikTok. You have a cute, homey kind of vibe in some of that. And then the next video, it’ll be looking for somebody to eat ass or something.

JA: I think sex sells. So, there’s this part of me that wants to have fun and make sexy music for people to vibe to, and then there’s also a part of me that loves chilling with family and my grandma. I feel that kind of ties into this evolution I’m going through as an artist, where I feel like I’m trying to step away from this gimmicky identity that I’ve made for myself. It’s starting to overshadow, or outshadow, what I actually care about, which is making good music. Despite the fact that some of my art is maybe really vulgar or sexual, there’s still a core of earnestness and truth in all my expression. I don’t need to shroud it in gimmicks anymore. I feel confident enough to just stand by it. I was kind of like, “Everything is boring,” when I first started releasing music. It was COVID, and all you could do at that point was tap into a fantasy. And so, Jonah Almost was kind of this outlet for me to take my qualities, turn them up to ten, and just say and do outlandish things and create a fantasy universe to live in where it’s sexy and low consequences. Just like fun, easy, himbo party boy energy. But I guess lately, it’s felt a little limiting, and I kind of feel like I’m going through my first artist evolution. It’s like, I did it. I became the sexy “It-Boy” that I wanted to be, that I fantasized about being. I performed the live shows. I performed at the Box, I performed at Paris Fashion Week, I walked the runways, I traveled all over the world, and fucked all the hot guys. I got caught up in living my idea of what a rockstar lifestyle was and really committing to this fantasy in a way that was almost like performance art. The other part about it is that I feel I objectify myself.

And now I’m dealing with the repercussions of that.

JMB: What are the repercussions?

JA: When you become a sex symbol, your interactions with people are inherently loaded with this expectation.

JMB: Like, people are expecting sex, or what does that mean?

JA: People want the fantasy. They want you to live up to their expectations of what they’ve built up of you. These preconceived notions of you being this bombastic, Instagram, middle fingers up, whatever guy, so it’s like the performance never ends. It’s not that there aren’t those parts of me, but again, those qualities are turned up to ten. So, I’m just kind of feeling clowny. As an entertainer, you’re walking this line of doing it for yourself or at the expense of yourself.

“I feel like people don’t necessarily understand that I actually care about the music, and I care about making something good, and that I’ve spent a ton of time teaching myself how to produce” JA: I’m definitely a type, and I attract a certain kind of guy, and that guy is usually this type A, New York career person that has figured everything out and has money but is kind of missing this core ability to live life exuberantly, and that’s where I come in. I’m the manic pixie dream boy trope, so to speak, where I don’t have anything figured out, and objectively, maybe I’m messy as fuck, but one thing I do know how to do is live life with passion.

JMB: So, you land in Paris (for fashion week).

Where do they have you staying?

JA: They have me in this crappy Airbnb, but it was more just the fantasy. I had built up enough of this identity. I’m not a model, you know, I’m not a traditional 6’2” runway model, so there was this sense of, like, “Okay, I guess I’ve made it in this way.”

It was like being recognized as someone who’s interesting enough to be featured as a personality model, which was cool. I also got to perform at the after-party, and Arca was there. So, I got to debut my new song in Paris at a strip club, where I had Chippendales for backup dancers and Arca sitting front row, watching me perform. It was definitely a special moment.

JMB: What’s the artistic evolution? In terms of musical references, you have some Frankie Knuckles and stuff, this wide time span that one wouldn’t necessarily expect from someone who’s an “Instagram hot boy musician.” So, I want to hear more about that.

JA: I feel like right now, my music’s getting faster.

And the evolution is also occurring as I’ve gotten better at producing. The thing is, I feel like people don’t necessarily understand that I actually care about the music, and I care about making something good, and that I’ve spent a ton of time teaching myself how to produce, and I’ve gotten so much better. And every time I release, you can hear the growth. And when you produce your own music vs. rapping or writing a song to somebody else’s beat, there are two sides to the expression for me.

I’m expressing things verbally and lyrically when I sing or rap, but as a producer, I’m also expressing sonically. I’ve found that the harder and longer I work on a beat and the more complex it gets, the less I have to say verbally over it, because I pour so much into the expression that you’re hearing, musically. I feel like my new stuff is a little more, not lyrically vague, but meant to be a little bit more ambiguous.Sonically, I’m really inspired by a lot of music that’s coming out of Berlin right now. And there’s all this German rap that’s being mashed up with club beats, and the voices just sound so sexy, and they’re spread really wide on the audio. It’s like, they’ll center the vocal and then spread it so that it really fills up the listening space. You don’t really hear stuff like that here. When I was in high school, I listened to a lot of hardcore and screamo, and I was listening to a lot of rap. And as an adult, spending time in these club spaces, I discovered electronic music and, you know, the heaviness of that. It’s weird being gay though, because I feel like gay people don’t really understand my music. All my

references are what straight guys are listening to in Germany. But whatever, I just do it for myself.

JMB: Can you paint a visual picture of what it looks like when you’re working on a song?

JA: It’s just me in my living room. I live alone and I just have a big laptop and a desk. And I’m usually smoking a joint, just in the zone, head bobbing, like, that kind of vibe.

JMB: For how long would you sit there?

JA: It depends. There’s a specific energy that I’m in, in my creative flow state. And that can be crazy.

I can sit down at my computer for 8 to 12 hours, no exaggeration. I’m not even thinking about food, I’ll wolf a slice of pizza down just to keep me going and I’m just hitting my vape, in the zone, headphones on. Headphones cause I’ve gotten complaints from everybody in my building, so I try to be a little bit more respectful. I’m not trying to get kicked out.

JMB: Is this morning, night, after you get home from the club?

JA: I’m more of a night person in general, my hours are on vamp mode, so usually, it’s in the evenings from, I don’t know, 9pm to 6am. I’ll go till the sun comes up and then crash and then sleep all day.

JMB: Phone unplugged, people can’t get hold of you?

JA: Depends on how available I want to be. When I’m in that state, I don’t like to let things bother me. That state is just always outta your grasp, you know? So, when I can tap into it, I really tap in and focus, and I get all the expression out and I can’t think about anything else. It becomes obsessive.

I’m at work running to the bathroom to listen to the latest demo I made and take notes on what I need to fix and change. But I love that feeling, it’s such a great feeling. It always sends me into a mania and then I crash really hard, and I don’t take care of myself when I’m in that state. I’m just smoking a ton of weed and vaping and not eating. I can barely keep my eyes open and I’m still at the computer.

And then the next day, after I finish the song, I get really depressed, and I’m like, “What if I can never make something again?” And then I’m haphazardly trying to recreate the magic and I’m just making all these terrible beats that sound awful. So, it’s very tumultuous.

JMB: When you’re in your studio at home, making that track for 12 hours, and it’s not tedious, but the tiniest detail matters, it’s this very, like, granular process, but you’re kind of trying to evoke something that’s so nonmathematical.

JA: Yeah, that’s the other thing. I didn’t realize that you’re kind of coding in this weird way. Like, on the computer, producing stuff, you know? It does feel very engineer vibes.

But I guess, yeah, it’s hard to do. You’re trying to capture a feeling and world build, and I want people to step into my universe and feel what I’m feeling.

I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so that’s why I get really granular with it. It’s like controlled chaos in a way. That’s what a rave is too.

When you think about Berlin, this culture of raving, Germans are very structured, and you get dirty looks and people yelling at you if you jaywalk. But then they’re very good at segmenting their hedonism. So even though their society is super structured, and they’ve super structured their hedonism, when you step into those spaces, it’s all out, balls to the wall, sex, drugs, and techno. The hedonism is

there, it’s just controlled to this space during these times and hours, and people really let it out.

JMB: What’s the best night out in New York you’ve had recently?

JA: I had an amazing time last weekend at the closing party for “Unter,” which is this big techno rave.

They had this amazing venue in Williamsburg that was this old cast iron building right on the water, and it was like 4 floors. It was just grungy. There’s no running water in this building, like, it was really giving you that dark, nasty, rave fantasy, because everything in New York is too polished and clean.

So, I was there for 12 hours, I left the party and my fingernails were black. It was gross, but it was hot.

JMB: Kind of across musical genres, there’s this very visceral connection between music and sex, which obviously is really wrapped up in what you’re talking about, and the language you even use to describe a rave is very sexual.

JA: Well, I think sexiness is something I’m inherently trying to do in everything I do. I think that just speaks to...great art always stimulates some core human urge, whether it’s sex or hunger or anger. All of my favorite songs have an inherent sexiness to them. But that doesn’t mean it has to be so overt, I guess, which is where I’m kind of trying to capture that nuance. I also think sex-magic and all that is really powerful, and I’m really inspired by love. What compels me to create are romantic and sexual experiences. Although I am trying to diversify that.

I read somewhere that most of what culturally is produced in America is always related to love and relationships and for whatever reason, we don’t, as a culture, value art that shows perspectives of the mundane or day-to-day. It always has to come back to some sort of sordid relationship, or pining, heartbreak, or whatever. So, when I heard that, I was like, “Okay, maybe I should try and make something like Deee-Lite.” Just, here’s a fun song about going to the park on a summer day. Ultimately, I just want more listeners. I don’t really care about money. I want to reach people. It’s hard because the models I have before me, the people that I look up to and are doing what I’m doing on a successful scale are also DJs and I’m not a DJ. That’s something I went out of my way to avoid because I feel like I’ve come up in this era where everyone and their mother is a DJ, but no one is producing or making original music.

So, I was like, “I would rather establish myself first as an artist.” I really just want to work with all of my favorite producers, but I feel like I have to establish my own voice and become a force in my own right before I do that. I’m just trying to reach as many people as I can.

“I’m the manic pixie dream boy trope, so to speak, where I don’t have anything figured out and objectively, maybe I’m messy as fuck, but one thing I do know how to do is live life with passion.”

“People want the fantasy.

They want you to live up to their expectations of what they’ve built up of you.

These preconceived notions of you being this bombastic, Instagram, middle fingers up, whatever guy, so it’s like the performance never ends.”

Photography MAXWELL POTH Model MASON MORROW

Photography ALEXIS ROBARDET Model ANTHONY LA ROSA

all swim briefs SEAN & VAL

Self Portrait by Bruce LaBruce

The man, the myth, the legend. Cult filmmaker and artist Bruce LaBruce is in his prime. His film “The Visitor” just premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, while his photography book “The Revolution is My Boyfriend” is unleashed to the world this spring. Purveyor of all things dangerously queer and master of the controversial space where art and pornography intersect, here, in fractured conversation, LaBruce and fellow era-defining punk and friend John Cameron Mitchell reflect upon their trailblazing lives, Dada/Surrealism and the best hustler bars in Schönenberg.

John Cameron Mitchell: Bruce, you and I come from a time that was, I would say, on fire with various things we were dealing with in the queer community. Such as, probably foremost, AIDS-Bruce LaBruce: Oh my God. JCM: And that set fire to lives but it also set fire to Queer Punk.

BLB: Yes. JCM: I mean, when you have Todd Haynes, who’s our punk adjacent person, making “Poison” and “Superstar” and then Jennie Livingston’s documentary (“Paris is Burning,”) the late ‘80s/early ‘90s was very much “OK, this is a time where our fury is real, our lives are at stake.” And the aesthetic of punk, which I would define as breaking things to make things better, which is what I think Trumpists think they are right now too but-BLB: Right. That’s held debate because I recognize in Trump certain punk strategies. Which you don’t want to acknowledge but they are there. Just that he uses them for nefarious purposes. But the technique is there. “J.D.’s,” my Queer Punk fanzine that came out in the ‘80s, which was one of the fanzines that kickstarted the Queer Punk movement, that was a reaction against conservatives and Raegan and the swing to the right but our strategies were borrowed from the Situationists, so we actually pretended that we were a full-blown Queercore movement with hundreds of members and we propped up this spectacle that we were these wild crazy queer punks, which was based on a kernel of truth but then because of that, it snowballed into a real-JCM: A real movement.

BLB: And that’s a kind of Trump thing to do. Because technically, it was fake news.

JCM: You were creating fake news.

BLB: I’ve made 6 films in Berlin, done 4 theater productions there.

I’ve spent a good part of my life there.

JCM: You’re very Berliner.

BLB: There’s this amazing story with my German friends. There was this very specific period of time where, because women have a longer lifespan than men, their fathers were dying first. And then the mothers were the ones that started telling all the stories about their Nazi past after the father had passed away.

JCM: Wow. They were somehow freed.

BLB: Yeah. Which was a very traumatic period for my friends because they learned all these stories about their family’s involvement in the Third Reich. It was really heavy.

JCM: My dad was the military commander in Berlin while I was there.

BLB: I know! That’s insane. Right before the Wall came down.

JCM: Yeah. The 4 years before, he was the military commander. And my dad, a very sweet guy, was also in the closet.

BLB: Oh, I didn’t know that.

JCM: And after I came out in the ‘90s, he told me, but it was in a way of saying “You can do what I did and become heterosexually competent.”

BLB: Pray the gay away.

JCM: Yeah, very Catholic. I said to him it’s not my path and he

respected that and supported me. (He) didn’t want to talk about “Shortbus” or “Hedwig” but he had my back when my mom would say I was going to hell. He’d be like “Shut up, you know he’s a good person.”

BLB: Do you think he had gay lovers?

JCM: In some ways, I hope he did, but he was such a man of duty and discipline-BLB: Wow, that sounds very, you know... “a man of duty and discipline” could come in handy in certain S&M circles.

JCM: They both got Alzheimer’s, which had a strange silver lining in that their dogma and their Catholicism fell away very early with the memory loss, and revealed more of who they were. I kind of got the mom I always wanted because she’d forgotten what she was supposed to do.

JCM: Wilde, Coward, and Orton were my touchstones. Later, Pinter and Beckett. And I actually weirdly had coffee with Beckett the year before he died which was a whole other story-BLB: Wow. JCM: Yeah, changed my life completely. He was very kind and very pure.

BLB: Did you know Albee as well?

JCM: No. Though I was once in the Biograph movie theater when I first moved to New York, and he cruised me there.

JCM: I was the young twink with a point of view when I arrived in New York. Doing musicals here and there but also thinking about writing and directing.

BLB: How old were you then?

JCM: Well, I came to New York at 21 to do “Big River” on Broadway.

BLB: And you came out shortly after.

JCM: Yeah. I was always kind of out, but I publicly came out after I played Larry Kramer in “The Destiny of Me,” and had an interview in the Times and it was nice. The article wasn’t about me coming out, it was just kind of a side thing. Which I liked.

JCM: In ‘92, ‘93, we were in the last horrifying years of the biggest part of AIDS. In the early ‘90s, up until ‘95, ‘96, when the drugs came in, there was just this strange feeling of “this is just part of life.” And at that point, theater and film people were finally engaging with it, in a more mainstream way. Before that, it was grassroots, it was Act Up, it was just fucking surviving. But there was an incredible discipline to the movement to fight AIDS that worked on a lot of levels that I think a lot of people today who have been, let’s say, fighting the power, aren’t always paying attention to or how well it went. Gay men had some resources, money, and influence, as opposed to, say, heroin users who didn’t have any power, generally.

So, there was this incredible multi-pronged approach where some people would talk to Merck and Pfizer and be like “You gotta fucking make this happen.” Others were shaming the major homophobes like the Jesse Helmses and the Bushes and the Reagans, in putting giant condoms on Helms’ house. And then also just getting out in the street. So there was working in the boardrooms, working on the street, working in a film, working in a zine, there was a very direct “we gotta do something or we’re dead.”

BLB: In that film “Long Time Companion,” one of the characters says, “I feel like I’m being stalked...all the time.” That’s how I felt.

I felt there was a kind of monster that was stalking me. It’s pretty profound because the trauma from that is real. And it’s an existential thing where I know so many people from our generation who said, “I’m not gonna make it to 40.”

JCM: They accepted that.

BLB: Yeah, it was just part of their consciousness. And that’s part of maybe why we’re so productive as well.

JCM: Yes. “Not much time! What are we gonna do with it?”

BRUCE LaBRUCE in conversation with JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL

pened where people were like “there’s a bigger issue here: we don’t have healthcare, women get less opportunities for health, people of color even less.” It was bringing that stuff up early.

BLB: Those alliances.

JCM: The club Squeezebox. I know you used to hang out there when you were here.

BLB: Oh yeah.

JCM: The club that we always dreamed of. It was the first truly queer punk rock drag extravaganza with a house band led by Stephen Trask, who wrote the music for “Hedwig,” and my boyfriend was the bassist. I was in pig heaven. I was like “I’m a band wife, I can carry his bass.” I started working with them on “Hedwig,” going to Squeezebox every night and seeing legends, people we thought were legends that other people didn’t. Like people who play beautiful bit parts in John Waters movies. Jean Hill would come up there with a respirator and a wheelchair and sing some punk rock song. Or Angie Bowie, who was a fucking nightmare, but she was Angie Bowie. And Debbie Harry, in a way, kind of returned. The queers never left her, but she was at a lower ebb and then coming back to Squeezebox, she was refreshed again, and “Blondie” came back. So that was a very beautiful time that also started in the last years of AIDS. There was FURY in the air.

Bruce LaBruce

JCM: I was in LA. I had just done an action movie “Band of the Hand” with the “Miami Vice” people. It was very bizarre.

BLB: Were you playing a queer character or--?

JCM: Queer coded, I would say. You know, back then it was like, “Is he gay or is he new wave?”

BLB: Mmhmm.

JCM: So, I was the new wave murderer that killed his father and blew up his school. Even though I wasn’t an official punk, it was in my DNA and weirdly, I moved into that by playing the roles of punk people in TV shows made by people who didn’t really understand it. So, I was always trying to queer up and punk up things in the mainstream, so to speak. And I remember in my head going “Well, this movie’s gonna be a huge hit, I guess I’m gonna have to go into the closet like actors do for their careers.” It was not a hit, luckily.

BLB: I got a chance to hang out with Volker Spengler who starred in “Year with 13 Moons.” His favorite hustler bar in Schönenberg was Tobasco. It still exists actually. There’s 3 hustler bars left in Schönenberg. They’re becoming extinct everywhere-JCM: Everywhere else.

BLB: Yeah, so I would run into him there and-JCM: Did he do a lot of acting after that film?

BLB: Well, he was a Fassbinder regular. He was in “Despair” I think.

He was a huge theater star as well in Berlin. With Susanne Sachße who starred in my movie “The Raspberry Reich.” She actually introduced me to him. He died a number of years ago but I remember we went to his apartment, this tiny apartment that was kind of like a council flat. He was a hoarder; it was packed full of his memorabilia and stuff. He was very gruff and very big. Imposing.

JCM: I moved to New Orleans. I bought a house from an occult church that was once run by Aleister Crowley, so you know, I’m goin’ there. New York, as we know, along with some of the big cities are losing their luster. Getting too expensive. Artistic people are not going there first anymore.

BLB: Well, they can’t survive.

JCM: So, I think the future of art and youth culture is in smaller cities and bigger towns. Even Portland’s too big now. I’m talkin’ about Lawrence, Kansas and Cleveland, and Detroit, wherever something can take hold and find a bit of a community. New Orleans has always had that, and resists change. For better and for worse sometimes.

BLB: Harmony Korine and I almost made a documentary once about the Radical Faeries at Short Mountain. Because I shot him and Gaspar Noé for this Arté TV series called “Into the Night,” I spent a week in Nashville shooting Gaspar visiting Harmony and I was corresponding with one of the Radical Faeries from Short Mountain and they invited us up to film.

JCM: Which is very rare.

BLB: I know. And then it was like quicksilver, it slipped through my fingers and the timing didn’t work out.

BLB: Your monthly club “Mattachine” at Julius Bar-JCM: Right, “Mattachine,” which is connected to Harry Hay who started the Mattachine Society and also coined the term Radical Faerie in the 70s. The Mattachine Society at first was like “We’re just like you, we’re no different than you.” Which at that time was a tactic and it probably helped in some ways. Once Stonewall happened, it was “We’re not like you, we are humans worthy of respect like you, but queer people are special” and, what is it Holly Near said? “We are a gentle people” ...I don’t know if that’s true but there was an identity thing that was beginning now. It was “We are not you; we are us and there’s a gorgeous diversity here.” And Act Up had a goal about AIDS but it also had larger issues about the right to health care, the idea of intersectionality--I’m not a big PC corrector kind of person, I’m not dogmatic about that stuff, but there was an interesting thing that hap-

Baron Books

saying ‘I’m more oppressed than you’.” Guys, oppression Olympics goes nowhere. Nobody gets anything.

BLB: Yeah. Never trust anyone over 22.

BLB: I don’t believe that gay characters have to be played by gay actors.

JCM: No. And straight doesn’t have to be straight. To me, it’s fiction.

And in fact, the whole reasoning lately has been “stay in your own lane, tell your own story, that’s not your story to tell” and it’s like-BLB: How boring-JCM: --any fictional character is not your story to tell if you think of it that way.

BLB: And also, if everyone only has their own story to tell-JCM: You have a Netflix of narcissism. You just have motherfukin’ autobiographies everywhere.

a/political

JCM: What are you up to?

BLB: Well, I just finished this big project in London. It kind of came out of left field. It’s a reimagining of Pasolini’s “Teorema,” called “The Visitor.”

JCM: Ugh, “Teorema” is so brilliant. I just bought that Blu-ray yesterday, the whole Pasolini collection. But that’s, I think, my favorite of his.

BLB: This is super pornographic. It’s so daunting to try to take on Pasolini but it’s trying to reimagine it in a modern context so there’s a lot of non-binary stuff going on. There’s a lot of taking Pasolini’s idea, that he borrowed from Freud, of “family romance.” The sexual tensions within the nuclear family. And taking it to its logical pornographic extreme.

JCM: Who’s your Terence Stamp?

BLB: Well, it’s also about a black refugee so the visitor is played by Bishop Black, who’s a porn performer and an artist that I’ve worked with several times before. He washes up on the Thames in a suitcase.

On a raft in a suitcase.

JCM: I love it.

BLB: It was amazing. Really fun. One of those projects where, like my movie “LA Zombie,” I just had a basic premise and just riffed on it.

Improvisational in some respects. It was creatively really exciting. So that’ll be showing in festivals next year (2024).

JCM: Fantastic.

BLB: And I also have a big book of photographs coming out. Kind of a retrospective called “The Revolution is My Boyfriend.”

JCM: I feel like we’re in an era where Dada/Surrealism should come back because if all news is fake, then all stories are true.

BLB: Yeah, and it’s also the only way you can-JCM: Illustrate what’s happening!

BLB: Or cope with it, is through a surrealist lens.

JCM: In some ways, the early ‘70s, late ‘60s, was a version of that, a more hippie version but surrealism was there. And the Abbie Hoffman kind of Ken Kesey “we’re all going to hell in a handbasket,” Vietnam, Watergate, you know, we’re there again. It’s just that the targets are now strangely disparate and conspiracy theories are more important than any fact.

BLB: And the big problem too, now, is that the left is-JCM: In disarray.

BLB: The whole Fascist vs. Stalinist divide and the political correctness and the policing of language and art and all that stuff that’s coming from the radical left is problematic now too in a way.

JCM: It’s hobbling us.

BLB: In the 80s, it was much more clear-cut. Punk was almost surrealist adjacent on a certain level and also, so directly political. It had a way of expressing this dialectical thinking and all these contradictions in style. That’s always my interpretation of it. That it allowed for everything because it wasn’t a direct spelling out of political positions or situating yourself on a political spectrum. It was about how you can communicate that through style and direct action and through music.

So that’s what I think we need, we need a cohesive-JCM: We need a new punk.

JCM: I’m seeing it already with young people. I’m talking 20-year-olds who are annoyed about the 25-year-olds telling them they can’t say shit. And certainly, both of us get annoyed with that. If our intentions are pure, the words should not have...they’re not inherently evil if the intentions are to redirect them. And it’s a hard thing to say to young people right now because they’re so terrified of everything. But I also sense young people gravitating towards saying “We know things are fucked up, what can we do? This PC policing doesn’t seem to work, gets a bit of a backlash and it’s divided us in our common goals by a/political

Photography CHRIS FUCILE Model KOTA WHITE

Photography & Fashion TYLER UDALL

Models JOHNNY & WILLIAM DE COURCY Nail Art STEFANIA FLEX Special Thanks LEILA BANI, BRENDAN MEADOWS & SYLVIA FARAGO

from left to right Johnny wears overcoat by BALENCIAGA William wears overcoat by DRIES VAN NOTEN

Johnny wears dog collar by FREND FUREVER underwear by XDRESS sweatpants by ADIDAS ORIGINAL William wears dress by BALENCIAGA

Johnny wears nun habit from PARTY BAZAAR blouse by GIVENCHY William wears sweatshirt by ADIDAS ORIGINALS

William wears jacket by HAIDER ACKERMANN dungarees by TOMMY HILFIGER Johnny wears jacket by MAISON MARGIELA fur blanket by HUGO BOSS denim shorts by TOMMY HILFIGER

William wears coat by ROBERTO CAVALLI underwear by CDLP track pants by ADIDAS ORIGINALS

Johnny and William wear shorts and dungarees by TOMMY HILFIGER

Johnny wears coat by SAINT LAURENT hat by LOCK & CO HATTERS dog collar by FREND FUREVER

William wears jacket by VETEMENTS and shorts by LEVIS

William wears suit by DOLCE & GABBANA

Johnny wears overcoat by BALENCIAGA

Johnny wears jumpsuit by DEADLY COUTURE duffle bag by LOUIS VUITTON William wears shirt from COMMUNITY THRIFT & VINTAGE undershirt by RICK OWENS

Johnny and William wear jackets and shirt by SAINT LAURENT jewelry (worn throughout) by ANNA DE COURCY

JEFFERY SELF in conversation with PETE ZIAS

Photography DIEGO URBINA Fashion JULIAN BAUTISTA DEL TORO

JS: So yeah, I cracked my tooth. We got home from Thanksgiving, and I got stoned and was like, “Do I have any sweets in the house?” I didn’t, and then I remembered I’d frozen a couple Hershey’s kisses in the freezer, and I bit into one and it was frozen. Like truly frozen. And I was like, “Fuck, that’s hard.” I’m chewing. I’m chewing. And then I’m like, “God, it’s really cracking in there and it’s not melting as I swallow it down my throat.” And then I realized I had swallowed my tooth. I’m always cracking my teeth and I go to the dentist, often.

PZ: How often do you go?

JS: Like, a couple times a week.

That’s normal, right?

PZ: That’s totally normal. It’s healthy.

JS: It’s healthy. No, I go however often you’re supposed to. They always tell me I’m doing great, so I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I should probably stop chewing on glass.

PZ: No, I think you should continue chewing on glass. But do you like going to the dentist? Some people like it.

JS: I love it. This was my first time going to this new one in New York, because I’ve just moved, and I will say, I’m not sure I’m gonna stick with this particular place. Didn’t love the vibe, dentist was kind of rude hat ORTTU shirt, tie THE FRANKIE SHOP hoodie JW ANDERSON to the dental hygienists. You could definitely tell there was a toxic workplace environment situation going on and that’s not a great thing to be witnessing when A possessor of many talents, you’re lying in a chair with one of those weighted things on you. My one thing is, I’m always worried I’m going a razor-sharp wit, and a pento get hard. Not because I get turned on by it or by the chant for absurdity and satire, people in there, but there’s something about lying in that chair, exposed with your-Jeffery Self is an actor, author, PZ: Exposed? Honey, you’re not dressed?! and comedian with a perspecJS: They get you naked at the dentist when you go, right? tive keener and ballsier than PZ: Oh, honey, I wish I was going to your dentist. most. Take a surreal stroll JS: No, I always think I’m gonna get hard because I’m lying out and my crotch is up, you know. It’s not as bad with Jeffery and his friend, in the winter because I’m wearing long pants, but if I’m unhinged and unparalleled in shorts at the dentist, the entire time I’m lying there, comic Pete Zias, down a windI’m like, “Don’t get hard, don’t get hard.” I literally have to think about things to not make me hard. ing, bizarre, and marvelously PZ: What makes you not hard, honey? confounding road.

JS: Children eating food. I can’t. I can’t watch children eat. When I was a kid, I used to not eat in the lunchroom because I could not. The sight of other children eating.

PZ: I understand.

JS: It would disgust me so much; it would literally make me gag. Thinking about it right now makes me want to Jeffery Self: How are you, Pete? gag. If I’m at dinner with people who have children, I Pete Zias: I’m good. Did you find the body I left behind cannot sit near the kid if it’s going to be eating. in your apartment?

PZ: You know, I broke a tooth eating an almond at JS: I did, and you hid it so well. the Hollywood Bowl at the Barry Manilow concert.

PZ: I know, thank you.

Whenever I would feel that tooth, I would think of Barry JS: It was sort of like that movie “Dirty Work.” Do Manilow. you remember that movie “Dirty Work” with Norm JS: Mandy.

Macdonald?

PZ: Lola. I named that broken tooth Lola.

PZ: No, I’ve never seen “Dirty Work,” does he kill JS: Suzanne Somers said on that wonderful Larry King somebody? clip, right after her one-woman show, “The Blonde in JS: He hides fish all over someone’s house in a way the T Bird,” closed after, like, 4 days, she said, “Larry, that they can’t figure out where the smell is coming Barry Manilow told me that Broadway would break my from. heart, and he was right.”

PZ: Oh, that’s a great way to torture somebody.

PZ: Broadway breaks everyone’s heart.

JS: It really is, and that’s what you did with our home.

JS: Yeah. Did you see that one-woman show?

PZ: Did you see me on camera on January 6th? My PZ: Oh no, honey, I wish I did. birthday is January 7th, so it was a crazy weekend.

JS: Me too. I only know one person who actually saw JS: Oh shit, that probably threw a wrench in your it. I think they saw it twice. birthday plans.

PZ: Was it Susanne Somers?

PZ: Well, me and Katie Couric both have January 7th JS: Yes. Her and her very handsome husband, who for a birthday, so thank God it wasn’t on January 7th. buried her in hiking boots. Did you read that?

That would have ruined our birthday.

PZ: No. JS: That would have really, really thrown a bee in Katie JS: I didn’t even click on the article. It just said, “The Couric’s bonnet.

Romantic Reason Why Suzanne Somers’ Husband PZ: How is your tooth? I heard you cracked your tooth.

Buried Her in Timberland Hiking Boots.” I didn’t click

on it, I didn’t care that much. I also don’t want to know the real reason, you know?

PZ: Yeah, it’s better just to make it up.

JS: There’s a lot of reasons that she would have potentially been buried in them. Where I went was that maybe she liked to get fucked in hiking boots.

PZ: Oh, that’s good. I was thinking they just met on that Runyon Canyon.

JS: Yeah, that’s sweet.

PZ: That’s so sweet.

JS: They didn’t even bury her. They didn’t even dig.

They just left her at Runyon Canyon for the coyotes.

We’re gonna have all these zombie coyotes, who have been eating her, because she was on all that hormone stuff-PZ: All the hormone stuff-JS: All the hormone creams.

PZ: Oh my god, we’re gonna start hearing about super coyotes attacking the Hollywood stars of the Hollywood hills. We’re gonna call them Suzanne Coyotes.

The Suzanne Coyote.

JS: L.A. loves to tear everything down, and I do think some history should remain. With Marilyn Monroe specifically, it’s not like she had a Graceland or anything.

Didn’t she die in a motel room, choking on her own vomit or something?

PZ: No, that was Anna Nicole Smith. She died at the Hard Rock Café.

JS: No! Did she really?

PZ: In Florida.

JS: Anna Nicole Smith died at the Hard Rock Café? AT the cafe?!

PZ: The hotel, the Hard Rock Café Hotel, whatever the hell it’s called.

JS: I love the idea that she was at a table at the Hard Rock Café, like, eating chicken tenders, beside a bomber jacket worn by Pat Benatar to a Bar mitzvah.

PZ: Oh my God, if only. Well, I went to that house (Monroe’s) with my father and mother when I was in high school. We came out to find the house.

JS: You did?

PZ: Yes! JS: You went for that very reason?

PZ: Well, to see all the touristy spots, but all the celebrities I’ve always liked were dead. So, we went to graveyards and dead homes. But there was a spotlight that came on that spooked us away.

JS: A spotlight?

PZ: Yeah.

JS: Like a Broadway theater spotlight or--?

PZ: Yeah, I started singing “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” No, because we got there at night, because we had trouble finding it, the spotlight came on.

JS: Everything about this trip sounds badly planned.

You’re just going to cemeteries and apartment buildings at night before being chased by the police. I will say, when I decided I was gonna move out of LA, I did start going, in the final months, to the cemeteries to pay my respects to some of the gals that are buried around town. I stopped by Judy’s, I stopped by where Bette Davis is buried in Glendale, isn’t that depressing?

PZ: I like her headstone because it says, “I did it the hard way.”

JS: You did it so hard, you’re in fucking Glendale, baby.

Thanksgiving a couple years ago, I woke up and I went on a hike in Coldwater Canyon, and I was in the midst of listening to the “Helter Skelter” audiobook and I was like, “Oh, right, the Sharon Tate house is near here.”

I don’t know what got into me, but I drove over there on Thanksgiving morning and parked outside of the house, and just had a little moment of wishing Sharon Tate Happy Thanksgiving.

PZ: Well, that’s not weird for Hollywood, because after a while, you just run out of things to do, and you start making things up.

JS: Yes, truly. It’s like, how many trips to Target can I make today? I guess I better go stop by where they murdered Sharon Tate. The first time I visited, in like 2008, Cole Escola and I were making videos and this reality show production company, it was all very nefarious, brought us out there to film a pilot presentation for a reality show that would be us moving to Hollywood and trying to break into show business. But we stayed with the producer in his apartment, and he kept taking us out and getting us drunk at night and being handsy.

PZ: Oh, I think I know him.

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JS: Probably. And they, day one, got us off the plane, got us shit-faced, took us to get spray tans, and then to the Abbey. I mean, everything about it was truly miserable. I have a vivid memory of sitting on a balcony of this guy’s apartment, in one of those high rises overlooking Hollywood Boulevard. Just Cole and I, sitting out there, getting stoned, and being so sad and stuck there. I hadn’t driven a car in 5 years and I’m a terrible driver, but they rented one of those little smart cars, and they made us drive it on the freeway. And I was terrified, having a full panic attack, and they’re filming us and we’re wearing body mics. It was a beautiful introduction to LA. The next time I came was a few years later, I was obsessed with some boy that I had met on Facebook who could not have had less of an interest in me but every so often, he would get drunk and tell me I was hot and make out with me if we were in the same city.

And so, I obviously followed him to LA and stayed with him for a week and then decided I was going to be his boyfriend and just never came back to my apartment in New York. I just stayed there and called my roommates back in New York and was like, “Get rid of my stuff, I’m staying.” And then that guy obviously wasn’t interested in me and was like, “Whoa, I don’t want to be your boyfriend,” and then, like, 13 years passed, and you go, wait, I’ve been here for how long? And you’re just broke now and standing outside of Sharon Tate’s murder site.

And now, here I am living in New York again. It’s cold.

We have snow outside.

PZ: Well, you’re going to miss the hormonal Suzanne Coyotes that are on the attack.

JS: Do you think they’re going to start biting people and then those people are going to start turning into Suzanne Somers types?

PZ: Yes. JS: Are we going to be overrun with iconic blondes from the ‘70s all of the sudden?

PZ: Everyone’s going to be using the “Thighmaster” again.

JS: Everybody’s going to be mad at Joyce DeWitt.

PZ: Joyce DeWitt’s gonna be completely run out of town.

JS: Everybody’s gonna have John Ritter stories.

PZ: Honey... “She’s the Sheriff.”

JS: “She’s the Sheriff!” Isn’t it a bummer that we don’t have things like that anymore? That we don’t have “She’s the Sheriff” or “Jennifer Slept Here”?

PZ: Those campy, like, weird shows. I miss all those. I also like just discovering them, you know, on Saturday at 7 o’clock.

JS: You could make so much fucking money in that era.

Just fucking doing some coke and coming up with the stupidest possible idea, and then by fucking Monday morning it would be on TV. PZ: Was it always your dream, like, when you were a child, to move to Hollywood?

JS: I guess. I think I grew up more dreaming of New York City.

PZ: Yeah, me too.

JS: But I definitely came to Hollywood thinking in 2009 that it was going to be very much like the ‘80s and I was going to be on a silly sitcom. I had a very different idea of what I thought Hollywood was going to be and was definitely disappointed by it because it’s just not fun.

Nothing about show business is fun or interesting or unique anymore. Everything is just so fucking vanilla and just content and mainstream and-PZ: Subscribers.

JS: Follows. I find it all just so blah and boring. It’s definitely even worse now than it was in 2010 when I got to LA. You look back on the early ‘90s in Hollywood, so much more exciting, so much sexier, so much more dangerous, so much more “what the fuck.” I do feel like everything now is very, very bubblegum. You’re about to turn 69, is that right? This year?

PZ: 88.

JS: 88, okay. I’ve got my 73rd coming up. It’s a big one.

My niece, my daughter-in-law, and my podiatrist are throwing me a sock hop. I’m really looking forward to that. I’ll have to extend the invitation your way.

PZ: Well, as long as I can bring my walker and my Craftmatic adjustable bed.

JS: I used to say I wouldn’t be happy until I had a fireplace and a pool, but I don’t see myself having a pool in New York City anytime soon.

PZ: Oh, honey, don’t think that way, you’ve got to manifest it. Look at Taylor Swift.

JS: It’s true. I could flood part of my apartment.

PZ: Flood the kitchen.

JS: Be honest, do you think it’s a bad idea or a good idea for me to flood one half of my apartment and turn it into a pool?

PZ: I’m 100% being honest, I think you should. I think it’s creative and it’s what you want, and you deserve it.

JS: It’s now. It’s very now. It’s innovative.

PZ: And you could also charge people. They can come and use the pool, or they could ice skate on it during the winter-JS: Yeah, I could freeze it. It’s a good 2nd source of income when you think about it. By not doing it, you’re just burning money that you could be making, basically.

PZ: Honey, you’ve got to do it.

JS: I think I will. I think that’s what I’m going to do next.

PZ: Call it the Suzanne Somers Memorial Pool.

JS: I feel like Suzanne is just sending creams to every woman of a certain age, and I think she’s still doing it, even though she’s just a dead corpse in Runyon Canyon, being feasted on by coyotes.

PZ: Well, with AI, honey, all the stars can stay around forever.

JS: What are your thoughts on that? I’m all for it.

PZ: Oh, I’m all for it, too. I mean, I heard you could go into a virtual world and be with other celebrities. I want to be with Charles Melton and Michael B. Jordan in a virtual world.

JS: That sounds great. On the calm app, Jimmy Stewart reads you a bedtime story and it’s an AI-generated thing.

PZ: Is that really true?

JS: It’s true. I want more of that.

PZ: Oh, I like that too. I want Jayne Mansfield to read me anything, a cookbook-JS: Totally, 100%. Where is the Katharine Hepburn video game, you know? Throw her into “Grand Theft Auto 10,” or whatever they’re on, you know, why not?

PZ: I hope it gets to a point where we can vote on them for president, so we can have different ghosts of AI celebrities as our new president, who cares?

JS: Who cares? There is absolutely no reason that a hologram of Penny Marshall isn’t Secretary of State.

There’s just not. You know, Barbara Walters, famously, was always just covered in baby powder. Like, if she sat down next to you, it would just leave a cloud.

PZ: I love that you know what all these women are covered in, hormones and baby powder-JS: Barbara Walters was covered in baby powder, Suzanne Somers was covered in hormone creams, Penny Marshall was covered in ketchup, Joyce Dewitt is covered in nothing. She’s sharp, naked, dry as a bone.

PZ: Oh my God. Poor Joyce, poor Joyce.

JS: When I first started masturbating as a kid, I shared a bathroom with my sister, and the only lotion she had was “Country Apple,” Bath and Body Works lotion. So, for about a year of my life, my first experience with masturbating, it reeked of that, just, sickly, sugary, apple cinnamon smell.

Anytime I smell it, I think about cumming obviously.

You know what I did the other night?

I got up to masturbate in the middle of the night and I didn’t want to turn on the lights, I didn’t want to wake up Augie, and so I came into the living room in the dark because I’m hoping to masturbate and pass back out.

If I turn on the lights, I’ll wake up too much.

So, I go into the cabinet and get what I think is coconut oil and I open the jar and I start masturbating with it.

And I probably masturbate for a solid minute or two and I’m like, “What is this, it’s a strange consistency and it smells sort of strange.” I turn on the light, I am masturbating with a jarred chicken and dumpling soup.

PZ: Oh my God. JS: And I have shredded carrots all over my fingers, and chicken, like a thick chicken broth, and, like, little bits of dumpling and chicken on my hands and my penis-PZ: Oh my God-JS: It was so revolting. And so then, I went into the bathroom, obviously, and took a shower, and then when I got out of the shower, I realized that in the chaos of it all, I’d smeared a handprint of soup on the wall.

PZ: Oh, God, honey.

JS: And then I felt bad because it was kind of fancy soup. It was Rao’s, it comes in a jar.

PZ: You can’t waste that, put it back in the jar--!

JS: I didn’t want to waste it! So, I put the jar in the fridge but it just sat there for like 2 weeks, because every time I started to eat it, I was like, “Well, that just smells like masturbating.”

PZ: Give it to your husband.

JS: I should have fed it to him and not told him. That would have been so kinky.

PZ: Just, like, spoon-feed it to him. “Yeah, I made you soup, honey. Does it taste like anything familiar, honey?”

JS: That’s hot. You know that someone has made soup, or I bet someone has like cum into the stuffing on Thanksgiving and served it to their family and watched them.

PZ: Oh, I have a disgusting story. I know this girl; she has this guy that visits from another country. She had him cum in an ice tray and then she would put the cum in the freezer. And when he would go back to his country, she would make cocktails and put the cum ice in the glass and just sit there in the dark and drink it and think of him.

JS: This is Hoda Kotb?

PZ: It’s Hoda Kotb. I can’t go over to Hoda Kotb’s house.

JS: No, you can’t trust a person like that. That is vile.

PZ: It’s diabolical.

JS: People are drinking cum ice cubes, people are rubbing hormone creams on themselves and dying and getting left in Runyon Canyon-PZ: And soup on the cock-JS: --and people are masturbating with soup. That’s America.

PZ: That’s America for you, honey, and it’s sad.

JS: And it’s sad. And you know what it’s gonna take to end that? Get fucking AI Penny Marshall, wipe all that ketchup off of her, and make her Secretary of State.

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ZANE PHILLIPS Photography ADAM WASHINGTON Collage PORTIS WASP Makeup MATTHEW PAUL MURRAY Hair DRAKE JAMES Interview BODYELECTRIC

Zane Phillips is more than a hunk with a heart of gold. The talented and charismatic actor starred in “Fire Island,” the breakout gay comedy from Joel Kim Booster, and the Netflix series “Glamorous,” as the hotheaded son of a domineering Kim Cattrall, and that’s just in the past 2 years. Along with a rabid online following, collaborative work with major fashion labels, and a magnetic pull that is impossible to resist, Phillips is doing things his way, on his terms. And we are all the better for it.

BODYELECTRIC: You were just in Paris.

How was that? What were you doing there?

Zane Phillips: It was incredible. I went to the Balmain show, their first runway presentation in 4 years, I think. It was actually my first Fashion Week. It worked out that I was able to go and I’m so glad I did because, first of all, talking about the clothes themselves, I think Olivier is...I don’t know much about fashion, but I know he’s good.

And I know he has a really bold point of view and that comes out in a really fun and fresh way. I’ve never seen so clearly, like, “Oh, yeah, this is an art form.” Being able to be present for that, and also seeing Naomi Campbell walk the runway...

BE: It’s insane.

ZP: It’s insane. I keep saying it’s like watching Michelangelo paint. Like, to be able to see someone who is a master of their craft do their craft, in a really beautiful setting, I was blown away. So, that was my little trip to Paris and then I got to do some sightseeing and eat some croissants and wham bam thank you, ma’am, ready to hit the ground running here now.

BE: Isn’t Fashion Week the craziest energy?

ZP: Yeah. I literally have never sat in so many standstill Uber rides, first of all. You definitely get the sense of “Oh, yeah, Paris is not built for all these people in their

fancy gowns having to avoid the subway,” you know what I mean? It’s a really vibrant energy and I love it.

BE: It seems like fashion has really embraced you.

ZP: In a way that I totally did not expect.

BE: Really?

ZP: I have always loved the world from an outsider’s perspective, I grew up watching “Project Runway,” I watched “Top Model.”

Being a very normal kid, well, I say normal, but, you know, I just didn’t have any proximity to this world growing up, or anything even close to it. I was in rural Texas, leading what felt like a very normal, humdrum, ho-hum life and so, I’d watch these shows and it just felt like a different world. Now to sort of be in it, in a part of it, I’m learning a lot about the process. But I’ve always had a respect for the artistry of it. As I was coming up in this career, you know, you start wearing clothes publicly, and I always told myself, priority No. 1, “Never look like a banker.” Like, we are actors, we are people who express themselves through their bodies, and I think clothing is an extension of that. And for me, I feel like a very colorful person. That’s something that I’ve grown into as I’ve gotten older. I’ve found so many different parts of myself that were hidden before, that now compose an essential part of who I am. Being able to take all of that and put it in clothes and really just have fun, that’s kind of been my approach.

BE: That’s great.

ZP: So often, I think men are pressured to leave it to the girls and I’m glad it seems like we’re in a state now where menswear is a lot more experimental, and the experimental stuff is going a lot more mainstream, and a lot of really well-known straight guys are playing with gender. I think a lot of people have a lot of opinions about that, but I think it’s good.

BE: I agree. It’s definitely changed a lot.

Tell me about this Dsquared2 stuff. You

seem to be working with them a lot.

ZP: Yeah, my friend Mike Seater, who’s an actor and filmmaker, he saw that we followed each other on Instagram, and he was like “Let’s make something happen with them, let’s just see if they’re interested,” and so we reached out and they were like “Sure, we’re in Mykonos, come out.”

I’ve always had an appreciation for their aesthetic, which is really playful and never takes itself too seriously. It was kind of something that we were figuring out along the way, but it was one of my first forays into, I would say, having a heavier hand in the creative side of things. Realizing “Oh, okay. I’ve been through this now, enough to where I can put in my opinion and feel like I know what I’m talking about a little bit.” They’re fun. They’re fun as hell, and they’re very kind. I think it’s a really cute little, I guess you could call it a campaign.

I think it ties into fashion as storytelling.

With that specifically, it was telling a story about me that I hadn’t really thought about before. A story that I hadn’t really told about myself before, which is that it took me a while to figure out what my masculinity looked like. I was a really shy kid, I felt very feminine, and then of course, you have these things pounded out of you, and suddenly you’re left with sort of 2 extremes and you’re not really sure where they meet. I think what made sense to me about that particular project was this idea that masculinity can be playful. It can be flirtatious, can be cheeky, can be all these things. It made me realize that just because of my body type, and how I enter a room, and what people tend to think of me, anything that I do ends up sort of being a statement on masculinity. And so, I find it really fun that I get to play around with that, and show different sides, and have people be like “I never expected a guy who looks like that to be doing something like that.”

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BE: Correct me if I’m wrong, but in researching you, it didn’t seem like there was a time where you had to come out. It seems like when you entered public life, you were just living that way already.

ZP: Yeah, I mean, I was a theater actor in New York. That’s what my start was, and you don’t see theater actors coming out.

Obviously, there’s a ton of straight theater actors, but it’s not an uncommon thing.

When the transition happened to more film and TV projects and I was put in more of a public eye, I guess there was never any point where someone asked me, or someone said, “Okay, you get a chance now to hide this and be more private.” I’m grateful that I didn’t have to think about it. If I had been given that knowledge or that chance, I hope that I would have still done the same thing and been really open, but there are a lot of really strong people who still hide it. It’s hard because you want to show people, you want to literally show people, “Hey, we’re here, you don’t have to censor this part of yourself, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a private thing in order for you to be successful.” And you see other people who might still be struggling with that, that openness, and you wish they would be a fellow soldier in the fight, but also, I get it. I completely understand and I won’t say that it doesn’t eat at me sometimes. This idea that it could matter and that there are people who still won’t really see me for certain things, simply because of my sexuality. It’s just a thing that IS. I’ve never considered it this huge essential part of my personality. It’s not something that I can really hide at this point, and it affects my perception. I’m really happy with the person that I am and how I got through some of the less comfortable parts of that.

That’s what, at the end of the day, makes it worth it. Just the fact that I’m happy with myself, and how I’ve given a lot of grace to myself. When you’re young and dumb and naive to, maybe, some of the ways of the world, like, I knew how things worked in conservative rural Texas, but I moved to New York City and I was like “Nothing matters, everybody’s gay, who cares?”

And I got very comfortable, very fast. It’s weird now that I’ve gotten older and I can sort of look back, knowing more about this industry. I’m glad I didn’t have to think about a lot of these things because I think it would have really been so much more of a burden. I’m a bit of a late bloomer in that regard.

BE: I think it’s really special.

BE: You’re a millennial, right?

ZP: I think I’m the lower cusp but yeah.

BE: It’s very different for Gen Z. ZP: It’s so weird because it draws attention to the fact that, for straight actors, their sexuality almost never impacts their work, right? There’s never a conversation about how their sexuality impacts their work. And I get it, queer people, we have developed a way of behaving, you know, to signal in a group, to sort of communicate with each other. But at the same time, we’re all kind of taught the same skills,

and the fact that there is such a trepidation, not a straightforward negativity, but there is a hesitance that if at any point this becomes associated with who I am as an actor, then suddenly people will have an impression of what kind of work I can do, which again, is really strange. The only way I feel to combat that, maybe there are other ways and I’m just blind to them, but the only way I feel to combat that is to be open. Just live your life as you would and then still do all the things that they said you couldn’t. That’s always a better place to work from anyway, to sort of be like “I can’t get comfortable in this, I have to work really hard in order to get this.”

That’s a place that I’m more comfortable working from.

BE: It’s interesting. If people comment on straight actors playing queer roles, the argument is always, “Well, they’re actors, they should be able to do whatever they want,” which is correct...

ZP: Yes. BE: But on the flip side, it’s very rare you’ll see a queer actor playing a heterosexual role and I don’t think it’s ‘cause they don’t want to.

ZP: Right.

BE: So, it’s a bit of a double standard in that way.

ZP: Also, you look at the queer actors who are playing straight roles and it’s a very narrow type of person. We are essentially teaching our queer performers that “If you want to be successful in this, you have to present a certain way still, you have to make sure that you’re...” I don’t even know what it means to be straight-passing anymore. Especially living in LA, the straights are so fruity! Like, my gaydar is so bad here. I think it’s a generational thing too.

Everyone’s feeling a lot more comfortable with themselves, which is great, but at the same time, we’re still having to deal with these old ideas of what it means to embody straightness. And for me, I’m like “Let me just share a moment with another person on screen.” That’s it. That’s all I want to do. It doesn’t matter who it is in front of me. We’re 2 souls baring ourselves to each other, and that’s meaningful. I don’t know what the state of the industry is, to be honest. I’m also not trying to come up with imaginary situations in my head to get mad at. I think all I can do is just work my ass off. I understand that there might be some more work involved, but ultimately, that’s fine, it’s a part of the story. My goal is just to be happy with myself and how I approach my work and how I approach my life.

BE: You’ve played a lot of gay men. Has that been a conscious decision or is that just more so what has come your way?

ZP: It’s been more so what’s come my way. I’m very curious, I think the next couple of years are going to be really interesting, I hope. Because I love being a part of queer storytelling and I think there’s a fear for some people that they could get stuck in there, but I think we’re having a lot of really interesting queer stories being told

right now, and so I’m like “We’re part of something really cool right now, so I’m not gonna worry about it too much.” But also, I feel like I am a chemistry monster. I feel I can have chemistry with almost anyone.

Like, from high school plays to working in theater, if you want to see me falling in love with a girl, you will see me falling in love with a girl. I don’t want to limit myself and I want to feel like I’m giving the full expression of things. I do think playing a straight person as a queer actor is really interesting because queer people study straightness in a way that straight people never really have. Obviously, everyone is under these pressures, but we are looking so critically at what is the exact hand movement that reads as straight, etc. So, I think it’s always interesting to play straight characters in that regard because you can access something that can only be gained by looking from the outside.

BE: Tell me about growing up in Texas.

What was that like?

ZP: Well, we also grew up very religious, and the wildest thing about it is that while I know this isn’t the way for all people who grew up queer in a religious tradition, for me, I was given the exact right things to really want to be good with God. I mean, sure, there are social pressures and there are blah blah blah, but for me, I really was in love with God. I loved the challenge of trying to be a good person. I loved the deep emotional connection that you could have in religious situations that you couldn’t really have in other situations.

It probably sounds a little bit like Stockholm syndrome from this side of things, but I feel like so much of my torture was really self-imposed, because I was also a really savvy, observational kid. I knew very quickly, “Alright, this is what it takes to be a good person, this is what it takes to be a leader, I have to put these things on myself, nobody else is going to be able to hold me to account the way that I can.”

That’s where a lot of the torture came from. You start to grapple with things, and you get really good at sort of separating your life a little bit. I’ll never be one of those people who has a very knee-jerk negative reaction to organized religion.

Obviously, there’s a lot of pain and a lot of problems that have been caused by the church, various churches, but I think what I saw there was a genuine desire to do good and to help people. I really think it shaped me in that way. There are so many different ways to become a person who is loving and is ethical and who wants to leave the world a better place.

Granted, this is on the other side of a lot of therapy, where I was really mad about certain things, and I did hold a lot of anger.

Now, I’ve released a lot of the anger and I’m glad that I’ve been able to take what I needed from that life and bring it into my life now, in a more healthy way. In a way that isn’t laden with shame, but is just, again, an expression of who I am.

BE: Should we talk about social media?

ZP: Twitter has absolutely made me a more fundamentally anxious person, absolutely. And yet that became my world when the pandemic started, you know what I mean? I don’t know. This year, I definitely want to redefine my relationship with my phone. I was the kid who did not get an iPhone until, like, 2015. I held on to my Nokia Brick for as long as I could.

I was giving Luddite, I was giving “I don’t care,” I was giving “Let’s live in the moment.” And then the pandemic happened, and now it’s this fucking insidious thing.

You know what the worst is? When you open an app, nothing’s there, you close the app, and you just mindlessly open the app again. Nothing makes me feel more like a lab rat. I’m desperate for little sugar water notifications. It’s not good. Also, I sometimes think we know too much about the disasters of the world.

BE: I wonder that.

ZP: I don’t know if the human spirit is capable of taking on all of this grief.

BE: And it’s constantly accessible. I don’t think that’s helpful, necessarily.

ZP: I think we’re reaching the limits of our brain capacity. God bless people who are able to process all of that and still make positive change happen. It’s all changed our understanding of what our power is too, because I feel with the climate change crisis and global conflict, so often, it’s very easy for people to feel powerless.

I was just having this conversation with my partner the other day, and we were talking about how if things get bad, do we move to Europe? My perspective on this has always been that there’s going to be a large-scale problem that we’re never going to be able to tackle as individuals but there’s always going to be something in the community that you can do to make someone’s life better. I am trying in my life to maybe create a more local sense of community and to start to shrink my world a little bit, just so I’m not so paralyzed by what’s going on.

BE: I do love Instagram.

ZP: Some people know me from Instagram before they know me from a project.

That is something that I have to contend with, something that I have to remind myself of, like, “Alright, it’s fine, but the career that you want, you have to...” I don’t know, it’s a matter of constantly aligning reality with what you want. Another thing about Instagram is, beauty fades. If you like the way I look, well, there’s a finite amount of time that I’ve got. Whereas, if I can keep working on my craft, that will hopefully serve me for years and years to come.

BE: I heard you hate taking selfies? Is that true?

ZP: Yes, I do.

BE: I do too.

ZP: I mean, you see that my phone is busted. Like, it’s not a new phone. This is my interpretation of what’s going on: whatever the focal length of the front-facing camera is, it’s not good for my face.

Sometimes, people take pictures of me and I’m like “I look good, I look great, I love that picture of myself.” And then anytime I try to take a picture of myself, it’s simply unacceptable. Like, if this is really what I’m bringing to the world, I need to have far less confidence.

BE: I can’t believe anyone looks good in a selfie but some people do. It’s incredible and I don’t get it.

ZP: Some people really do.

BE: When did you move to LA? ZP: A year ago.

BE: What do you think of it?

ZP: I love it.

BE: Really?

ZP: Yeah. I was in New York for 7 and a half years. Of course, 3 of those years were COVID. It was scary. I felt like it aged me 5 years in those first 3 months. I was like “Well, shit, I feel like a New Yorker now.” It also helped me realize that I was getting a little tired of living with so much friction in my day-to-day life. You wake up and immediately there’s a setback.

That felt like my experience in New York.

Because also, I was hustling my ass off, morning till night, working my survival job, I was auditioning, I was trying to go to the gym, trying to cook for myself and clothe myself and it was something that I think was good for me in my early 20s because I knew I had a good work ethic and that proved it. Now coming to LA, relatively late in the game, surrounded by 20-year-olds, the most beautiful 20-yearolds you’ve ever seen in your life, I’m like a crusty 29-year-old, coming into town and ultimately feeling very much that I know myself. Knowing what I want and what I want my life to look like. I think that made all the difference. I want to be surrounded by greenery, I want to be surrounded by a community of people that I can gather and see regularly. That was one of the coolest things to me about moving here was I was like, “Oh, at any given point, people can just have people over to their house.” People have houses and suddenly it changes the way that you see people and friendships become so much more communal. In New York, you would go to Brooklyn to see a friend for coffee and then you’d go into the Lower East Side to see a friend for lunch

and then you’d go up to the Upper West Side to see a friend for drinks. You were busting your ass just to see 3 different friends and it was impossible to get them to know each other because they’re all in different neighborhoods. Here, I’ve found community building to be so much easier.

Again, it’s less friction. Also, I like to drive.

I would much rather be in my car, listening to music, in traffic, than be in a crowded subway car.

BE: What is your relationship with aging?

Do you have thoughts or feelings on aging?

ZP: Oh wow. I’ve never really felt young.

I’ve always jokingly described myself as a very somber child but I think there was always a tired, sort of resigned energy that I took on when I was a kid and carried with me for a while, especially as I went to college and I moved to New York and I was just working a lot. I was not someone who really went out or partied. And of course, everyone always does that thing where they call you an old soul. Maybe that’s just code for gay when you’re a kid, I don’t know, but I always have people on the outside confirming to me, like, “Oh, you’re really mature for a 12-year-old, 19-yearold, 24-year-old.” So, from that perspective, there was always this idea that my age would eventually match my insides and maybe that would be good. That was also a thing for my career. Especially when I was in theater, you know, I have a deep voice, so a lot of the roles that were good for me were older roles. So everyone was like, “Just wait until you’re 30, you’re gonna book.” What I’ve realized is, and maybe this happened a few years ago but it’s continued to sort of reinforce itself, I think I was aging myself unnecessarily, and I feel like the past couple years, maybe, I’ve come to really embrace my more youthful qualities. It’s hard to pin down, but I’ve let go of some of the need to appear mature, and I think that’s done me well. I didn’t feel confident when I was young, and so I’m like “Okay, well, if youth wasn’t the key to confidence, then maybe youth is not what I should be chasing.” Maybe youth is not something that serves me. But it’s hard not to fall into the trap of “I need to accomplish this thing by the age of 30, by the age of 35, by the age of 40.” So, what I will say is, given where and how I started, I’m extremely proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish so far. And also, I think the timing was necessary. The timing happened how it needed to happen.

Some people just need more time to be able to accept the good things that come to them. And I think I’m in a prime spot for accepting the things that come to me.

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Photography

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SLAVA MOGUTIN SLAVA MOGUTIN was exiled from Russia for being too much of the very thing that defines his enduring legacy. Utterly fearless, brazenly other, radically frank, a poet of the political and photographer of the forbidden, MOGUTIN is an artist of gargantuan importance who refuses to do as he’s told. JOEY GRAY, writer and creator of the lauded LGBTQ+ documentary podcast “The Fire UpStairs,” interviews.

Joey Gray: How would you describe yourself to someone who isn’t familiar with you already?

Slava Mogutin: Prior to me leaving Russia in my early 20s, I identified as a writer, poet, and journalist. I started writing when I was in my early teens, I started getting my work published when I was 16. I had to lie about my age in order to get published in the newspapers and magazines. My father is a writer and journalist and he introduced me to the first network of creatives. When I moved to Moscow, I started taking pictures around the same time but it’s not until after I moved to New York that I started focusing more on my visual work. I continued to write poetry, first only in Russian, then in Russian and English, and later on primarily in English. Ultimately, I feel I remain a poet in everything I do, including my visual work.

My photography, video work, installation work, drawings, paintings, sculpture, collage, etc., I feel like most of my visual work would fall under the category of journalism. All my favorite photographers, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alexander Rodchenko, Brassaï, Diane Arbus, Larry Clark, all fall under the journalism category.

JG: When you relocated to New York in the ‘90s, I read that the transition into photography was easier than translating work from Russian to English. I thought that was a really beautiful way of maintaining narrative storytelling, as someone who has a perspective as an artist.

SM: I was always primarily interested in people, you know, my new book is called Analog Human Studies. It captures a lot of creative people, and I always say that, for me, taking pictures is all about collaboration. That’s why I love working with other creative people when I take pictures. I’m not interested in just the pretty face or, you know, beautiful people.

They have to have something beyond the surface to get me interested in them. The very first pictures I took were people that I interviewed, and I was basically taking pictures of them to illustrate my interviews. I didn’t think of it as an art form until later when I showed my first pictures to people like Terry Richardson and Bruce LaBruce and they were like, “Oh my God.” I’m endlessly fascinated by people and throughout the years, I’ve probably worked with, if not thousands, definitely hundreds of people and in the past few years, several projects with multiple collaborators.

JG: You mentioned Bruce LaBruce. He said something like, “You create art because you need to.” I think it was in reference to you and I love that. Do you find what he said about you to be true? Is there a driving need that you still identify with from 20, 30 years ago?

SM: I’m a workaholic and I’m driven. I definitely have more ideas than I can possibly realize in my lifetime. Also, I have a severe form of ADHD. So, I’m always working on several different projects. Now, I have 3 unfinished book projects that

I’m trying to finish. So, yeah, I’m driven by whatever force it is.

I don’t know how to describe it.

SM: My background is something that informs everything I do and certainly everything I did when I was in my 20s. Looking back, I feel like a lot of stuff I did back in the day was really brave, and sometimes, I wonder if I would have done it if I was older and thinking clearly. A lot of people thought it was really crazy what I was doing back in the day in Russia because I had complete disregard for the authority and certainly the corrupt state system and institutions, and I was attacking them in my writing and also in my public performances. I just didn’t realize that I could be arrested, that I could be thrown into jail, that I could be killed. A lot of awful things could have possibly happened and did happen to a lot of people who followed my example. There were several other gay couples that tried to register same-sex marriage in Russia years after my attempt in ‘94 and they were beaten and arrested, and it was worst-case scenario. In my case, I was prosecuted for the last 3 years of my life in Russia, under constant criminal investigation, harassed, death threats, police surveillance, it was really hard. There was a point where I wasn’t even allowed to leave Moscow. I had to sign a paper saying that if I left Moscow, I would be arrested and thrown in jail, just for that. So, it’s kind of crazy. I was also lucky that I was able to escape because I don’t think it would be possible in Putin’s Russia, for example.

It was super traumatic and something that shaped me both personally and artistically. On the one hand, I’m proud of this experience, and that I lived through it and was able to tell the story, but on the other hand, I still have nightmares about being in Russia and going through this. It’s really traumatic.

JG: Do you find that the work helps you to process a trauma like that?

SM: Oh, 100%, definitely. In this sense, I believe in higher purpose, and my poetry, and then my visual art, were always going hand in hand with my political activism. And I feel like, if you remove the political aspect of my work, it’s basically half of the substance. And I think that’s why a lot of people find it appealing because I don’t take pictures just for the sake of taking pictures. I don’t make art for the sake of it. It’s always about the statement behind it and the people that I’m drawn to are also kindred spirits, like Bruce LaBruce. All troublemakers in one way or another. I would say collectively they represent the substance of Western culture that I was so inspired by when I first moved to New York. I wanted to meet the rebels and these counter-cultural icons that New York was famous for. And I was lucky to meet most of the people I had considered my teenage idols. Even if they say that sometimes it’s not good to meet your idols, actually, I was lucky that I wasn’t disappointed by any of them, really.

JG: You mentioned having a disregard for authority figures growing up in Russia. Were you always like that? Where did that come from?

SM: I guess part of it is the fact that I come from a dysfunctional family, and I always had this love-hate relationship with my dad, who was, on the one hand, this really non-conformist person who was always very anti-communist and he was a freelance person at a time when there was no such concept. Like, everyone in the Soviet Union had a job, you couldn’t just be freelance, but he managed to do that at the time and in a place where it was unthinkable. But later on, he joined the Communist Party in order to further his career as a journalist. I rebelled against him being a conformist to the system, the communist system that I never believed in. And the fact that he was a writer, he’s a good writer but very conservative in his style, I just wanted to write something very different from him. And I guess the fact that I was openly gay in a country that was so hostile to gay people, where it was still considered a criminal offense at the time when I was growing up...to be honest with you, I did a lot of crazy, fearless things that I wouldn’t necessarily have done if I was thinking clearly about the concept-JG: I mean, thank God you weren’t-SM: --for example, I remember I was at a big official ceremony for the Pushkin Prize, and I got drunk and got naked and jumped on the table during this official ceremony and I pissed on some really important literary topic. The cops were called, and everyone was like, “Who is this?”

JG: You were what, 19, 20?

SM: I was probably 18, yeah, something like that. I was arrested, beaten, thrown into jail for a night, and charged with disorderly conduct. That was my attitude towards the establishment.

JG: That just sounds like an iconic act of rebellious youth but then at a certain point, you become enemy of the state. Your personal sovereignty is being threatened. You mentioned earlier living in fear, but I wonder how you were able to keep moving forward.

SM: Well, it’s interesting because when people talk about Russia, that it’s a very homophobic place, my argument was always that actually, Russia is no more homophobic than any other given country. I cannot tell you that I was discriminated against on a day-to-day basis because it was never the case. And so, I was lucky that I had this support system in place that allowed me to go through this nightmare of being harassed and intimidated and prosecuted for close to 3 years of my life. And again, being able to escape that situation, the fact that I was lucky to get the most famous human rights lawyer, who was at one point representing the most famous Soviet dissidents during the Soviet era. I’m lucky to be able to tell this story and I feel like my personal example did inspire a lot of people in Russia. One of the book projects I’m working on at the moment is my first book of writing in Russian in over 20 years and it’s something I wasn’t really planning on doing because I don’t want to endorse Putin’s regime in any shape or form. But at the same time, this young, underground publisher contacted me, and he basically convinced me to do it, because his argument was that it’s more important than ever to have my voice heard in Russia because people are deprived of any kind of alternative culture. The very fact that this book is coming out in Putin’s Russia, it’s already a

rebellious act. I wouldn’t be doing it if it was a safe thing to do.

JG: Having been in the States for as long as you have, how would you explain your experience in America as a queer person, as a queer artist? Because there are some arguments to be made that we’ve come a long way politically, with certain rights being afforded now, but at the same time, every day, they’re being fought against and taken away.

SM: When I first moved here, I was mostly seen as a gay activist and a journalist and I was invited to different colleges and universities, and that’s actually how I got to travel around and experience different parts of the country. And then I did a porn movie for Bruce LaBruce that immediately shattered that image of me as a “good gay activist.” It wasn’t a conscious, calculated decision, just something I did because I wanted to have that experience. Coming from a very conservative and homophobic culture like Russia, to be in a porn movie by one of my favorite filmmakers, it wasn’t something I was doing for the fame or notoriety or for any other reason, I just thought it was a fun and interesting thing to do. But I obviously didn’t consider the consequences. I stopped being invited to all these colleges and universities overnight after the movie was released. It was called “Skin Flick” and it was about a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads in London who kidnap and torture this interracial gay couple, and there’s a crazy rape scene that I was participating in as an actor, and then the irony of it is that throughout the movie, the entire skinhead gang turns gay, essentially. It was really, really controversial. Nothing like this could be possible nowadays and it nearly ruined Bruce’s career and certainly fucked up mine, whatever little career I had as a quote-unquote gay activist. 20 years later, Bruce and I were presenting this movie at MoMA in New York during his retrospective, and I just couldn’t believe it.

JG: That trajectory is pretty wild. As an artist, given the tools, the access, the platforms, the reception that’s given to this sort of renegade queer art, do you find it easier nowadays to make the kind of art that you make?

SM: To be honest with you, I’m so fed up with the censorship, especially on social media. I was very much engaged in the online queer community since the early days of the internet and I was a strong believer in using it as a platform for free speech, free expression, artistic expression.

JG: The accessibility is unmatched. You can reach every corner of the world.

SM: Recently, I saw this fall. It went from being this free forum to being the most controlled public space that we have, probably.

It’s really unfortunate to see this trajectory, from something really beautiful and empowering, a true community of people, that became increasingly controlled and policed by these giant tech corporations. I speak out about this in each and every interview because I think it’s a very important, in fact, fundamental issue that we’re all facing now. If you’re a non-conforming artist or thinker or creative, you’re faced with really tough choices and the result is an entire generation of young people who are self-censoring and, essentially, self-castrating in order to fit in this rigid matrix; what’s being imposed on us and sold to us, the homogenous and sterile version of the community as described by the tech corporations. The capitalist package of community, which is total bullshit, of course.

SM: I’m being invited again to do artist talks and lectures at colleges and it’s sad to see how people really use social media. Like, when I was visiting artists at SVA or Parsons, virtually half of the kids were using social media as the main inspiration point. They’re basically using these, not even secondhand, like God knows, completely processed accounts and there’s nothing personal about them. They’re exchange students from other countries coming to New York and they use social media or a page from a fashion magazine as their main inspiration point, and I ask them, “Why did you come all the way to New York to do some art that is completely derivative and unoriginal and is not inspired by your true experience or surroundings?” What’s the point of it, why even bother?

But unfortunately, I would say the majority of kids in their 20s, they operate on that level and they use really processed information as their inspiration point.

JG: Mmhmm.

SM: The irony of it is, social media does offer exposure to young creatives and especially young queer creatives who wouldn’t normally have an outlet for showcasing their work.

And that’s a really empowering and important thing in many cases. But at the same time, the way it’s done and the way this whole system operates, I think it’s just designed to crush any authenticity or any unfiltered and radical expression of sensuality or sexuality. It has to do more with policing and shaming people than empowering them.

JG: We live in social media, we live in Grindr, we live in these sort of encapsulated experiences that are so limited to filters and tags. I’m curious to hear your take on where you find places in the world that still exist that feel alive in a way that maybe others aren’t anymore.

SM: Berlin, certainly. I think Germans have a particular culture of outdoor sex and nudist lakes and all that, which I really appreciate.

JG: It’s liberation, right? Whether you have a judgment about the act itself or not, it’s personal sovereignty, it’s rebellion, it’s freedom. And I think that is at the heart of what a queer existence is and can be.

SM: The whole right-wing argument is, you know, “Oh, our children, our children, drag queens and trans people are corrupting our children” and all that. In Germany, you go to a nudist lake and the kids are with their parents, everyone nude, gay couples making out, guys with hard-ons and cock-rings and God knows, and no one is molesting or raping anyone. It’s just a stupid argument altogether but it’s such an American hypocrisy.

JG: I often think of it like the monster in the closet or the monster under the bed. The more you fear it and push it away, the bigger and more looming it gets.

SM: It’s ridiculous. You go to places like Riis Beach, which is traditionally a queer space, and up until just recently, people were given tickets and even arrested for being nude. And ulti-

mately, they’ve decided to translate it into online censorship.

Because it’s no coincidence that the giant tech corporations imposing these rigid community guidelines on the rest of the world are all American-based corporations. It’s not a coincidence. I consider it as damaging as, let’s say, British colonialism, that imposed homophobic laws on places like Japan and India and places that never had anti-gay laws. In fact, in Japan, they still have the same British law from World War 2, where homosexuality is still considered illegal. And it’s the same in Hong Kong and India and the rest of the British colonies. British colonialism was really damaging in terms of homophobic advancement around the world.

JG: Do you envision a certain achievement, something that you strive toward or is it all part of the same “life of art” for you?

SM: I would like to have a retrospective, where I could show different aspects of my work. Because I’m producing so much work constantly but I think most people are only familiar with my photography. Next year (2024), I’m doing a big show in Berlin that will cover different aspects of my visual work and my text-based work, so I’m really excited about that show. And I do hope one day that I can return to Russia.

JG: If one were to just do a cursory search of you, you have this rebellious, badass lore about you in your life, deservingly so, but what’s a typical day?

SM: It depends because I travel most of the time, or at least half the time. I’m kind of between New York, Berlin, Mexico, LA. I do a lot of handwriting, journaling, stuff that no one sees. It’s something that I spend a lot of time working on, it’s kind of like the source material for a lot of my writing and visual work.

JG: As you’ve aged into this profession, as a figure, has your relationship with yourself, your body, has that, or how has that changed?

SM: I don’t know if I was a narcissist but I was definitely an exhibitionist. I always joke that I spent most of my 20s naked.

I loved to pose naked and be in front of the camera and all that. And I was really determined too. I was going to the gym 5 times a week and was determined to have the most perfect body and all that. Now, I hate to be photographed and I hate to be in front of the camera and I actually feel really self-conscious. I much prefer to be behind the camera than in front.

So that’s a fundamental change. But I’m glad I did those naked pictures in my 20s because now I can prove that I was once hot too.

SM: I’m comfortable with who I am and what I stand for. In a way, I still feel like a 16-year-old teenager, trying to, basically, just follow my heart and speak my mind and never compromise. I feel pretty comfortable being in my own skin.

JG: What are you afraid of, if anything?

SM: Conformity and mediocrity.

Photography STÉPHANE GIZARD

Photography SHANE REYNOLDS Model KOLE PARCHMAN