I first heard of Brad Walsh in 2006, when he was performing at the now legendary Misshapes parties, and running the photography site Junk-Mag, a project he started with his friend Kathy Cacace while attending Oberlin College to “get our college friends naked and on the internet because we went to school in very rural Ohio and what the fuck else do you do out there?” Since then, Brad has made quite a name for himself in New York as a photographer, party promoter, DJ, and most recently as a jewelry designer, all while chipping away at his own solo music. The end of 2009 saw the release of Brad’s latest album, Human Nature, a slick, beautiful album. Drawing equally from the underground and the Top 40, Brad is making a totally charming, clever and catchy kind of pop music.

Portraits of Brad photographed for EVB by Miguel Villalobos

Max Steele: I first saw you performing at Misshapes when it had just moved to Don Hill’s. Something that I think contributed to the success was the mix of genres / communities / vibes at the party, which has sort of gone missing from New York City nightlife lately. That mix of styles is also something I really like about your work.

Brad Walsh: My Misshapes show in 2006 was my first live performance in New York City. It will always be special to me because of that, and because so many people I admired were there that night and watching me. Misshapes was a great thing in its heyday - it was so comfortable to me. Anything went. You could be crazy, but you didn’t have to be. People always thought it was this clique-y, exclusive thing, but I think it was a really genuine and exciting moment for New York. Nothing really has compared since then.

MS: You had made your first album before you arrived here from Ohio, right?

BW: I moved to New York in 2005, had one very bad album under my belt before I got here, and finished my second bad album as soon as I got here. The press refers to my new one as my debut, and I don’t correct them.

MS: I’ve heard your second album and it is not bad, I really liked it, but I’ve never heard your first, Look At Me. What is your most and least favorite track from it?

BW: Oh, Look At Me was just that record you put out before you put out your record. It worked out my kinks and my discomfort with performing alone even to record. Worked out my influences. I do cringe when I hear most of it nowadays. I’m not ashamed of it by any means, but it really just amounted to a bunch of bad demos that needed to happen in order to get here.

MS: If your music was indicative of any specific time or place, what would it be? Do you feel like a real “New York” singer?

BW: I think I’m not particularly “New York” because what I’m doing is not what I’m hearing in New York. I think the two struggling musical communities - not struggling, maybe, but upcoming - are gritty real rock, and poorly-produced electro. People call me electro sometimes but that’s not right. And I like to think I’m well-produced. But both of those semi-genres are extremely artistic and still somehow underground around us here in New York. I’m amazed that anything underground about New York remains underground with someone like Gaga out there dragging it all up and putting it on “American Idol” - which I appreciate, by the way.

MS: Speaking of Gaga, what are your thoughts about her, vis-à-vis “realness”.

BW: She’s as real as she is fake. I’m not trying to sound that pretentious, I promise. Let me think. I love her. I love her music, I love my interactions with her and I think she is a genius in several obvious ways, and that itself is its own genius. She lets us all see what’s happening, and everyone knows that she has manipulated us all, and we still want more. That itself is not a new concept, but somehow it feels very new coming from her. She admits the fakeness about herself, but the fakeness about her has nothing to do with her hair or makeup or clothes. A lot of her lyrics are about lies and holding back and hiding and false faces. They deal with love and feelings and that’s what it’s all about. She uses it to feed the genius. I’m proud of her, and thankful for her.

MS: I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but one of the things I like about your work (both photography and music) is that you’re really earnest and sincere in a culture that’s sometimes too ironic for it’s own good. Am I way off the mark? Is it all a big joke to you?

BW: It’s not a joke at all to me. I think some of my work comes off as jokey or ironic because some parts are familiar. Ripped off, even. Some, I say. Maybe it’s unconscious, but I think it’s just the amateur in me showing. I usually very much mean what I’m doing. I put a mask over my face but I try to draw my face on the mask, you know? Sometimes I think that you, Max, have a face that’s very bare and you don’t even have a mask in your closet as a safety. I respect that about you.

MS: Do you see yourself as part of a particular scene or community? Who do you think of as some of your musical contemporaries?

BW: I don’t think I’m part of a New York scene, because I don’t go to shows or do many myself. I don’t know who would be my musical contemporary here. My musical friends make music that’s nothing like mine, and the people who make art most like mine are not musicians. Maybe the closest would be someone like Josh Madden? He’s an excellent DJ and he likes to inject people with feeling through music. I think stylistically I’m on par with one of my best friends Kerin Rose, who is the designer behind A-Morir. Our brains mesh well and we like to be loud, but behind some obfuscation.
MS: How long were you working on your new album, Human Nature? You recorded the whole thing at home, right?

BW: Ideas and basics for a few years, though it was all recorded last year at my home studio, which is my ancient equipment, a mic on a stand, and me in a chair trying to figure out what’s next. It made me very wary of going outside which is why I now talk like this. I’m turning into Juliana Hatfield, who I really love, by the way.

MS: The cover art is really striking. I think it’s an apt metaphor for the music - there’s a very subtle amount of magic and trickery in it. What are you hoping to reveal about human nature?

BW: The album art has a clinical feel to it but the images of me are animal, which really was just a comment on the content. The album is about relationships, my relationship, and instinct and decision. Shrinkwrapping and sheening the animal chaos going on in each one of us. Turning a fit of human rage into an arrangement on a plastic disc. The same old feelings that every sex-focused living thing has, which is what we most associate with “nature.” We force formality onto it and call it “culture” so as not to kill everyone around us, but even mentioning that this is what humans do brings back the fact that we are animals. Don’t you feel a little sexy, or insecure, or dangerous, or at the very least hungry for food just thinking about all this right now? Thinking about being an animal makes you feel like the animal you are.

Boy/Girl (feat. CariDee English)

I Got What U Need (feat. Amanda Tannen of Stellastar)

Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah) - (Gary Glitter cover) [download]


MS: What record we be most surprised to find in your collection? Are you a closet country queen? Are you a secret reggae fanatic?

BW: I actually don’t think I have any contemporary country, maybe some old Shania. I mean, I have the odd oldie here and there. Hank Williams, Juice Newton. The most surprising CD in my shelf might be Meredith Brooks’ second album - the one after Bitch. Love her to death but I don’t know why I still have that.

MS: I want to know your biggest guilty pleasure.

BW: Probably snacking and watching cartoons. I fall right in. I’m interpreting “biggest” to mean “most often engaged.”

MS: How did your dog [Topper] get his name?

BW: There’s an old Cary Grant movie of the same name, but I think it really all boils down to my puppy’s last name, which is Bottom.

Jeffery Self (left) and Cole Escola (right), known collectively as the VGL Gay Boys, are a true American success story. Striking out on their own to make it in the Big Apple, as so many do, Jeffery and Cole found each other, a webcam, and YouTube. Their viral videos introduced the world to their acerbic wit, demented minds, and classic 1990s sitcom sensibilities. They were picked up by Logo to have their very own TV show, Jeffery and Cole Casserole. Since then, the TV show, their live shows - most recently at New York City’s 2009 HOT! Festival - and two upcoming nights at The Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub, have solidified their status as real celebrities. I’m honored to have gotten some quality time with them to discuss their ride to the top.

Photographed for EVB by David Kimelman

Max Steele: So… how did you guys meet?

Jeffery Self: Mutual friends. Sadly there’s nothing exciting there. But once we did meet and become friends we had some pretty exciting times, not excluding the time we got to meet Lesley Gore. Yes, that Lesley Gore. Maybe we ought to start telling people we met because Lesley Gore introduced us at her annual Memorial Day Pancake Breakfast upstate.

Cole Escola: We knew each other through friends for many months, but we didn’t really click until he started letting his hair grow out. You can fact-check that if you want.
Max: How do you describe Jeffery and Cole Casserole to people who aren’t familiar with your other videos?

Cole: People aren’t familiar with our videos? Haha! I’m half-kidding. I describe it as a sort of casserole made from the messy ideas in our heads and presented to you on a dish that is our TV show. I don’t think Logo likes me to describe it like that because it doesn’t really make people want to watch, but I can only think of things in terms of food.

Jeffery: Cole always uses the term “shit show” but I don’t think that’s the best marketing angle. I guess it’s essentially a hodgepodge of various sketches, stories, jokes, and groove thangs.

Max: What’s your writing process like? Do you guys take a lot of notes or mostly improvise?

Jeffery: I’m really controlling so I tend to sit at the computer and type while we talk the script out loud. We definitely write out loud and attempt to make each other laugh.

Cole: When we get together we usually gossip and have coffee for 40 minutes or so. After that we throw out ideas, improvise based on the ideas, and keep what we like. We do that for a few hours until we’re ready to start drinking.

Max: Which one of you is older?

Cole: I am.

Jeffery: He’s a loooooooooooot older. Can’t you tell? No, but seriously, Cole is older and his hair is graying a lot faster than mine.

Max: You guys recently performed at this year’s HOT! Festival. What was your show like?

Jeffery: Is it lame to say hot? Yeah, it was. It was something we originally workshopped back in March under the title A Conversation about Annie Potts. We were offered a slot at the Here Arts Center and we didn’t have a show or script to do but we had a mild bit of an idea so we told them we’d do it and wrote the show in three weeks. We didn’t really know what it’d be about so we just called it A Conversation about Annie Potts. We reworked the show and I like to think it was pretty groovy. It was called Jeffery and Cole: Make it Bigger. It was the bio-play of our fictitious rise to fame and fortune. We wanna make a movie version of the script. Are you listening Nora Ephron?

Cole: It was kind of like Laverne & Shirley if Laverne and Shirley were 100 times hornier and really high all the time. And that’s not a joke answer. That’s really what I think it was like.

Max: When you began doing videos together on YouTube, was the goal to eventually do a TV show? If not, what is your goal? Exactly how famous do you guys want to be?

Jeffery: Asking someone who has the audacity to film themselves on a webcam and put it on YouTube just how famous they want to be is a loaded and very dangerous question. We really just started out with the videos to amuse each other but once we got into the groove of things a TV show was certainly on my radar. Our main bond is over television of the early 90s so the idea of being on TV is intoxicating.

Cole: I think our goal was just to make videos. I liked doing them because it made me feel like I was doing more in New York than working at a job I hated for $8.50 an hour just so I could afford to sit around my apartment and be miserable. As far as fame goes, I consider myself an artist, and any true artist will tell you that fame can NEVER be the goal. Art is about making money and getting the people you want to fuck to want to fuck you.

Max: As bona fide internet sensations, you guys must get a lot of fan letters. Do you respond to them?

Jeffery: Are you kidding? I LOVE hearing from people on Facebook and stuff, so OF COURSE I respond. Speaking of which. Follow me on Twitter. Yeah, I did that.

Cole: A fan is a friend I haven’t met yet!

Max: Apart form the VGL Gay Boys, you both also perform separately. Do you guys “save” certain material to use in your solo work versus what you come up with together?

Jeffery: They’re such different things so not really.

Cole: We usually write collaboratively, so I think it would make things awkward if he were to see one of our ideas show up in a solo project. That’s probably not far off, though.

Max: Jeffery, your solo work deals with unrequited love and one-night stands. Cole, your work as Joyce Conner deals with suicide. So I would ask you each this this: Jeffery, what most makes you most want to kill yourself? And Cole, what do you find sexiest in a man?

Jeffery: Love this question. I tend to get most depressed out of insecurities and being jealous. Wow, that was way too revealing and truthful. I also dislike the way my face puffs up when I drink too much red wine.

Cole: It varies depending on what substances I’m on that day.

Max: Your show has had a lot of cameo appearances. Who would your ideal guest star be?

Jeffery: Thats like my favorite thing to think about in the whole wide world. Obviously we wanna work with some of our favorite ladies: Annie Potts, Jan Hooks, Shelly Duvall, Teri Garr, Melissa Joan Hart, the woman who played Miss Yvonne on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse (as Miss Yvonne).

Cole: I think about this almost every day. There’s a long-ass list of comedy ladies that Jeffery and I would KILL to have on our show, even if we had to kill each other - and don’t think we’re not ready. All Jane Curtain has to do is say “go” and I’ll shove an ice pick through Jeffery’s fucking skull.

Max: One of your early videos, The Morning After, made a joke of you two sleeping together, kind of pre-empting any speculation about you guys as a couple. Give me the dirt: have you guys ever had a long day of shooting video and hopped into bed together?

Jeffery: No, but one night we did get really drunk and held each other and cried.

Cole: It hasn’t happened yet, but we still have more episodes to film.

Max: What advice do you guys have for other young queer artists?

Cole: Write all your ideas down right when you think of them.

Jeffery: Do your shit. Don’t talk about it, do your shit.

Max: Which one of you likes peanut butter more?

Jeffery: Me, but likely cause I’m more desperate for a “thing”. Though… I’m really obsessed with it in a huuuuge way. In fact, now I’m craving a peanut butter cookie and I literally ate a peanut butter sandwich two hours ago.

Cole: Jeffery probably eats it more frequently. I definitely know more about it though. I’d say he likes it more, but I really appreciate it.
Max: Do you guys have any good luck charms? Any other kooky superstitions?

Jeffery: I have all kinds of kooky superstitions and compulsions. For example, and this sorta goes back to peanut butter thing actually, if I walk by the Tasti D-lite in Times Square and they have the peanut butter flavor on their flavor chart for the day I won’t let myself eat any peanut butter that day. If I look at a clock and it says 13 on it I won’t move until the minute changes, and to make it even more insane, I’ll close my eyes and if I open them before it changes I’ll flip out. I have all kinds of habitual ritualistic behavior that somehow roots back to my mom.

Cole: On my right hand I wear a ring that once belonged to my great-grandmother. She gave it to my grandmother, who gave it to one of my aunts, who gave it to me when I left Oregon for New York. I always say it gets passed down to the strongest woman of each generation. Every once in a while I look down at it and think, “this same ring was once on a hand that harvested wheat and delivered babies. Now it’s on TV and touches dicks in bars.” I think that’s neat.

Jeffery and Cole perform Jeffery and Cole Casserole: Live at Joe’s Pub, Sunday September 13 and Friday September 18

Sam McKinniss is making a scene. The Connecticut-born and -raised painter exists at the epicenter of an art and party community in Hartford, Connecticut. While Sam’s got the brains, brawn, beauty and talent to be a real bona fide New York Art Star, he’s in no hurry to move. He’s had solo shows at some of Hartford’s most prestigious galleries and museums, including the New Britain Museum of American Art, and has been thriving outside of the New York City gallery system. He also maintains a blog, chronicling the glamorous Hartford nightlife, employing a high/low cultural contrast also seen in his paintings. Here’s what he had to say about his life in Hartford, his paintings, and his thoughts on desire.

Max Steele: Where are you from, originally? Have you always been an artist?

Sam McKinniss: I’m from Connecticut. I’ve always been an artist in the way that most kids are artists, and then I grew up, and I was still an artist.

MS: One of the first things I noticed about you is your personal sense of style. What do you wear when you want to impress someone? What do you wear when you’re just staying at home?

SM: When it really counts, I like to expose my collar bones and chest, usually with an unbuttoned shirt. Having one good navy blue blazer is important.  A clean shave goes a long way. I like old world New England preppy dress-codes and dressing for dinner, but it also needs to be just ever so fucked-up. Maybe that’s just how I was raised. At home I mostly just wear tons of fabulous jewels!

MS: Your blog, Weekend Party Update, makes Hartford seem so glamorous! Is it really like that? Why live there as opposed to New York City?

SM: Weekend Party Update started vaguely as an art project, where I would document my life in Hartford in the hyper-young, hyper-fashionable mode of a New York City party blogger. There are so many people doing this in New York like Nicky Digital, Cobra Snake or even Brad Walsh. It make sense, I guess, for where they are and what they do, but I wanted to bring that sort of faux-photojournalism to Hartford because it seemed absurd and funny and nobody else was doing it.

Hartford is not glamorous and it’s not fun to live here - we need to get that straight. My friends and I are fun and glamorous, however, and we do have good parties, so I wanted to see if I could portray Hartford as this undiscovered hipster gem, relying mostly on the force of my character and powers of persuasion. Its really about a kind of fantasy where I would like to live. It’s a persona I’ve affected in order to make life bearable in this otherwise terrible city. I hope the blog works that way. I try to think of it as Tina Barney meets Last Nights Party. That is, all of the pedigree, money and good manners of Connecticut mixed with kids who just want to party and have sex.

There is definitely social coterie and a classist flair to everything going on here, and I’m attracted to that in a lot of ways while also being repulsed by it. I’m talking superficially about hand-me-down Mercedes Benz’s, The Dead Poets Society, country clubs, J.D. Salinger, Yale and Fairfield County. I love that crap. Have you ever noticed how Chloe Sevigny always mentions growing up in Connecticut in every interview? There is this quiet, well-mannered and hidden exoticism about Connecticut, it slowly reveals itself to you the longer you live here, and then it quickly becomes irrelevant the minute you leave.

MS: You say that your number one goal in painting is to fall in love “quickly and without moral discernment”. Are you usually in love with the people you make portraits of, or does it happen while you’re making the painting?

SM: I have been trying to replace the confusion of falling in love with another person with falling in love with a material object, to make romance easier. In a scenario reminiscent of Dorian Gray, I’m trying to make a lifelike stand-in for somebody that will stare back at me with love and devotion, forever. I’m doing this because my relationships with men don’t usually go this way, even though I’d like it if they did. I’d like there to be this perfect romance with every boy I’ve ever been into. I paint people who I am strongly sexually attracted to, straight men mostly, so I can pretend to have a perfect affair with them. The letdown is realizing that art cannot love you back - though this doesn’t stop people from looking at my work and saying “I love that” and then buying it.

I think that kind of transaction is strange, because here is an object that cannot love you back, but the emotion you’ve devoted to it begs for reciprocity. The art world is a big, fucked-up love economy, but I like the way buying and selling feels. So much of it is based around love and desire. The way I feel about consuming an image is devastatingly similar to the way I feel about meeting attractive men. At least when I’m painting, I can have a flicker of a few moments to myself where everything is right and I feel I’ve lived with him, whomever he is.

MS: Your work is sweetly, gently political (to me). You playfully explore issues of identity, power, and the queer gaze. Do you think of yourself as a politically-minded artist, or a romantic?

SM: I’m decidedly romantic and reluctantly political. I make figurative pictures and I overuse the word “love.” I deal with the effects of light within a pictorial frame. I’m interested in pop music, dreaming, sex and magic. These are very romantic things. But I’m making representational work, which is inherently political because somebody is getting represented. Who is posing, who is looking, who is buying and who is profiting? These are political questions. I’m interested in advancing a gay gaze, but I’m also interested in helping to form a post-queer art-world, if you will. I’d like homosexuality to be a non-issue, politically. I’d like for everybody to have the kind of sex they want to have, and I’d like it to be perfectly acceptable to lust after whomever you please, and live with whom you want. This is not exactly how things are in the mainstream, but it’s close, and I’m going to continue operating as if it is. I feel like I have power when I can politely convince a straight friend to sit, pose and look at me like he wants me, and he does it willingly. No one is taking advantage of anybody exactly, but I have turned the tables and made total dudes believe that this kind of thing is perfectly normal. I’m living the dream. That’s politics.

My work also makes a subtle attack on bourgeois configurations of love and normalcy. For example, I present 15 portraits of different men in one room and call it “True Love”. I think this exposes the impossibility of locating one partner to live with happily ever after within the traditional framework of heterosexual marriage and social organization. The shock of recognition is felt and repeated 15 times from every direction and from different men, defeating the likelihood that ‘one true love’ exists. I’ve replaced that trope with a network of connections that is based entirely on desire, reaching out and wanting to touch.

MS: Who are some of your personal heroes or role models? (I’m thinking along the lines of gay artists, etc. but they can be anyone, of course.)

SM: I think about John Singer Sargent a lot, mostly because of his unknown private life and very public fame. Also Mark Morrisroe, Oscar Wilde, Wolfgang Tillmans, Maureen Gallace. Andy Warhol is an obvious one but that should go without saying.

MS: Does your boyfriend  mind when you paint loving portraits of other boys?

SM: No he likes it. We are very protective of our respective independence in art and in life. I do whatever I want and so does he, but we have sex only with each other. Its very stable and very good.

MS: You’ve done a few self-portraits - is this something you’d like to continue doing? Can you fall in love with yourself?

SM: I don’t like self-portraits. I like the way Jack Pierson handled self-portraiture by photographing idealized youths, models and actors - basically everybody else but him. His various desires collate to compile an accurate picture of what he is attracted to, and tell something essential about himself in the process. I don’t really respond to the way Robert Mapplethorpe did it, as an example. I don’t trust the cliche, the “artist looking inward and revealing.” Can that happen in real life? I doubt it. It’s not very modern. I don’t like to admit to self-absorption, because what artist isn’t totally self-absorbed? It’s a given.

I think you are referring to a self-portrait I showed last summer in Brooklyn, which was an ink drawing of me in my briefs, standing on a rock next to a lake with the inscription “I WISH I COULD HAVE BEEN WITH YOU AT THE SWIMMING HOLE.” I made that as a missive to Thomas Eakins’ beautiful male nudes bathing in a similar swimming hole from 1885. I made it because I  felt like I needed my own body to invoke the desired sense of longing. Look: here is my body and look at how badly it wants these bodies which are referenced but absent, and in this fixed and permanent picture, the image of my body will stand here in wanting for all time, lusting after another image which will also stay fixed for the length of history. When a work of art references or quotes another work of art, that’s a lot like unrequited love. I don’t usually want to paint myself. But I did want to put myself out there for this cause, because Eakins’ swimming hole imagery haunts me in the most visceral way.
MS: Unrequited love seems very productive for you, Sam. What do you think your work would look like if it depicted reciprocal love? Is that possible?

SM: I am trying to work that out now, because I happen to be in love and in what seems to be a long-term relationship. Go figure. I am trying to maintain and enhance the sensuality and magic of pictures without having to chase every hot guy. There are so many hot guys out there. I mean, look at Eastvillageboys. Who has time? To quote the Mamas and the Papas, “unrequited love’s a bore, yeah/and I’ve got it pretty bad/but for someone you adore, it’s a pleasure to be sad.”

I’m trying to make pictures that sweat and lust in their own way with their own private, obfuscated erotic life freed of this self-determined agenda. I’m trying to sublimate more and substitute pictures of inanimate things, places, pop stars and private memories for how great it feels to get a hard-on. But I still like making portraits and I haven’t stopped. I’m just trying to expand the program to include my experience in the studio, now that reciprocal love is a personal reality and not just some distant vision of getting laid. Lately I’m working on a big painting of Crystal Gayle’s 1977 album cover for We Must Believe in Magic. It seems right.

MS: Have you ever done animal portraits? What would be your ideal animal to depict?

SM: I drew a swan the other day just for the fun of it. I’ve always been attracted to Degas’ racehorses and jockies. George Stubbs’ horses are fabulous too. I have a little bit of that in me. I like what animals have meant for society pictures, historically. Power, virility, status and portable property. Domesticated animals are the ultimate luxury item. In art school I painted a really flamboyant portrait of my really gay friend Joe with his lapdog, Maggie, and it remains a personal favorite. The lapdog in serious portrait art is a convention which has fallen out of fashion, but it might be ripe for a comeback.

MS: How do you organize your artwork? Do you have a thematic idea for a series first or name them after?

SM: For my two shows last year, called “True Love” and “Fierce Doubt”. I wanted every portrait for “True Love” to stare directly at the viewer, and in “Fierce Doubt” to look away from the viewer. The shows were up simultaneously in different venues across town and I wanted this difference to be noticed, felt, and taken personally. Like finding true love followed by experiencing fierce doubt. That was my big style concern going in, which I thought would act as a good organizational parameter.

Color and mood can be just as important for me when putting work together. I tend to work fast, so my palette is often consistent for a number of weeks or months, and lots of things will relate formally that way. But it’s also important to me that nothing looks like it is part of a series. A big group of new work gets made, and I want them to be linked together by secret ties and relationships, because that’s so much riskier and sexier. Nothing is ever the same size, and the pictures’ relationships to one another are all private or obscure. If they work, my paintings hang well together because they have my certain style.

MS: You’ve been selling quite a bit, Sam. Where is your work ending up? What do you think of people’s reaction to your artwork?

SM: I have a few very committed collectors in Hartford, and they’ve been quite supportive. A lot of gay guys buy my work, believe it or not. Gay guys and the women that love them. Straights too, I don’t mean to leave anybody out.

Portraits of Sam McKinniss shot for EVB by Nodeth Vang
All artwork ©Sam McKinniss
.

Team, by Max Steele
Artwork by bowerystudio

My best girl friend, Cotton, and I wake up in the afternoon and smoke the joint he made with grass he stole from his dad. We drink mint medicinal tea and listen to the old Pandoras record. We get sad when we remember that the lead singer was a speed addict. Cotton shows me how to play Courtney Love songs on the guitar for a few hours. At dusk, at eleven at night, in the middle of the night, then, we go out. It’s nighttime in the Tenderloin. Gay couples in bars want to buy us drinks.

We go further downtown and sit at the bar. Cotton wears black and brown and I wear blue and black. We’re the colors of punched-up faces. Punched-in mouths.

Yuppie fag couple comes up and sees us sitting at the bar, says “How are you boys tonight?” His hair gel smells.

“I’m here with my boyfriend.” He says. I picture a German Shepherd, a Fido on a leash tied up outside the gay bar. Growling. He grins at us as if he has just made the funniest joke anyone has ever heard. “Do you boys like to dance?” he asks, then he yells “I LOVE TO DANCE”, which settles it, I guess.

I love to dance, too. Cotton used to hate to dance, used to tell people to stop dancing. Now he’s okay with it. He’s a really good dancer, he shouldn’t be so shy.

I’m not the greatest dancer but I ‘get really into it’. I was hoping to dance a lot tonight but now I’m not so sure. I drink gin and tonics and Cotton drinks gin and tonics. Cow pus, some bitch next to us keeps sipping his white russian (milk has cow pus in it - we know we’re the vegans) really loudly with his big sunglasses, indoors. Milky and sticky and loud. Bacterial. I don’t really wanna dance with hairgel.

Hair Girl.

I go to the bathroom to talk to my friends.

I’m waiting in line for the bathroom, which means cigarettes, I guess. San Francisco, anyways.
I see a boy with a dyed black mowhawk sitting on a chair in the back hallway, sobbing, while a girl rubs his shoulder. His lips are pierced a few times. I sidestep them and watch someone giving a blowjob at the sink. It’s my friend Daisy Duke, he writes a gossip column. Loud fag! He is getting his dick sucked by someone in a white t-shirt with expensive shoes.

“Hey Billy.” Daisy Duke zips up his pants and we watch boys on the dance floor.

Here’s how he says “Hey”: he says it like women on television, like he is talking about the food that horses eat.

“Damn!” he shouts and points like kids at candy. He sees a boy who is skinny or something, hanging up his coat nearby. (The boy’s pants are tight - they are probably his sister’s pants. I bet he got all his old records from his older sister too. She probably taught him how to dance so good. It always comes from an older sister.) “Look at him!” Yeah I see him. “You like him, Billy?” Daisy asks. I nod yes, of course. “You wanna put your dick there? You wanna put your dick up his ass?”

I have to admit that I am not a poet.

“Oh, um hey.” The boy says to Daisy. “What’s up?”

“Not much, sweetie, we just watchin’ you dance is all. What’s your name?”

“Daisy, you know my name!”

“How do you know my name? What’s your name?” He is bewildered. This is like when you accidentally eat poison, or when your vegan girlfriend takes a bite out of something that has milk in it and you don’t have the heart to tell her, explain about how the cows are hooked up to machines, milking machines, for so long that they get infected and pus gets into the milk into the cookies, you don’t tell her you just let her chew.

“Daisy, I’m Justin. We know each other.”

Which means that poor Justin with the ass up for grabs, dancing by himself in the back hallway with sobbing faggots, poor Justin fucked Daisy Duke one time, got fucked by Daisy Duke, and now doesn’t even get to keep his name. Worst divorce yet.

I could watch this all night.
The back, the further back you go it’s like in time. The boys here are younger. At the very back of the gay bar there are even more idiotic young tiny boy conversations. In the back alley there’s a little baby, maybe. Shitting his pants. I leave Daisy Duke to go dance. Meet up with Cotton and the men who want to buy us drinks. Men who LOVE TO DANCE. Daisy kisses me on the cheek. Daisy kisses me with tongue. I shake Justin’s hand.

Congratulations.

Yuppie negotiates with Cotton. Says “We’re really open, Steven and I are like, we’re, like, cool with anything. We’re up for anything.” Cotton comes up to me.

“These guys want to fuck us, Billy.” I hate it. “They really like us.” This is code for “RUN”.

“Are they going to pay us?” I ask. I would maybe have sex with one of them, the cute one, for money. Or something. That bitch bottom, kept boy, even at 29, frosted tip hot bitch piggy bottom. Pierced nipples, tweaked nipples. Maybe he’d like me to tie him up and leave him locked up somewhere dark. Maybe he’d like me to fuck him in the bathtub, tie him to the bed and then take his money. Worth a shot. Maybe he likes expensive sushi. I am doubtful.

Our drinks are done and Cotton is bored. I am the slow one, I take forever. I can never make up my mind, I might have a tumor. What a creep I am. Apparently. What a bore! The out-of-towner! The tourist! We get our coats.

“It was so nice to meet you boys,” they say. “Are you guys gonna have a good night? Seriously,” the cute one, that old queen queer bitch puts his hands on my shoulders “have so much fun tonight, okay? Have a lot of fun.” Like a carpet he is rolled up, rolling. I can taste the glue taste on my own tongue, just looking at the sweat pooling down his neck. They think Cotton and I are running home to go fuck each other.

Outside the club, we find a pack of Nellies smoking cigarettes so we steal some. Cotton starts a fight.

Princess is the leader of the pack. He is a radical faerie and he is chatty chatty chatty with us. “Oh boys, I love making new friends.” Hands us a pipe of weed. It’s a crack pipe, though, there are traces of meth TINA CRYSTAL STEPHANIE MICHELLE HONEY WANDA LINDA ALEXANDRA SAMANTHA EUGENE NAME NAME AMERICA GIRL LADY powder on it. I’m scared to smoke from it but I do anyways. Fear is there to be overcome, right? Ride through the forest.

A homeless woman walks up to ask for change from us. Princess says “Ew, oh my GOD! This woman smells like shit!” The homeless woman walks away, cursing. “Oh Honey!” I’m terrified. Cotton is terrified too. You never know when, if, or how a curse will come true. Maybe Princess will get hit by a car for being a fucking bitch faggot tonight.Cotton turns to Princess, turns to him even though Princess is much taller, and says “I hope you get hit by a car and that your face gets torn open on the asphalt.” Princess giggles, shocked! Boy cruelty! Boys with no hearts! We are in a city where the boys amputate their hearts. Not DC, not Olympia, SAN FRANCISCO is where all the boys are robots. It’s not so bad. It’s an efficiency thing.

Cotton is glutted on the truth serum and weed and dancing, and the go-go boys, and the offers to have our assholes eaten. We start walking back towards the heart of the Mission, to his house. Cotton lives in a big room with no windows. It is full of guitars and pictures of rocker-chicks. It’s my favorite room in the city.

I make us stop for pizza. “Are you sure, Billy?” I nod and I am bossy, apparently, so Cotton and I go out for pizza. The pizza place near his no-window room is one of the few things open all night long. Cotton has a theory (and he is absolutely right) that the pizza place is staffed exclusively by faggots in the closet, there to catch a glimpse of boys like us. Tonight is a night of our assholes money godfuture heaven assholes. Advertised, as well. We are always being hit on, the two of us. We order pizza, there is a cute boy sitting alone, eating two slices of pizza. I stare at him. I cross my arms. I have a stomach ache.

“Hey lady,” Cotton says.

In high school he was my most popular friend. He can talk to animals, you know. He’s one of those rare birds who knows everyone’s language. The boy perks up. We sit down.

“So what are you guys up to tonight?” He asks. I think about lying to him and giving him a fake name, Cotton and I think the same thing, like twins or teammates.

I tell him my name is Billy and Cotton tells him his name is Cotton. We feel comfortable because these aren’t our real names anyways. He gives us his real name, Chris.

“What did you boys do tonight?” He asks. I wait for Cotton to talk first. I like feeling like wifey. This is Cotton’s home turf. He’ll make a better joke, I’m better at following it anyways. Cotton says we went to a club together and now we’re bored. What about you, Baby Chris? He looks like he is new to town and Cotton says so. I don’t need to say it I don’t get to say it because I live in New York City now. So this is provincial San Francisco. This is the boonies I am in a foreign land where the boys amputate ourselves. We wear tight jeans in NYC but we also act like we’re dead. We all lie perfectly still in bed.

Courtney Love: “WE TALK THE SAME. WE LOOK THE SAME. WE EVEN FUCK THE SAME. DO YOU PLEASE? MAKE IT REAL?”

Chris is (of course) from the East Coast. He is new to San Francisco and this is when Cotton gets bored so I take over. He gets our pizza. My pizza.

I eat pizza - Cotton doesn’t, he is a good vegan warrior and I have no backbone. I can’t make a fucking decision to save my life. I’ll have the cheese. Mine with extra cow pus please.

Chris has some job - some nonprofit job. He is bummed because he spent all night taking care of his friends from out of town. “And now,” he says with his raising eyebrow, which strikes me as obscene, me with a face full of pus, finding this boy’s eyebrow obscene, “and now, it’s like, what am I gonna do all night?”

It’s four a.m. “Y’know?” he says. “You know what I mean?” I wonder if he likes it in San Francisco.

“So what’s up with you guys?” Chris asks, finishing off the last of his pizza.

“You guys like, friends, boyfriends, what?”

Cotton pauses and I don’t know whether to follow his lead. “We’re best friends.” This seems to work. “But all night people have thought we’re a couple.”

“Oh.” Chris says. Fuck him. As in hurt.

“We’re going back to my house now,” Cotton continues, “to watch the Sonic Youth Goo movie. Have you ever seen it, Chris?” No he hasn’t seen it he hasn’t scene anything good. This is getting ridiculous.

“Should I come too?” he asks. He is honestly asking and now Cotton has to literally hold his greasy hand to get him to come over. Don’t bother, I think to myself. He comes with us.

In Cotton’s room we smoke more grass because I think I’ll need it. Chris lays down in between us on the bed and I am watching the shit out of Kim Gordon in leather stretch pants. Wondering how much more blonde I’ll have to be in my life. I want to be as cold as her. I watch and don’t even notice that Chris and Cotton have started necking. Chris licks my ear and I can’t decide whether to go for it or to keep hearing secrets about My Friend Goo. Girl World. Hairgel Girl world sunglasses. Fucking music videos, man.

Chris and I make out. He gets his ass eaten and at some point Chris wants to take off my shirt. He sits on top of me and it pisses me off because now I don’t see the video for Cinderella’s Big Score. He raises his eyebrow, again, when he sticks his finger up my ass. As if HE is surprised and as if it is news to HIM that he is clawing his way up my ass. His mouth tastes like cow pus grease and crust. I hate him for looking so curious.

I wrap my hand almost all the way around his neck. My hands are smaller than I thought. My ex-boyfriend and I used to choke each other in bed, used to beat each other up a lot. A lot of biting. No blood though. We went wild, so I figure Chris will a) go wild, or b) get freaked out, and either way it’ll be over soon.

Kim! Tune your bass with the tendons of this poor boy’s throat! Your picks are all chipped, with fingernails up my ass, expectant.

He is one of those awful horrible boys who insists on eye contact when he cums. He stares at me and makes an expression of great exertion. This is supposed to get me hot. I cum and wipe myself up with his t-shirt. He has the audacity to stay over in Cotton’s bed. In the morning Chris wakes up and says “I’m leaving my number here, guys.” And the fucker leaves his number.

Back in New York City, ran into Daisy Duke. Walking home from the train. He said “you know, I’ve wanted to fuck you from the day I met you.”

I’m not being fair.

Daisy Duke is drunk and out of town staying at a friend’s house. He doesn’t live here he’s a tourist. He says “Billy, I have wanted to fuck you from the day I met you. You’re not my friend. We’re not friends, you know. I can get pervy on you. You’re not safe from me.”

Actually, that sounds fine to me. I don’t wanna be safe. I wanna be H-E-L-D like H-E-L-D down, touched. But I don’t want to be safe.

Not with you, Daisy Duke.

.

Puppeteer: Gold Codes, by Max Steele
Artwork by bowerystudio

Sister Cotton and Sister Antlers and I go out together. Sister Antlers is taller than I am and Sister Cotton is shorter than I am. I’m Goldilocks. We are the youngest boys at the club in San Francisco. We’ve known each other since before we had nicknames (Antlers, Cotton and Billy) and we sleep in the same bed, hold hands when we walk down the street. We’re like young French girls, we show affection openly. And also like little French girls, men in San Francisco think about fucking us.

Antlers and Cotton take me to the dance floor and then someone turns on a strobe light. A fog machine starts up. Crazy rainbow lights. We smoked a joint and drank a bottle of gin on the way here. Cotton takes off his shirt, he’s got black hair on his chest. Antlers takes off his shirt, he has brown hairs on his chest, and a moustache. Cotton shows us how to dance, clenching his fists. I don’t have hair on my chest, so I just watch.

A tall boy in glasses says hello. I like boys shorter than me, and this one is a full head taller. I like to be the bigger one, but letting him be bigger feels really familiar. He asks me where I’m from, and why, if I’m from New York, I’m in San Francisco.

I get impatient when I’m telling him about myself. He buys me a whiskey and I drink it really quickly, even before he’s paid for it. He seems really smart from his glasses. He asks me about my band, what kind of music I like to listen to, have I been to this club before, do I want to go hang out at his house. It’s a little bit, he warns me, of a walk. Says he hopes I have strong leg muscles.

(My friend Betsy teaches an acting class in San Francisco for mentally retarded adults. One of the people in the class, Annie Ding, was born without eyes. Betsy says that she is puppeted, that someone has to hold her hand to take her anywhere. Her puppeteer leads her to the middle of the room and she sings.

“I GO OUT WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT”

Her puppeteer is a gorgeous but too-skinny boy. He stands behind her, holding her up by her wrists.)

When we get to his house, his bedroom is pitch black. I ask him: what’s your sign? When were you born? Under which animal?

(I’m only asking because I used to go out with an Aries and I read somewhere that Arieses are supposed to be the best lovers for me. For a lion like me, I mean.)

He throws me down on the bed on my back and says “Guess.”

“I hate to.”

“You don’t want to try?”

“No.” I think this is going to be really bad. I don’t want to have to guess anything. This is the worst boy in the whole city coast Californian country. Back in New York where I live, if this were happening in New York and someone throws me onto their bed and then I asked him what sign he was born under he would just TELL ME. We wouldn’t need to talk about it like in California: movie stars, beaches, farms. There’s not a lot to talk about.

So okay, finally he gives up and says what animal he was born under. “I’m an Aries. Are you going to fuck me?” he pulls my legs up, so my knees are on his shoulders “Or are you going to get fucked? What’s gonna happen?”

The Nerve! to ask me what is going to happen!

HERE ARE THE RULES - SOME TRUE THINGS:
NEVER FUCK ANYONE YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO BE.
EVERYBODY’S HUNGRY. EVERYBODY’S HIGH.

And he fucks me - and slowly.

Slow enough for me to think about how I when I used to go out with an Aries I always fucked him like a mommy. How the astrology sexual compatibility chart (capability chart) said that an Aries always likes to top and that an Aries always likes to top without being gentle - likes to top swiftly. And makes me think: someone here is lying. Either the guy I used to go out with, or the guy fucking me, or an astrologer, and I’m thinking about the lying and that makes it hotter, and his dick gets harder, mine gets harder.

THE GOLDEN RULE: DO UNTO OTHERS

The GOLD CODE, laws, a rulership, kingdom of Gold Codes.
I let him fuck me the way my ex-boyfriend liked to be fucked. That is to say I raise my hips the same way he used to. I touch him in the exact way that I would want to be touched, the places I like to be. I pretend that he’s me, he’s Billy fucking me, Billy’s ex-boyfriend. Fucking him the way I would want to be fucked. Keeps bouncing back and forth into me. My head is spinning from whiskey. I say I hope you have strong leg muscles and he proves he does, acting the part of me. Bouncing around just Billy! Billy! Billy! I hear feedback from guitars.

Says I hope you have strong leg muscles.

Inside of me, he says “relax”. I tell him in a calm voice “I am relaxed. You should relax maybe.”

He pushes his dick inside of me all the way, but slowly. I’m thinking about speed, gathering it. And inertia. The sound of doors slamming. Loud sounds that wake you up. He grunts, he moans at me. I think: I can’t take all of his dick inside me. Think: guess I already am. Think: I contain all of him already, I can get all of him. I close my eyes, him in me slowly, but again. I’m acting like someone else so I can pretend he’s me. Like a hand making my arms move from the inside.

Getting fucked by a boy you don’t know who wants to talk to you about Derrida. Pretend to be someone else so you can imagine the other person is you fucking your own self.

List of things this is like:

Karma
The Golden Rule
Singing the blues
Born without eyes
Being an actor
Puppets, puppeteers

I GO OUT WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT

The next morning a man with a pink rhinestone-studded skull-shaped belt buckle follows me for three blocks, down the stairs to the subway station and onto the train. He sits down behind me and sniffs at the back of my neck.

.

Our Job is to Quit, by Max Steele
Artwork by bowerystudio

I woke up this morning with the wan film of Joe’s cum in my mouth. I scanned the room at the top floor of the building in Chinatown for anything worth stealing. I felt entitled to the jewelry hung from a pushpin on the wall, the designer scarves, and entitled certainly to the stack of porno on the opposite side of the room. I wondered briefly if Joe and I were the same shoe size. He was, I assumed, loaded and foreign even though he said he was from Texas.

He had the overgrown and unformed build of a Scandinavian and an indecipherable accent: “How come you are a perfect lover all of a sudden?” I couldn’t answer I don’t know. Two times in one night.

When we got into bed I made fun of him for being old (25). He thought I was 18, told him to guess again and he sighed 21, fixed his hair and took of his underpants. I asked what he does and he said he is an actor.

I left a note and snuck out and walked to Union Square. No, actually, I left a note and went to the bathroom and put on all of his expensive cologne and Chanel Pour Monsieur moisturizer and hair cream and then snuck out. I walked to Soho and I was wearing the t-shirt I made that says “I fucked Sontag”, and I walked over to Deitch Projects and threw a sledgehammer through the front window. I just found it on the street. It was sitting up against a fire hydrant - a golden hammer and a black metal head. On its side in red paint the name AMY was written in cursive.(I remember now that Crystal, my friend, is reading Keith Haring’s journals and read part of it aloud to me, and one of the entries, a few Julys before he died of the Gay Plague, begins with poor Keith Haring saying “fucking sexy New York boys are driving me crazy.”)

Jeffrey, seeing me, realizing that I am the boys who drove men crazy. Keith Haring, Jeffrey Deitch crazy. Mad with kinetic energy, they can’t get into my ass fast enough so they go crazy and die.

Seeing me in my little black tank top and reeking of Swedish cum and cologne, seeing me break his gallery window with a golden sledgehammer called Amy, has a heart attack.

He clutches the golden chain that hangs around his neck under his Marc Jacobs shirt
 and feels his pulse leave his body.

(The Gay Plague that Haring died of maybe isn’t AIDS but it’s actually how Jeffrey Deitch died. It’s when fags come and rend you limb from limb. Ancient Greeks thought it was only women during Bacchanalia, when they’d leave their husbands and kids and run through the city. Actually, boys did it too after we killed all the Greek women. Now in NYC, it’s fags only. Men come up from downtown, they come up out of the water with beards and hairy legs, they run screaming across the Williamsburg bridge with cracked broken sharp teeth, and you’re torn open with wanting to fuck. Rich sons of privilege with golden crystal money assholes taking cabs from the Upper West Side just so that you can see yourself explode in your reflection on them. We come and we eat you up and make you watch.)

I was celebrated by the art world and famous artists wanted to sleep with me, wanted me to sit on their dicks. I had an interview in Artforum Magazine and was offered a teaching gig. There aren’t any photos of me killing Jeffrey Deitch, so all they could do was sell the sledgehammer named Amy.

I was tried for involuntary manslaughter and someone on the news called Deitch “a national hero” and called me a killer.

This is a dream ha ha ha.

I wake up in Chinatown with the wan taste of Joe’s cum in my mouth and look for something to steal. Less a souvenir than a way of covering the smell.

WHAT’S TRUE: I did leave, though, and walk uptown for a few hours. I could feel the sun baking me and my tender skin (I wish I had a harder body. A hard body).

My tongue is sore, I have a cut tooth and now I’ve cut open my tongue in three ways:

1. on the tooth
2. on a piece of glass that I sucked on while I danced at the club
3. on his stubble, licking myself off of Joe’s face (the greedy fuck) so that it wouldn’t harden there into a crust; so he couldn’t show his friends or roommate that Billy Was Here.Yesterday I worked a 15-hour day. My ex-boyfriend showed up at the club but didn’t try to see me of course. Maybe he did see me, maybe he saw me dancing by myself getting fingered onstage or he saw me smoking cigarettes out front. Chatting. Probably left, ran away, I was insane. I jutted up against the wall which was a mirror and pretended he was watching. Meanwhile, ex-boyfriend took a cab home.

Last night Crystal asked the DJ if she could request a song. He said “no” and smiled and turned his back to her to get a record out of its sleeve. So she started smoking on the dance floor (big no no no) and no one could stop her. No one came up to her. She flicked her cigarette ash on the turntable and threw her drink at a stranger so that he’d buy her a new one. We’re from the west coast. Faggots love her, we love Crystal don’t we?

She screams if she doesn’t get her way. It’s the same way we’d all like to act if we were girls. Boyfriend faggot dripping with her rum and Coke and cigarette ash, hands her a new cocktail and calls her “hot bitch”. Said “hey there you hot fucking bitch”, she dropped her cigarette butt in his drink and went outside.

I’m from the west coast Crystal is from out of the country.

I walked over to where a group of huge black (radical) drag queens were dancing and they held my hands and smiled, gently shoved me away. Then two boys started kissing me, grabbing my ass so I thought I knew them. One of them doughy, unformed, malformed and without a shirt. He pulled me aside and asked where I lived. “Brooklyn-what-about-you-where-do-you-live?”

It’s like going through customs.

Has anyone else helped you pack your bags?
Do you have money for a cab home?
State the purpose of your visit: Blowjob, or beat me up?

I went home with the milkfed boy with the accent, white skin and blonde hair. “Texan”. He asked if I wanted to sit on his dick, um, no, sorry. Would you like to sit on mine? He apologized and whispered I usually don’t like to bottom. “Well me neither”, which is a lie. I never like to bottom and I hate to top and I actually hate fucking unless I get really stoned. Texan actors don’t smoke pot I guess. They wear cologne and take ecstasy and dance dance dance. He left his shirt at the dance club. This is a red flag, this is a message. It says to me: a) he’s a fucking idiot boy who probably knows how to suck dick or at least act like it, give it a shot, and b) he has enough money that he can lose a couture shirt at a stupid West Village nightclub and not care. It’s okay to steal from him - he probably has cash lying around his apartment.

I looked Jimmy up on the internet. I’m such a creep. I found out that he is an actor and has been in some movies and they are gay and successful. The one who begged me to cum on his face has a job, has a few, and all those pieces of ugly jewelry and shitty fashion clothes. There are photos of him wearing them at the Tribeca Film Festival. He knows young and cutting-edge directors. I should have stayed on the seventh floor apartment, but I hated the foreskin and the Amanda Lepore autographs.

.