I first met Patrick Lilley when I was writing a piece on gay ragga clubs for the Observer Music Monthly Magazine in the UK. He was fixing me up with the right people and driving me around London’s beautifully quiet night streets to the best clubs in town. But most importantly, he was filling me in on a whole history of gay clubland through stories, jokes and gossip. As an organiser of events, screenings and festivals, as well as being behind London’s longest-running gay night Queer Nation, he’s been involved in the movings and shakings of the capital for a long time now. Back in the 80s he was a publicist for Divine and Sinead O’Connor and when he went home after a long day’s work or a long night’s parties, it was to an infamous squat he shared with pre-Culture Club Boy George and a host of the city’s underground creatives. This is clearly a man with tales to tell, so read on for a taste of the juice, an epic tale in two parts, and listen to the soundtrack along the way.

Stuart Brumfitt: You had red hair back then?

Patrick Lilley: I had reddy-blonde hair I guess. It’s very difficult to remember what hair was like to be honest. It’s been a while.

SB: When did you start losing your hair?

PL: Going for the jugular there! My mum warned me that I would go bald if I continued to dye my hair every colour every different day and never a truer word was told to me.

SB: Did you dye it every colour under the sun?

PL: Well in the school holidays I’d dye it. In 1977 when I was 17 my mum had a small jewellery factory in the jewellery quarter in Birmingham. I’d go in at the weekend and do the cleaning. While I was there, I dyed my hair David Bowie red. I would go to the kitchen area and do some cleaning and I would stick some bleach on and then some colour. My mum said, “Well you can’t work for me with that colour”, so I went and had to bleach it. I had to go back to boarding school and it was meant to go back to its normal colour. My sister was a hairdresser and we tried to make it go back, but it didn’t. It went a muddy green-brown, which was worse than ever.

SB: So you experimented with your hair when you were on your school? Which school were you at?

PL: I went to a junior seminary called Cotton College I boarded from 11 to 18. They had a reputation for producing conservative bishops.

SB: So you were meant to be heading towards that?

PL: We were poor children who were sent there to have a better education with the help of the local authority and the local priest.

SB: Was there lots of hanky panky in the boarding school?

PL: None whatsoever. I was viciously bullied for being a poof. I remember being 13 and 14 - me and my best friends at school had just got into Bowie at the time. We used to act camp quite deliberately. There were three of us – me, Billy and John Flanagan. We used to do a Dick Emery “Oh you are awful, but I like you” line on each other continuously. Then one day one of them turned round and said, “You’re not pretending.”

SB: Oh shit

PL: You’re not kidding. The shit hit the fan then. And no sooner had that happened and stocks and shares in Patrick Lilley plummeted.

SB: So they were totally straight but were just playing along?

PL: We were all just acting camp. It wasn’t about sex, it was about acting camp. The idea of a practicing homosexual or a practicing heterosexual didn’t exist at this school. There was no sex, just an awful lot of paranoia. And the priests were more paranoid than anybody. (more…)

The best book store devoted entirely to photography, ever, Dashwood Books (in the East Village of course), has just begun publishing their own books, starting with the absolutely beautiful The Chance is Higher by Ari Marcopoulos, the newest collection of images from the photographer and filmmaker of some of our favorite subjects - skaters, snowboarders, artists, musicians, and the scene and culture they create.

As the press release describes, “The Chance is Higher is a 72-page book featuring 40 black-and-white images by legendary Dutch Photographer Ari Marcopoulos, all of which were printed on a Xerox machine. For years Marcopoulos has worked with Xeroxes as sketches for books, zines, and exhibitions. In love with the simple direct beauty of this lo-fi technique, the artist turned to that medium to create this new body of work.”

The book itself is as essentialized as the photography. It’s almost minimalist in it’s exacting design, by Swiss designers Gavillet & Rust. With such a refined craft in the service of such raw, direct, of-the-moment content, it’s one of the best books I’ve seen recently to bring the ‘low’ visual language of zine culture to the ‘high’ craft of book design. Even the cover’s slightly haphazard placement of the high-contrast black image on silver canvas manages to capture the urgent DIY reproduction feel of Andy Warhol’s monochrome canvases from the 60s - think Jackie, Elvis, Electric Chairs. Marcopoulos actually printed photographs for Warhol in 1980, and photographed intimate rarely-seen Basquiat portraits around that same time, so perhaps the gesture was deliberate - or intuitive.

Anyway, the book is beautiful and the images are hot. It’s printed in a limited edition of 700 numbered copies ($85), and there’s also a deluxe slip-cased, signed and numbered version, printed on red paper with a folded poster dust jacket, in a limited edition of 50 copies ($350).

Ari Marcopoulos will be signing copies at Dashwood Books, 33 Bond St NYC, Thursday April 3, 6:00-8:00, so if you’re going to get one, get one then and there, meet Ari, and get it signed.

Maybe what makes amateur porn so much hotter than regular porn is the same thing that makes 70s porn so hot too. The boys always look like amateurs - like the guy you just passed on the sidewalk - but unlike amateur porn it’s actually shot by someone who knows what they’re doing, sort of. Raw Heat (Bel Rose), from sometime in the 70s (it doesn’t say when), by author and photographers Leo & Gem, has got to be one of the lost classics. I hate to say its lovingly-crafted but - it is.

Of course the boys are pretty, but what makes it so special is that they look like they’re honestly having fun. They’re not posing, they’re not trying to be sexy, they’re just a couple of guys fucking, sucking, laughing, and getting stoned (on “very strong Afghan shit”). Even the pacing of the photography is something more special than typical cheap-ass 70s porn - not to mention half of it is in rich warm technicolor. If Angelo (who was “raised in an orphanage” - of course he was) gets blown on the left-side page, then Tony gets blown on the right. So sweet. Or the spread with Angelos lips wrapped around a cock on the left, and then wrapped around a joint on the right. Perfect.

In the second story, Angelo meets up with, Fucka and Moosey (from Germany - are those German names? There’s something wrong with the Germans I tell ya), at a rock festival (of course). There’s a bunch of pictures of them chasing each other and ripping off each other’s clothes and laughing, with the big money shot at the end - a big kiss with a hand down the pants. Awwww.

The photos are sweet and honest, but for some reason the text is really not. Maybe it’s the translation from the German text, but it’s like the verbal equivalent of teenagers having sex for the first time. Maybe that’s what they were going for. It’s pretty explicit, and maybe it’s a 70s thing, but it seems like they they just didn’t have the good trashy words yet. “…probing Angelo’s bum hole…”, “…pushed on his anus muscle…”, “…his tongue cleaned softly under the flange…”, “…entering the tighter zones of his bowel…”, “cum sack”, “love hole”, “love juice”, “salty cummy sperm” and my favorite so unsexy line “…uncapped the tube of lubricating jelly…”. Classic.

Hailing from one of our favorite cities, the steamy and chaotic São Paulo multi-talented artist Rodrigo Novaes last week launched his new project, WLTF. For all two of you not familiar with online dating, the cheeky little acronym WLTF puts it STR8 out there. WLTF is a publication (currently online only), which brings together photographers from across the sexual, geographical and creative spectrum to express what they WLTF, or about what WLTF means to them. Its that simple.

Rodrigo Novaes moved from Sao Paulo in the 90’s to study visual arts in Gloucestershire, England before heading to London where he apprenticed for Sir Philip Sommervile, the world famous milliner. After graduating from The University of The Arts, London, in 2001 with an MA in Enterprise and Management for the Creative Arts he moved back to São Paulo. His work has been exhibited in Brazil, England, Spain and Greece.

We caught up with Rodrigo via IM!

Richard: What have I just interrupted?

Rodrigo Novaes: Oh c’mon, use your imagination… do I have to spell it out? lol ;)

R: WOW, you love your acronyms don’t you!!

RN: LOL I guess I do!

R: When did you come up with the idea of WLTF, you mention on your site it was a series of serendipitous events, what were they?

RN: It was a big mixture of lots of things, I worked as the Assistant Curator for a videoart festival here in São Paulo last year, called Videobrasil but at the same time I was making some homemade little books on my domestic printer using my own photographs as I had decided at the time that self-publishing was the future.
During the festival I went round handing out my books. Everyone seemed to like them! At the same time, my boyfriend, who is an internet kid, made me a profile on flickr.com where I started to post images without thinking too much about it. Then as the festival ended, I decided to learn some HTML and CSS on my own in order to make a little site to sell these little books online as artist’s books.

My idea was really just to get the work seen, nothing much beyond that. But I kept getting enquiries about the books, and friends said they wanted to get involved. This got me thinking and one day I had I guess what I would call an epiphany – why not use exactly the same format, images without words, but lots of other people’s work together and not just a vanity publishing project?! So I sat down and wrote the first editorial which became the “about” section on the WLTF site, which is a reflection on the nature of my own photography that is all about very intimate moments with lovers and friends and always very sexual, but quietly sexual, not in-yer-face sexual if you know what I mean. After this I made a very simple site with what I had already learned of HTML and put it online not expecting much from it. This was the first right move, because my friends started putting it about to their friends (the URL that is! -ed), and all of a sudden, the site started to get two to three thousand hits a week and the first images started coming in. This really surprised me and made me think more seriously about the project.

Following this positive interest, I started to further explore the Flickr network and found that there are some really good images out there, although one has to look hard! I created the WLTF group and went around Flickr inviting images into the group and members too. From that point WLTF started to grow and gather momentum. More images started to come in and I expanded the network.

R: How did you find and select the photographers?

RN: Well Flickr obiously was a great starting point. A kind soul, although I don’t know who, put the link to the site on a few Brazilian photography blogs and boom lots of work came in, and some good ones, for example Pedro David, who sent in those images of prostitutes from a very impoverished area of central Brazil. This kind of thing is what I call serendipity, it just happens, you can’t plan it.Some photographers I already knew and went looking for them to see if they would have any interest in taking part like Alex Rose and Stuart Sandford who were great and very responsive to the idea.The very first plan was to choose four or five photographers and start with a very small but perfectly formed project, in order to keep it cheap to print and to administer, but I was bitten on the head with that. So many good images came in that I couldn’t let it pass, I had to allow the project to take its own shape. The selection of the work came naturally, I work instinctively, I can’t say to you that I chose this or that image for any specific reason, it was organic, the images started to fall together naturally, that’s all I can say.

R: How come you’re currently only an online publication?

RN: The main problem is always the same one, money. The objective of the project is to exist in print, four times a year, and one needs cash to make that happen, So that is why I decided to make WLTF #0 an online edition, to show everyone how many people are already involved, how many good work there is out there, and what my concept of WLTF really is. Just talking about it wasn’t doing it anymore, it was time to show the goods and so far the feedback has been amazing. We’ve had 18k hits in just two days!

R: You mention that you ‘just want a bit of fun’ Which images excite you the most and how much is a ‘bit’ of fun?

RN: Well Sir, how long is a piece of string!? lol. I think I could safely say that all of the images excite me in some way, and I am not just saying this to be diplomatic, but if you’re asking me which ones excite me in the sense that it makes me hard, then… these are just a few, take a look and let me know what you think:

R: Future plans?

RN: If it all works out and we get to go to print and get the project properly funded etc etc, I’d like to have future editions of WLTF edited by guest editors. I think that would be a great way of involving even more interesting people and of expanding the WLTF vision, you know, to make it more exciting, that would be great.

R: Where do you hang out in São Paulo, any secret hottie spots we should know about?

RN: Oh I tend to hang out in places that area bit off the beaten track, where angels fear to tread… if you want I can write something for EVB about that.

R: We’d love for you to write something about being off the beaten track in São Paulo. Thanks, and we look forward to WLTF #1 and getting its physical manifestation in our hands.

Julian Frederick: Matthias, your new book Hotel V is one of a series in which you make photographs, largely of yourself, in hotel rooms around the world. What is it about hotels that attracts you to them?

Matthias Hermann: They are both public and private. Hardly any other space combines these two features as much as a hotel room. They have the stories of hundreds of people inscribed in their sheets (and mattresses!), but one does still feel that a room is truly theirs for a night. How many dramas have happened in each room before I enter it to add my mini-drama…. How much sex, love, and hate have those walls seen? There are layers and layers of history in each hotel room, like in history books. And every single layer is present in my photos, both as a backdrop and as the content of the photos.

JF: So you’re participating in an orgy with history: fondling the ghosts of guests gone by, then becoming one yourself. Text is also an important element of your work; it even occasionally serves as a lynchpin for the meaning of a photograph.

MH: The role of the hotel room and of text is not so different: both add further, hidden layers to what we actually see in the photograph. The texts and the authors of the texts contaminate the photograph and the person depicted (and vice versa); their history is forced onto the body displayed, like an invisible tatoo. Most of the text I use is by “famous” people, like art stars, or hollywood stars, or pop stars (Madonna is a constant source). Much has been written about the queering of space (in this case the supposed privacy of the hotel room) which is quite an ephemeral idea. The question seems to be whether the space returns to its original, unblemished straightness once the queer element has physically left. Or does the queerness stay with the space like a stain? How does that apply to text? If you put a quote by George W. Bush in a photo of a faggot posing in a Tuscanian landscape with a raging hard-on, will that have any effect on the perception of Bush? Probably not, but I guess it’s worth a try. Especially as the invisible stands in such high regard with the Born Again Christians…

JF: Yes, your text is very aggressive socially and politically, but also sometimes very referential. For instance the note next to you in one photograph reads “I’m not a person today. I’m an object in an artwork. It’s about emptiness.” It’s like Magritte and David Letterman met Andrea Zittel in a dark alley and beat her senseless with a dildo. Sexuality, art history, and queer theory collide in a hilarious supernova.

MH: Yeah, it’s all about referentiality. That IS what makes art interesting to me. I don’t get your Andrea Zittel reference, but I could imagine a nice menage a trois of Letterman, Andrea Fraser, and William Burroughs in one of Zittel’s tents. After they went for a guided hike, those three could beat themselves up with their giant dildos. Oh, would they have fun. Burroughs would then use a flesh-colored butt plug instead of an apple and restage his William Tell shooting his wife with Fraser. Andrea would give her Kippenberger talk while waiting to be shot at. But I’d insist that Burroughs does hit the butt plug and not at Andrea in this case. No deaths this time.

JF: I was thinking Zittel because there’s so much interchange between her life and work, but you’re right, it’s not a great comparison; she makes a practice of living and you live your practice. In other words where she makes objects in which she lives, you externalize your private life to make objects. Have you ever gotten too personal? Put something out in the world that hit too close to home?

MH: In a solo show in Vienna in 1995 I showed a really beautiful asshole triptych. My dealer overheard the guy responsible for all federal Austrian arts funding comment with disgust: “that’s HIMSELF,” as if every other asshole were morally more acceptable. I reckon it was then that it became clear I can do whatever I wanted, and that nothing could possibly be too personal anymore. “Outing” myself as HIV positive was a further step, though. Strangely I never needed to out myself as being queer, even though somebody told me the other day that an elderly lady asked, after flipping through all my books, whether I might eventually be a homosexual…

Now that the information about my serostatus is out, I guess the next step will be me dying.

JF: Are you afraid of death? Do you think gay men in general have a different relationship to the inevitable than the public at large?

MH: I love my life, so I’ll be happy to go on for a while. Every now and then, especially when I feel low, I think of how lucky I am to be alive and be well, and that I need to be grateful for that and make the most out of it. I tend to not to be afraid of death, but of dying. It seems too big a procedure to imagine, especially premature death, when too many things have to be left open. On the other hand I had a burst appendix three years ago and was on the verge of dying and that wasn’t that bad. I was just slowly fading away, I didn’t realize then how sick I really was. If my partner hadn’t dragged me to the hospital, I would have just gone without much hassle. It seems to me that gay men today are more afraid of aging than of dying, which of course was different some time ago, before protease inhibitors….

JF: I personally feel that gay culture has lost something profound in the last thirty years, the fear of death notwithstanding. My generation missed the both the clandestine, back-alley culture pre-1950 and the explosion of “pride” and resulting bacchanalia post-Stonewall. What do you think of gays today?

MH: I just watched Queer as Folk on DVD and realized (again!) that I have absolutely nothing to do with what is portrayed there as contemporary urban gay life. Although it might be an exaggerated depiction, it seems to be true in its core. But my distance doesn’t mean that I despise it. Foucault once remarked in an interview shortly before his death that he missed the secrecy and camaraderie of gay life (and sex!) in the 50s. But let’s not forget that this life”style” was available only to a very small portion of homosexuals: those who were daring enough to submit to what could be a very dangerous and threatening zone. Not every gay man is a Genet. So I am grateful that gay lib opened up many different possibilities for following generations. That so many gays today seem more bourgeois than suburban middle class families might be sad, but who’s to throw stones here? Why should gays be any more interesting than anybody else: just because they fuck men?

All images courtesy and copyright Matthias Hermann, 2007.

So here I am in Buenos Aires, I arrived last week, OMG its too much, I mean what more does a scruffy village boy need than mullet rocking scruffy boys, polo players and the tastiest meat I’ve ever had my chops around. Anyhow I’ll fill you in on the meat treats another day but I wanted to share this pic with you from a party I was at Saturday. It says something about doing your coke in the living room, not the bathroom. No selfish stashes in Buenos Aires, get it out and share… How civilised.