Some stars are so far away that we see their light only after they've burnt out, many light-years and galaxies away. Some stars are close enough to warm the Earth with their radiation, and pull us into their gravitational fields. Some stars live right here in New York City. Bridget Everett is a bonafide New York City star. Her nightclub appearances and karaoke heists have garnered her a cult following, and her show, At Least It's Pink with Kenny Mellman at Ars Nova made her a legend. You can also bask in her glory at Our Hit Parade, the smash hit cabaret series she hosts regularly at Joe's Pub. The powerfully talented singer took some time out of her busy schedule to shed some light on herself.

Bridget Everett photographed for EVB by David Kimelman

Max Steele: Let's start at the top. What's the first thing you thought when you woke up this morning?

Bridget Everett: Am I gonna not clean my room or not go to the gym today?

Max: When you're in the VIP lounge at the airport, hobnobbing with other celebutantes, how do you describe what you do to someone woefully ignorant of your body of work?

Bridget: [laughs] Girl, I can't afford to fly! But whenever anybody asks what I do, I just say I’m a singer. I still can't figure it out. All I know is when my mom told me the arts council from my hometown wanted me and Kenny Mellman to come do a show, I said no. I didn't want anyone to burn a cross in her yard.
Max: So Bridget, you're a true triple threat: actress, singer and dancer. Let's talk about your formal training. How long and where did you study to hone your skills?

Bridget: My friend Murray Hill says that I'm not a triple threat, I'm just threatening, but thank you. I actually studied vocal performance (opera) at Arizona State. I’m happy for the training and love that kind of music, but I didn't have the discipline to lead that lifestyle. Plus, too many turtlenecks in that crowd.

Max: I want to know about how you apply this training/technique to what you do now. Your sense of humor is so irreverent, but you're a serious singer. Did you always know you wanted to do this kind of comedic performance? At what point did you realize that the classical music lifestyle wasn't for you?

Bridget: Well, I know the importance of taking care of my voice. It's crucial. Especially the way I sing. I don't want to end up like Whitney. I stumbled into this kind of performance style. When I moved here, I only knew that I wanted to sing. I started going to see Kiki and Herb, Murray Hill, Sweetie - lots of downtown performers who blew my mind. Then one day Kenny heard me singing at a karaoke bar and asked me to sing with him at Starlight. That’s how it all started!
Max: Bach had the piano, Picasso had the paintbrush. What is your personal indispensable tool?

Bridget: Chardonnay, girl.

Max: Speaking of chardonnay, on your hilarious twitter feed you mentioned a 'Chardonnay Shocker' – what is that?

Bridget: The Chardonnay Shocker is when you wake up way too early because of all the sugar and can't go back to sleep. So then you're lying in bed reading blogs and watching porn and nothing can lull you back to sleep. Brutal.

Max: I heard that you have a knack for designing unique cocktail recipes.

Bridget: Yeah, as a longtime food service employee/connoisseur of delicious things I have been known to come up with a few cocktail recipes. There's a drink called the 'Copy This' that I designed. You can only get it at Planet Sushi on the Upper West Side. Equal parts plum sake, regular sake and vodka. Ice and lemon on the side. Assemble with chopsticks so as not to bruise the alcohol. It works.

Max: What kind of warm-ups or special rituals do you do before performing?

Bridget: I don't fuck around when it comes to that. My old roommate Jonjon Battles could tell you that! My shows can be reckless but I have to take care of my voice. I consider myself a singer before anything else. I always take a nap, then I get in the tub and tell myself stories. After that, I vocalize and do some stretching. If I’m doing Joe’s Pub, I always go to Indochine for their Vietnamese coffee (p.s. the bartender is hot). That's about it, except for some stretching. I’m not a flexible girl and I always wake up with sore muscles and/or bruises. Sadly, not from getting laid, which consequently has never happened after a show unless it's with someone I was already seeing. Life isn't fair. Anyway, in the early days, I used to lose my voice a lot, and when that happened it would get really dark in my brain.

Max: I'm curious about the telling yourself stories in the tub. Like, rehearsing monologues? What stories? What kind of bubble bath do you use?

Bridget: I use whatever bubble bath is on sale but I like Mr. Bubbles or whatever that stuff in the pink bottle is called. And yeah, when I write a story, it's pretty much just an outline, so when I’m in the tub before a show, I review the facts and pray that it all comes out on stage. Plus, it somehow feels very glam to be in a bubble bath and it makes me feel like a lady - and that's saying something.

Max: Tell me about your writing process. When you're putting together a performance, how much of what the audience gets is improvised and how much of it is scripted?

Bridget: I worked on a show with Michael Patrick King who told me that whenever I say something or think of something funny I should write it down and that's what I do. I keep a notebook or record ideas on my phone, then I sit in the bathtub and play around with those stories until I get an idea of what I want to say. After that, I hit the stage and hope for the best. It’s largely improvised. I have a horrible memory and drink enough that I’m just lucky to remember the words to a song.
Max: What's one lesson your mother taught you?

Bridget: She taught me every lesson! I constantly quote her. My favorite is, "Always eat something before you go out to dinner so you don't embarrass yourself." My mother is probably the funniest person I know, but it's never on purpose.

Max: In high school yearbooks, there's always a 'Class Clown' a 'Most Likely To Succeed' and 'Most Popular'. What was your high school title?

Bridget: I won a few, but 'Most Likely to Win an Academy Award' is the most hilarious. I took serious pride in 'Most Typical Senior'.

Max: What was your style in high school? What are you gonna wear the night you accept that first Oscar?

Bridget: I basically stuck to Levi's and boat shoes, but I would occasionally make a splash with some of my brother's WilliWear hand-me-downs. Now I’ve evolved into a more elegant House of Deréon look. But if I make it to the Oscars, I would definitely wear the house of Larréon. My friend Larry Krone has started making me one-of-a-kind dresses that are magic. A recent fave is the pussy dress - sort of inspired by my mom and Little Richard.
Max: Tell me a little bit about Our Hit Parade, the series you do at Joe's Pub with Kenny Mellman and Neal Medlyn. How did that come about?

Bridget: Kenny and Neal were upstate hanging out with Neal’s father in law, Peter Schjeldahl, Kenny’s partner Brendan Kennedy and Neal’s wife Ada Calhoun. Collectively they came up with the idea for doing it. Then they asked me to join. So happy they did. Not just because the people that do Our Hit Parade have become like a great big family but also because it's like boot camp. The show is a great exercise for staying on your toes. I love it.

Max: How did you come to work with Ad-Rock from Beastie Boys?

Bridget: We're on a softball team together - also with Murray Hill and Neal Medlyn. I told him I had just booked a solo show at Joe’s and he said, "Well, if you need someone for your band," and I was like "really?" and so I asked him and he said yes. Pretty crazy. I love working with him. In fact, all the guys in my band are pretty amazing.
Max: You seem to really connect with people when you're performing. How important is audience participation at your shows?

Bridget: Well, it's everything. I think of the whole night as a conversation. The more I feel like I can trust the audience, the further I’ll go. Plus it's cheaper than therapy.

Max: What has been the best audience interaction of the last year?

Bridget: My friends John and Bill have been together for over 50 years. I knew they were coming to a show and wanted to dedicate my favorite love song to them, 'That's All'. Bill took my hand at the end and it was one of the most special moments I’ve ever had on stage.

Max: The worst?

Bridget: Probably the night I did a show with the flu. I mixed milk and chardonnay while telling a story and it looked like, well, let's just say it curdled.
Max: You're known to inspire a cult-like devotion among your fans. Tell me about getting recognized offstage.

Bridget: People are super cool and kind and I’m grateful to have fans. Even if it’s when I’m at my day job, which can feel humiliating.

Max: What do you have to say about Gwyneth Paltrow?

Bridget: There are people in this world that enjoy happy hour and there are people that don't. She's a don't. That's all I’m prepared to say at this time.

Max: When you're finally on VH1 Divas, what will you have in your dressing room?

Bridget: I’m simple. Chardonnay, a bottle of water and 30 Rock's Dot Com.

Max: What is one thing you did not believe in before but you have found to be true?

Bridget: That you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up.

Bridget Everett and The Tender Moments will be performing at Joe’s Pub, Thursday, May 12
Our Hit Parade will be at Joe’s Pub, Wednesday, May 25

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)

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

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

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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
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