Are You Getting a Case of the Sinceres, Dear?: Nate Lippens’s “My Dead Book”
Books

Are You Getting a Case of the Sinceres, Dear?: Nate Lippens’s “My Dead Book”

I’m beginning to hate the phrase “chosen family.” Conducting an interview recently for a well-known “queer” publication, I felt myself physically recoil when an interviewee used that term. Why? Because like queer itself, the phrase, to me at least, feels increasingly hollow—emptied of all meaning—especially as queer becomes a brand identity and chosen families, the … Continue reading

Money Can Buy You Camp (Just Unintentionally): On Bad Progressive Camp and The 2021 Met Gala
America Is Doomed / Camp / Fashion

Money Can Buy You Camp (Just Unintentionally): On Bad Progressive Camp and The 2021 Met Gala

A nuclear green alien robot baby with his daddy’s matching lime-green hair. A morph suit dress that resembles a cross between the eponymous character from Alien and Charlie’s Green Man from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. A Balenciaga sleeping bag that could be mistaken for Mugatu’s Derelicte line from Zoolander. The blanket from Roseanne‘s sofa. … Continue reading

Wherever You Are, Darling, I’m Not That Far Behind: A Trip Through A Familiar Apocalypse With Nick Cave And Warren Ellis’ “Carnage”
Art / Music

Wherever You Are, Darling, I’m Not That Far Behind: A Trip Through A Familiar Apocalypse With Nick Cave And Warren Ellis’ “Carnage”

  Nick Cave’s epic poem The Sick Bag Song opens with a leap into the abyss. “A boy climbs a riverbank. He steps onto a railway bridge. He is twelve years old,” it begins. Walking on this bridge, the boy stands at the middle, gazing down at the river below with a “half-felled tree” that … Continue reading

Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Products: The Nauseating Fashion Week Commodification Of David Wojnarowicz
Art / Fashion / Rants and Raves

Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Products: The Nauseating Fashion Week Commodification Of David Wojnarowicz

“I feel a vague nausea stroking and tapping the lining of my stomach,” writes David Wojnarowicz in his essay “In the Shadow of the American Dream: Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins.” I don’t think I ever quite understood the feeling of David’s nausea until this past week. It took everything in me not … Continue reading

‘I Am Consumed in the Weight of You’: “Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds: A Chapter in David Wojnarowicz’s Life (1989-1991)” at London’s Live Art Development Agency
Art

‘I Am Consumed in the Weight of You’: “Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds: A Chapter in David Wojnarowicz’s Life (1989-1991)” at London’s Live Art Development Agency

To mark this year’s World AIDS Day, London’s Live Art Development Agency (LADA) hosted the first UK screening of Marion Scemama’s 2018 film essay Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds: A Chapter in David Wojnarowicz’s Life (1989-1991), co-directed with François Pain. Having spent the past two years immersing myself in Wojnarowicz’s life and work, I was hungry … Continue reading

A Charmed Hour And A Haunted Song: A Tribute To Brian Butterick/Hattie Hathaway
Trashy Tributes

A Charmed Hour And A Haunted Song: A Tribute To Brian Butterick/Hattie Hathaway

This week, the sad news ricocheted around the New York performance, drag, art, and nightlife community that Brian Butterick, otherwise known as drag queen Hattie Hathaway (or sometimes, Loretta Nicks, plain old Loretta or Loretta B. DeMille) passed away. If you, dearest reader, don’t recognize Butterick’s name immediately, just assume that everything you love about … Continue reading

Institutionalization Keeps Me Awake At Night: David Wojnarowicz, The Whitney and the Violence of the Canon
Art

Institutionalization Keeps Me Awake At Night: David Wojnarowicz, The Whitney and the Violence of the Canon

One of the last works on view in the winding, labyrinth-like galleries of the Whitney Museum’s long awaited David Wojnarowicz retrospective History Keeps Me Awake At Night features a hand, presumably the artist’s own, holding a tiny, adorable frog. Just one example of Wojnarowicz’s lifelong affinity for creepy-crawly things–bugs, frogs, snakes, etc., this tender and … Continue reading