This Guy’s SoHo Loft May House The Biggest Collection Of Homoerotic Art In New York

First published on Buzzfeed, March 26, 2014. Read the original, with images, here.

Every time I visit Charles Leslie’s SoHo loft, my eyes have to relearn how to see his apartment, to pick the individual players out of the sexual scrum. Then, like an erotic Magic Eye puzzle, a Warhol suddenly emerges from a thicket of phalli, and the coffee table resolves into a veritable Stonehenge of penises sculpted in glass, ceramic, and even whale bone.

Leslie lives not far from the museum that bears his name, The Leslie + Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. “Lohman” refers to Leslie’s longtime partner, renowned interior decorator Fritz Lohman, who passed away four years ago. The two spent 48 years together: traveling the world, collecting and championing gay art, and helping transform SoHo from industrial wasteland to artist enclave to moneyed playground.

The museum is their official legacy, but Leslie’s apartment is a distillation of those years: a story of gay life existing on the margins during the buttoned-down 1950s, exploding outward in the ’60s and ’70s, surviving the “grim and ghastly plague years,” and re-emerging triumphantly into the present — all told through homoerotic and homo-romantic art.

Leslie began collecting gay art while stationed in Heidelberg during the Korean War, and continued afterward while attending the Sorbonne on the GI Bill. And over the course of his design career, Lohman had also gathered a small handful of such works. In fact, their shared passion for homoerotic art was one of the things that drew the two together.

Leslie purchased his loft in 1968 for a whopping $3,500. At the time, SoHo wasn’t zoned for residential use. “It was an industrial slum,” he recalls with an astonished laugh. When Lohman joined him a few months later, their collection of gay art began to grow in earnest.

And what a collection it is. It contains many of the most familiar names in the gay art world: Warhol and Haring and Mapplethorpe, to list but a few. But it also harkens back to pioneers whose work has faded from modern queer memory, such as Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, whose early 20th century pastoral nudes turned the seaside town of Taormina, Sicily, into the European nobility’s version of Fire Island. Leslie published a book on von Gloeden in 1980, and a half-dozen of his photos adorn a narrow wall by his guest room.

A good portion of Leslie’s collection comes from artists who moved to SoHo for its cheap rents and large open spaces. Many of them made gay art in private, solely for themselves and their friends. In 1969, this led Leslie and Fritz to hold their first unofficial “homoerotic art fair” in their newly renovated loft. They expected maybe 50 people to attend. To their shock, hundreds showed up over the course of the weekend. “We sold every single thing in the show,” Leslie recalls. “We always say three things happened that summer: Woodstock, Stonewall, and the art show.”

Quickly, it became a yearly event, and by the end of 1972, Leslie and Lohman had become part of the first wave of gallerists to open in SoHo. They asked for a 25% commission, if the artist could afford it, or else just a piece of their work. As a result, their collection ballooned.

From 1970 to 1982, the gallery provided a welcoming venue for SoHo’s burgeoning gay art scene. Despite having to shutter their doors during the AIDS crisis, they continued to champion gay work, with Leslie playing yenta between his long lists of struggling artists and would-be buyers. With the advent of effective AIDS therapies, SoHo’s gay community rebounded in the 1990s, leading Leslie and Lohman to reopen their gallery as a nonprofit. In 2011, it gained official museum status, becoming the first gay art museum in the country.

Many artists involved in their earliest ventures became lifelong friends with Leslie and Lohman. Marion Pinto, whose full-sized portrait of the couple still hangs over Leslie’s couch, eventually donated her estate to the museum, helping to create the endowment that ensures its future in perpetuity.

But though all of the work in his collection will go the museum when Leslie passes, the apartment isn’t just high art. In classic camp fashion, the collection butts the absurd up against the sublime. A plastic Santa with his “stocking stuffer” on display has just as much a home here as a drawing by Jean Cocteau. In some cases, high and low are mashed together in a single piece, as in Darold Perkins’ re-imagining of (gay) artist J.C. Leyendecker’s classic advertisement for the Arrow Collar Man.

Some of the pieces have historic interest to them, such as a metal toy of two young men engaged in fellatio atop a brightly patterned carpet. A stamp on the base enabled it to be traced to a World War I German munitions factory, where an artisan must have made it in his spare time.

At 80, Leslie is less involved with the day-to-day operations of the museum, but he’s still avidly collecting and supporting gay art. And even when he isn’t out looking for it, the work has a way of finding him. “People are forever bringing me phallic serendipity,” he says. And somehow, his loft seems able to hold it all, in a densely layered, palimpsestous celebration of homoerotic desire.

Is Gay Singer Steve Grand Really Country Music’s Frank Ocean?

First published on The Daily Beast, March 25, 2014. Read the original, with video, here.

On July 2, 2013, little-known singer-songwriter Steve Grand YouTubed the video for his indie single “All-American Boy”, which the now 24-year-old Illinois-native made for a little over $7,000. “I’d never used a credit card before,” he recalled with a laugh. The video featured a chiseled Grand serenading an oblivious (but ultimately understanding) straight male friend, asking him to be his “All-American boy tonight/Where every day’s the 4th of July.” Seven days later, the song had gone hyper-viral and Grand was being written about by every media outlet in the country (I covered him here). It even rocketed him to a spot on Good Morning America, where they proclaimed him a “gay country star.”

Perhaps it would be more correct to say the gay male country star, since there has yet to be one in America (Canada, on the other hand, is home to sexy bear crooner Drake Jensen). But while the response from fans was instantaneous and overwhelming, critics opined that a single did not a star make, and that country music just wasn’t ready for an out gay man to top the charts.

Now, the Kickstarter campaign to fund Grand’s first album has become one of the top five most funded music campaigns in the site’s history, generating over a quarter of a million dollars so far. But the question still remains: Is the country music establishment ready for a gay star? And if so, is Grand the one?

Truth be told, country music already has a long history of gay songs and singers, with obvious recent examples being k.d. Lang and Chely Wright. Dolly Parton, although rumored to be heterosexual, certainly has a big place in the gay world. Grammy award winner Kacey Musgrave scored a hit last year with “Follow Your Arrow,” in which she sings “Kiss lots of boys/Or kiss lots of girls/If that’s something you’re into.” Latin country artist Ned Sublette wrote “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other” in 1981, and Willie Nelson covered it in 2006. In 1992, Garth Brooks scored a GLAAD Media Award with his song “We Shall All Be Free,” which has the lyrics “We shall be free/When we’re free to love anyone we choose.” And there are any number of queer banjo-and-fiddle hipster bands for the country-by-way-of-NPR set (not to knock the genre; it takes up half my iPod).

Earlier country musicians may not have performed songs with explicitly homo sensibilities, but many found radio success with story songs that tweaked the sexual mores of their listeners, like Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill,” or Jeannie C. Riley’s version of Tom Hall’s “Harper Valley PTA.” And I know I’m not the first to wonder what made Billie Joe McAllister jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge. (How do I know that? Because in 1976, Warner Bros released the movie Ode to Billy Joe, which despite the change in spelling was an adaptation of Bobbie Gentry’s song. In it, Billy Joe commits suicide after a drunken gay hookup.)

I could go on, but what’s the point? No matter how long the list, a few things will remain true: all the men on the list are straight, as are the most successful women. The two lesbians listed only came out after they had released multiple albums. Country has engaged in a long flirtation with gay music, but so far, Nashville hasn’t been ready to seal the deal. But there are signs that that’s changing.

Legendary country radio DJ and songwriter Gerry House has been ensconced in the Nashville scene since 1975. In his recent memoir Country Music Broke My Brain, he has an entire chapter devoted to “Gay Country.” In his opinion “hardly anyone on Music Row would punish you if you’re gay,” and in fact, he’s “long suspected there are several major Hillbilly Twang Slingers who ride Side Saddle.”

This theory must be in the air in Nashville, because it’s also on the air in Nashville, the hit ABC show starring Hayden Panettiere and Connie Britton. On the show, Chris Carmack plays up-and-coming closeted cowboy hit maker Will Lexington. In a 2013 interview with Vulture showrunner Callie Khouri said “It is something that I think is a real thing… There are always rumors.” Just ask Kenny Chesney or Sugarland singer Jennifer Nettles, both of whom have had to address gay rumors repeatedly throughout their careers.

The stage seems set for country’s Frank Ocean moment—which brings us back to Grand. When asked if country music is ready for a gay star, Grand comments on “this huge shift in our country socially,” which he sees as being generational. “There’s definitely a lot of progressive country music fans, especially my generation and below.” Younger listeners simply don’t care as much about labels (for sexuality or musical genres).

Even if established industry execs are still hesitant, the explosion of YouTube has made it easy for new, edgy artists to get around traditional gatekeepers. Just look at, say, Steve Grand. “All-American Boy” has nearly 3 million views.

But though country music may be ready for a gay male star, and Grand is flattered and humbled by the assertions that he’s it, he’s quick to point out that his music isn’t traditional country. He sees himself as “a pop artist with influences of country and rock and maybe some folk,” and fans can expect to see all of that on his album this summer. “I know I have a lot of country fans,” he says, from reading the messages they send him (all of which he tries to answer). He’s delighted they’re responding to his music, but he doesn’t want to misrepresent himself—there’s more to his sound than just country.

There was a time, perhaps, when that alone would have prevented Grand from becoming a country sensation, but in the age of Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson, and Carrie Underwood, the line between country and pop has become rather porous. Grand might not be pure country, but then again, country’s not pure country anymore either.

Who knows when country’s gay glass ceiling will break, or whether it will be done by an established artist coming out or an up-and-comer who’s never been “in.” But the glass gets thinner every year, and someday soon the sound of it shattering will be playing on every country station in America.

Wonder Woman Makes a Triumphant Comeback in a New Comic Series

First published on The Daily Beast, March 13, 2014. Read the original here.

Amid all the recent kerfuffles at DC Comics—the Batwoman lesbian wedding that wasn’t, the brooding big screen reinvention of Superman, Ben Affleck’s controversial casting as Batman—it would be easy to overlook the most exciting reinvention in recent comic book history: Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang’s Wonder Woman. Her epic two-year inaugural story arc wrapped last September, and War, the final graphic novel collecting that arc, came out yesterday.

It’s been a decade in the wilderness for Wonder Woman. She’s the only one of DC’s iconic three without a recent film franchise (though Joss Whedon wrote a script in 2007). In 2011, David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Boston Legal) attempted a new TV series starring Adrianne Palicki, but it died in the pilot phase. And earlier this year, the CW finally killed Amazon, a Smallville-esque origin show that had been in development since 2012.

On the page, she hasn’t fared much better. Allan Heinberg briefly wrote Wonder Woman for four poorly reviewed issues in 2006. DC temporarily replaced him with bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult, whose brief run fared even worse. In 2008, super-fan-feminist turned comic book writer Gail Simone took the reins, and for a time, Wonder Woman flourished. While not the most brilliant run of all time, Simone’s arc was interesting, smart, and consistent—in fact, with 30 issues under her belt, Simone is the longest-running female writer in Wonder Woman’s history.

But eventually Simone moved on. Though she continued writing two WW related titles (Birds of Prey and The Secret Six), the main comic passed to J. Michael Straczynski, of Babylon 5 fame. The new run featured Wonder Woman’s first major costume redesign in decades (created by Jim Lee), and debuted in 2010 to fantastic sales … only to collapse amid a morass of missed deadlines and mediocre reviews. Straczynski left with six months to go on his contract. After that, the Princess of the Amazons spent months bouncing back and forth between various writers and artists.

Then came the major event in the DC Universe: The New 52. Starting in September 2011, DC cancelled all of its existing titles, and debuted 52 revamped versions—Wonder Woman included. WW’s new writer, Brian Azzarello, had spent time at the helm of both Batman and Superman, and he was also the co-creator of the hardboiled detective comic 100 Bullets. Illustrator Cliff Chiang, however, was a relative newcomer, having moved to the art side of DC after being an editor for years (Tony Akins, another lesser-known talent in DC’s illustration stable, also provides some artwork for the comic).

From the beginning, the New 52 was plagued with concerns about the representation of women and the fact that the new Wonder Woman was the work of two men. But Azzarello and Chiang’s excellent work defused most of the criticism. By turns gorgeous and grotesque, issue number one featured intelligent modernizations of the Greek and Roman myths that make up Wonder Woman’s baggage. Unlike Superman and Batman, prototypical sons of the 20th century, Wonder Woman has always struggled to stay relevant to a young audience that often cares little and knows less about her storied mythological history. She has so much past, it’s sometimes hard to see her future.

In that regard, Azzarello and Chiang are visionaries. In the first few issues, Wonder Woman’s old origin story literally crumbles before our eyes, as she learns that she was not made from clay by Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Instead, she is the natural daughter of Queen Hippolyta’s brief but passionate dalliance with Zeus, the king of Olympus. This instantly humanizes Wonder Woman, while also making her divine. She learns her true history at the same time we do, allowing readers to experience her all-too-human feelings of betrayal upon discovering that everything she believed about her life is a lie.

This seamless melding of modern humanity with epic divinity is realized on the page in Chiang’s beautiful representations of the Olympiads. Whether portraying withered, root-like Demeter or drunken colonialist Aries, his artwork brilliantly captures the essence of what a god among modern mortals might look like. Thus, the story and style work in delicious harmony.

From this simple new back-story, the rest of the two-year arc flows naturally. Wonder Woman becomes enmeshed in the ultimate family feud, as the gods of Olympus vie to replace Zeus as king, and she seeks to protect her numerous half-god siblings—one of whom is prophesied to kill an Olympian and claim their throne. In this final installment, Wonder Woman ends up somewhere completely unexpected, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out in forthcoming issues.

And yet, for all the superpowers and divine beings that flit across the pages of Wonder Woman, the arc is most successful because of its humanity. She slams out her aggression in a London punk club when she’s upset. The Gods of Mt. Olympus squabble like eternal children. If this arc has a central theme, it is about love, family, and betrayal—profoundly human emotions that make Wonder Woman sympathetic in a way that Justice, Peace, and Divine Creation never could.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum Is a Haven for Artists Who Are Too Gay for Art School

First published on Vice.com, March 2, 2014. Read the original, with images, here.

As we unwind the bright red packing tape that joins the two coffee cans together, Hunter O’Hanian, the director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, explains what I’m about to see.

“We think this is his only finished work,” he says, separating the cans to reveal a long scroll made of computer paper taped end to end. Black and white photocopies of twinks—whipped, gagged, crucified, tattooed, and tied—writhe across the pages, filling them almost to the margins. The image has no punctum, white space, or dominant figure to draw in the eye, allowing the viewer's gaze to rest. Instead the eye skitters across the pages, noting a hard cock here and a flagellate there, without stopping on any particular moment.

Hunter isn’t sure if this is the artist’s only finished work for three reasons: The artist is dead, his partner—who asked that they both remain anonymous—donated the work, and the donation consists of 77 large cardboard boxes filled with gay porn, photomontages, pulp novels, mail-order sex-toy catalogs, books about Dracula, and images of opulent, but empty, rooms lacerated with careful slits to allow for the insertion of pornographic cut-outs.

A number of the boxes contained only carefully washed plastic clamshells (the kind that might hold a salad from a take-out Thai restaurant) filled with individual male figures meticulously excised from six decades of porn—the processed raw materials for the artist’s apocalyptic sex montages. Like the scroll in the can, each piece of paper has been carefully packed, as if the artist feared their rustling might hint at their true nature, their sexual shame. The line between fear and reverence is nonexistent here. These totemic boys are tools of artistic creation, but if discovered would mean destruction. The scroll itself is an act of mediation between these two poles, a spell cast in porn, simultaneously birthing and caging the artist’s secret desires.

To date, the museum has cataloged approximately two-thirds of this collection. Despite the detailed sheath of notebook pages that list the contents of each box, it’s a slow process because the closer you look the more you see. For instance, the centerfold of a 1950s physique magazine might hide a cut-out of a Saint Sebastian-esque ephebe in bondage. If you look closely at the image, you will notice that the figure’s tiny handcuffs have been transposed from another image and that his pentagram tattoo was added by hand. As the magnitude of detail hits you, you realize these 77 boxes contain a man’s lifework, his world, his everything—the story of an anonymous artist told through grainy reproductions of sexual torture.

Call it outsider art, intuitive art, art brut, or neuve invention; it is work made precisely at this intersection of art and obsession, pride and shame, sex and death, that has me scavenging through the museum's archives. Jean Dubuffet, the 20th century painter and impresario of the insane who coined the term art brut, famously said, “Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it; it would sooner run away than say its own name.” How apropos to go looking for it amongst the love that dares not speak its name.

Intuitive artists tend to share traits from a grab bag of commonalities: obsessive tendencies, mental illness, repression, confinement, isolation, a lack of formal training, sexual hang-ups, a sense of persecution, religious or visionary zeal, a focus on the process of art-making rather than its outcome, a disconnect from cultural centers of power, and a belief in the importance of their own work that is separate from its salability or critical appreciation. The original outsider artist, in an American context, is Henry Darger, the orphaned, occasionally institutionalized recluse who spent more than sixty years creating his 15,000-page masterpiece The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art is an ideal place to search for such artists. For the last 40 years, the museum and its founders, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman, have been dedicated to rescuing and preserving gay art. They’ve created a haven for art makers whose work was unappreciated during their time, whether because of their identity, the frankness of their homosexual work, or their mental instability.

I am fascinated by the delicate interplay between pride and shame in the lives of these men—their desire to be anonymous while simultaneously believing their art is important enough to dedicate their lives to it and ensure its preservation. (And so far all the intuitive artists I’ve found there are men. The museum now has a broader mission, but it began primarily as a collection of erotic male art, and the majority of its collection is focused on males.)

Much of the work could be considered survival art, rough pieces created in a hostile environment to make sense of the artists’ conflicting desires and unstable worldviews. Even when these men had formal training, they wanted to explore themes removed from what was speakable during their lifetimes. The insider art status was never available to them. Instead their art was an act of pure creation and dedicated to their own vision. Aside from the work that now sits in storage, little is known about most of these men.

Take, for example, Edward Hochschild. In 1995 three of Edward's friends walked into the museum to see if someone could rescue Edward's art shortly after he had died of AIDS-related causes. Wayne Snellen, the museum’s Deputy Director for Collections, recalled that his apartment was “trashed” when they arrived, but they were able to save three pieces: The Vial Cross, an approximately 5' tall wooden cross studded with vials of hair, blood, pills, sand, and all kinds of ephemera and effluvia; a shirt made from Edward’s hair; and a large dildo studded with acupuncture needles, placed under a bell jar, and affixed to a smoke-detector base. Crudely made but powerfully evocative, the three pieces present an inarticulate meditation on sex, religion, illness, penance, and identity.

Then there is Joseph Friscia, a self-taught sculptor who lived with his mother. In the museum’s files, he has but a six-sentence biography, which notes “his sculpture was the result of a severe Catholic upbringing.” His first donation to the museum was The Church Has Its Way, which consisted of clay figurines of men in various states of religious torture. (One man pleasures himself with a crucifix, which is a sight I will never forget.) After disappearing for years, Joseph reappeared and told Wayne that his mother had died and he was “now free.” He gave the gallery new sculptures, man-beasts molded from the peach pink bodies of fetal mice, and never returned.

Joseph and Edward are emblematic of the outsider artist who is a reclusive creative working out personal anguish through art. The museum’s collection also includes Hokey Mokey, who has anonymously mailed art to the gallery every month for the past 15 years.

Here, the same dynamic of pride and shame is worked out in a more playful manner. Hokey’s work primarily consists of flat erotic montages placed inside envelopes. The art dares viewers to both open the envelopes and destroy their contents. Each packet is themed around some aspect of the month, like a holiday or a turn of season, and suggests an ongoing attempt to make sense of the world through pornographic art. Over the years, Hokey’s work has developed three-dimensional aspects, layering of colors and materials, and suggestions of an awareness of other collage makers, like artist Barbara Kruger. When finally tracked down, Hokey expressed no interest in having a show of his work or coming to the gallery. He had sent art to a few other people, but said the overwhelming majority of his work (nearly 200 packages to date) has gone to the museum.

Ted Titolo is another artist who has given all, or nearly all, of his work to the collection—a vast and stunning collection of art in a dozen mediums and a hundred styles. Of all the outsiders in the collection, Ted’s work is the most powerful. Deemed too gay for art school and too crazy for the army, he worked on Wall Street and dreamed of being a “fat lesbian,” according to Wayne. Ted's compulsion to create is cataloged in reams of notebooks, sheaths of drawings, boxes of VHS tapes, and untold scores of photos.

Ted is often the subject of his own work, although his self-portraits tend to obscure or remove his face. Occasionally, the portraits go so far, they call for Ted’s own annihilation. (In their context, these self-destructive scratches might have more to do with Ted’s desire to obliterate his maleness than his self-hatred.) Much of his art is divided up into “projects,” such as Rasa, an epic collection of writing, drawing, and photography that nearly fills a dozen three-ring binders. Perhaps his most interesting work is American Kouros, an illustrated book created in the late 1960s, which details the “War Between the Monosexes and the Herms.” In this epic battle for humanity’s sexual and emotional future, Ted posits hermaphroditism as our only hope.

All but two of these men are dead or missing, and of those two, only one is in contact with the museum. They have left their work to say what they never could. For artists who made art outside the broader context of gay life in the 20th century, these outsiders speak powerfully to the experiences of gay men in their time and place. The fact that these artifacts remain—and were created in the first place—is a testament to the ability of pride to occasionally mediate shame in private, on paper, on canvas, or in the bodies of dead mice.

“Dirty 30”: Talking AIDS To The Basketball Wives Set

First published on The Daily Beast, February 16, 2014. Read the original, with video, here.

The statistics are upsetting and well known. Despite an encouraging recent drop in transmission rates, black women still represent two-thirds of all new HIV infections among women. In fact, they are 20 times more likely to seroconvert than white women—a greater level of disparity than ever before. The cavalcade of AIDS anniversaries over the last few years has spawned a corresponding interest in producing museum exhibits, documentaries, and feature films about the early years of the crisis. But with a few notable exceptions (Frontline’s “Endgame: AIDS In Black America;” Precious; Tyler Perry’s despicable Temptation), there has been no similar rush to tell the stories of the (black, female) face of the modern epidemic.

Hannelore Williams, filmmaker, actor, and creator of the new docu-series “Dirty 30,” is hoping to change that.

“My target demographic are the people who watch ‘Basketball Wives’,” Williams says with a laugh, which I’ve learned means she’s about to say something darkly honest. “Or let’s just be real—people who don’t want to talk about HIV.”

Like the hundred or so people around the globe that Williams has interviewed, I find it easy to talk to her about HIV/AIDS. She’s relaxed, cool, confident, and quick to laugh about difficult things. Indeed, she ends every interview for “Dirty 30” by asking her subjects to “tell their favorite AIDS joke.”

As with many working on the epidemic, Williams has a personal connection to the crisis: her sister’s father passed away due to AIDS-related complications. But it wasn’t until years later, when she was preparing to volunteer at Nkosi’s Haven, a center for destitute HIV-positive mothers, children and AIDS orphans in Johannesburg, South Africa, that that connection hit home. “How am I flying across the globe,” she found herself wondering, “and I didn’t even go across the country to be with my sister” when her father died?

Williams was in South Africa to do arts education with children, but the women of Nkosi’s Haven were so similar to women she had known her whole life that she was drawn to work with them as well. She taught them to use her camera and let them turn the lens on their own lives. In so doing, she became hyperaware of all the ways in which black women—in the U.S. and around the world—were lacking opportunities to talk about AIDS. Quickly it became an obsession.

“It was a hurricane coming at me from the far west,” Williams says with a distant look in her eyes, discussing that feeling. “Once you start to look at this pandemic there's no way you would ever turn your back.”

There was just one problem: At the time, Williams didn’t know much about HIV. She realized, however, that the journey to knowledge was the story she had to tell. So she put her life on hold, borrowed two cameras, and spent six months traveling the world gathering footage. “I'm learning about this from the standpoint that most Americans are,” she says, “which is not knowing, or sort of knowing, but easily sweeping it under the rug.”

Far from being limiting, this acknowledgement allowed her to make a series that speaks directly to the epidemic as it is today. In “Dirty 30,” there are no ponderous attempts to chart the entire history of the crisis in order to set the scene. Instead, AIDS is treated simply as a fact of life—something we all know about, even if we don’t talk about it. And from New York to Baton Rouge, from Cape Town to Paris, Williams’ goal is to get people talking.

“It's not Hanne telling you jack shit about anything!” she laughs, when I ask if she’s worried about the responsibility that comes with approaching such a fraught issue from a place of relative ignorance. “I’m creating a platform for somebody else to talk.”

And that platform is, in a word, slick. Stylistically, “Dirty 30” feels more akin to a music video than a typical AIDS documentary, with beautiful shots of foreign cities, quick-cut motion graphics, and “featured artists” whose R&B tracks provide the backbeat to the show. Currently, Williams is meeting with commercial brands that might want to underwrite the series, and networks and other media platforms that might give it a home. She’s planned 16 episodes, with topics like “Monogamy & Sexual Healing,” and “Drugs & Escapism.”

“There are sexy issues tied to this pandemic,” she says unapologetically. By exploring them, she hopes to attract a young audience that doesn’t often tune in for stodgy healthcare PSAs—and therefore might need them most.

Williams acknowledges that aspects of the series might seem triggering at first, like using the word dirty in the title. But she says her choices have been informed by her subjects, and that she’s backed away from topics—like AIDS conspiracy theories—that her interviews led her to believe wouldn’t further a real conversation about the crisis. Still, she’s not afraid to talk about difficult issues. “If you try to talk about stigma and don’t actually put it out there,” she says, “what are we talking about? Bullshit. Lies.”

Although the show looks at the crisis through the lens of black womanhood, Williams is adamant about including diverse subjects and experiences in her frame. To her, it’s simple: “You can't talk about black women in the context of AIDS without talking about everybody else at the same time.” AIDS, which was once considered a niche disease, is now as much a part of the fabric of our lives as cotton.

At the moment, “Dirty 30” is in production, but even now Williams can’t stop. While I’m interviewing her, she’s setting up an additional shoot in Toronto. She doesn’t know yet where the show will end up, but she’s certain it will find a home, and she’s already begun planning more episodes.

“Not even one season of a show,” she says, shaking her head with a mixture of sadness and reflection, “could address all of the issues tied to this pandemic.”

Model Melanie Gaydos’s Fight for High Fashion

First published on The Daily Beast, February 3, 2014. Read the original here.

Sitting across from me in an immaculately tailored dark blue jacket, Melanie Gaydos is so petite she seems almost like a child dressed up as a model. She picks at the cuffs of her coat as we talk, the only sign of her anxiety. This is her first in-person interview.

“A lot of people don’t realize it, but I’m actually quite nervous all the time,” the Connecticut-born, Brooklyn-based Gaydos tells me at one point. Then, as frequently happens during our sprawling, multi-hour conversation, a smile flits across her face. “But I’m a survivor.”

She needs to be. Although she has been modeling for nearly three years, was flown to Europe to star in a video for the band Rammstein, and has had (or has lined up) shoots in New York, Los Angeles, Madrid, and Berlin, Gaydos is still finding her place in the world of high fashion. As she’s quick to point out, this is in part the same struggle any young woman has when trying to break into that nearly impossible industry: the fight to get work, avoid being exploited, and make the fashion world take notice. For Gaydos, however, this already difficult task is complicated by a rare genetic disorder called ectodermal dysplasia, which “affects your hair, teeth, nails, pores, skin tissue, and sometimes even bone formation.”

Ectodermal dysplasia affects everyone differently. Gaydos has a relatively severe form, which has meant a lifetime of people being scared of her, or assuming that she was cold, “a bitch,” or even mentally disabled—things that are patently untrue if you talk with her for even a minute. Indeed, if her medical condition has done anything to her personality, it has rendered Gaydos a remarkably self-aware and self-confident young woman.

“I didn’t want to live my life the way other people thought I should,” Gaydos says of her childhood in Connecticut, ”and I certainly didn’t want to be the sort of person that other people wanted me to be.”

After moving to New York to study art at the Pratt Institute, Gaydos began experimenting with being the person in the picture, as opposed to the one making it. Her first modeling shoot came about almost by accident. After emailing a photographer whose work she admired, she was invited to sit for him. Although she had always hated having her picture taken, she found she loved modeling from the very first click of the camera. After that, she began picking up work on Craigslist, and, eventually, from the amateur modeling website, ModelMayhem.com. Soon, she was doing two to three gigs a weekend.

“I never had any difficulty finding a shoot,” Gaydos remembers, though she would only work with people whose vision she found compelling. Somewhat retiring in person, she has a powerful, almost regal presence when the cameras are on, and her art background gives her a broad understanding of composition, color, and angles.

As she gained experience, Gaydos found herself wanting to create images that told a story and conveyed emotion, much as she once had as a visual artist. She was less interested in selling the clothing and more in making the viewer have an experience, which is what she believes separates commercial work from high-fashion modeling. “Besides,” she adds with the grin of a confident fashionista, “people are going to want to wear the clothes that I wear anyway.”

Looking for new opportunities, Gaydos began sending her portfolio to the big names in the fashion world, nearly all of whom told her she was too much of a “risk.” Just thinking about it makes her roll her eyes. “If you’re afraid of taking risks, why are you in fashion?” she asks in exasperation.

Not that she doesn’t realize the challenges facing her. “You should always understand where you are in the industry,” she says philosophically. When people tag and share her images online, “the word ugly is almost always with each photo.”

“It’s not anything I haven’t heard before,” she shrugs. “But I never thought of myself as ugly, and I still don’t.”

Her look is an opportunity, and she intends to make the most of it. But she also has to contend with photographers looking to exploit her as a one-trick pony to shock their audiences. Most of her career, she says, “has been trying to make good choices so people understand that I’m a serious model” and not just a unique face. Gaydos knows it would be easy for her to rest on her look, and not bring the vitality, the depth, and the spark that separate supermodels from the pack of wannabes. She feels sorry for those girls who think they can rest on looks alone. If you want to be a true model, “you can’t just be a body that’s there,” she cautions.

Eventually, Gaydos wants to join a high-end fashion agency, but knows it might be a while before that day comes. “I don’t think I can just walk in and they would accept me,” she says. “I have to get people to understand where I’m coming from. I have to earn respect.” Far from intimidating, the prospect seems to excite Gaydos. She demands to be taken seriously, much as her photos demand attention. So far, she’s found more success in Europe and Mexico than in America, but she has faith that as her body of work grows, “it will help other people be on board with the Melanie train.”

What Does Trans* Mean, and Where Did It Come From?

First published on Slate, January 10, 2014. Read the original here.

It’s widely accepted that computer-mediated communication—emailing, texting, sexting, commenting, chatting, and so on—has changed the way we speak, even when we’re away from the keyboard. But a new label being embraced online by some transgender people may represent a linguistic first: borrowing from computer language itself.

The label in question is trans*, and the asterisk stems from common computing usage wherein it represents a wildcard—any number of other characters attached to the original prefix. Thus, a computer search for trans* might pull uptransmission, transitory, or transsexual. But in this neologism, the * is used metaphorically to capture all the identities—from drag queen to genderqueer—that fall outside traditional gender norms. (The asterisk usually goes unpronounced in spoken English, though some users do say “trans star” or “trans asterisk” for clarity’s sake.)

“It was about 2009 or 2010 when I started using trans* to describe my own experiences,” says Nash Jones, who works as the Bridge 13 Community Education Program Coordinator at the Q Center, an LGBTQ center in Portland, Ore. Like many of those who embrace the term, Jones is under 30, college-educated, and actively seeks out “queer and trans* spaces.” Jones, who uses “they” as their gender pronoun, says that they use trans* both as a personal label and as “a more inclusive, broader umbrella term than transgender.”

For most of the last two decades, transgender has been the umbrella term of choice, much as trans* is being positioned today. Labels like transmasculine, or transvestite were considered to denote specific identities that fell within its scope. Before that, the most widely used term was usually transsexual, which fell out of favor in part because it focused attention narrowly on physical sex. Today, transsexual is usually used to refer to someone who wants to undergo gender reassignment surgeries (Confused? Here is a handy list of terms from the National Center for Transgender Equality.)

For some, the appeal of trans* might be similar. By removing -gender, which instinctively brings to mind images of men or women, trans* might help transcend the gender binary and provide more space for people who are in the middle, who move back and forth, or who don’t identify with the binary at all.

An historical use of the term gay*, from the 1979 March on Washington.

As transgender gained ascendancy in the 1990s, many lesbian and gay organizations, pressured to present at least a veneer of inclusivity, added it to their names or mission statements. It’s possible that a younger generation turned against the term in part because the spread of the word transgender was often accompanied by little in the way of significant change to include actual trans* people.

Jenny Lederer is a San Francisco State University lecturer in linguistics who studies the metaphors by which people understand gender transition. She likens this falling out of favor to the cognitive linguistic concept of salient exemplars, which are “complex but relatively well-shared societal prototypes attached to any given label.” She suggests that “this younger generation of trans-folks want to disassociate” from the few famous transgender people they’ve seen, because those celebrities don’t seem relevant or similar to their lives. Instead, they’re looking to the Internet to find—or create—words, communities, and celebrities with which they feel comfortable.

There doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer to when and where trans* first came into usage. But it seems clear from its roots in computer language, anecdotal research, and the fact that no one agrees on how to say it aloud, that trans* first—and recently—appeared online.

But trans historian Cristan Williams cautions against leaping to any conclusions. “In talking with older trans community members, they tell me that they had used t* as a short code for all things trans back in the early 1980s message boards.” She believes the word may well be gaining popularity as a way of sidestepping an ongoing debate in part of the trans* community about the origins and uses of the terms transsexual and transgender (a longer history of which can be found on Williams’ website).

It may well be that the asterisk has been appearing and disappearing from gayspeak for decades. But why is it suddenly so popular? Jones has a theory: “When communities are no longer limited by physical proximity,” people are more likely to look for words that invoke broad inclusion, out of sheer necessity. As our (virtual) worlds get bigger, so must our language and our salient exemplars. Before the Internet, an isolated trans* person might have used a term that didn’t really fit because it was the only one they’d encountered. Now, a new label is just a click away.

We Can End AIDS Without a Cure

First published in Slate, November 29, 2013. Read the original here.

This Dec. 1, as we mark yet another World AIDS Day without a cure, a vaccine, or an intelligently interdependent global response to the crisis, I’d like to propose a thought experiment based on a radical—yet commonsense—proposition: We can end AIDS without a cure for AIDS.

After all, we have learned ways to prevent transmission between mother and child, discovered drugs that bring the viral load down to undetectable levels, and placed a critical understanding of sexual health in the hands of (some of) those who need it most. With proper funding and political will, these advantages can be replicated in every population, in every country, in every corner of the globe. Incurable is not unbeatable—as we already know from polio and smallpox.

So why haven’t we beaten AIDS? Clearly, it’s not because we don’t need to. In the United States alone, an estimated 1.2 million people are living with HIV. Globally, it’s around 35.3 million people. For one reason or another—because they are black or brown, gay or transgender, drug users or sex workers, and overwhelmingly because they are poor and disenfranchised—the life-or-death needs of these people do not dictate global policy or move world markets. Because AIDS has from its very beginning been a disease of the marginalized, we have allowed it to spread like a weed through the cracks in our society. Inaction, more than transmission, is at issue here. HIV causes AIDS, yes, but the AIDS crisis is caused by stigma, oppression, discrimination, and apathy. The virus is not our biggest enemy—we are.

And here, the thought experiment begins.

Currently, the popular understanding of HIV/AIDS is that it is a disease that affects certain “high-risk groups”: gay men, for instance, or black women. To be sure, rates of infection among these groups are disproportionately high, as any number of depressing statistics show. According to recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 30,000 men who have sex with men (MSMs) contracted HIV in 2010—up a significant 12 percent from 2008. While infection rates among black women seem to have fallen recently, they are still 20 times higher than those of white women. Such strong correlations between racial or sexual identities and infection rates suggest that this model is informative, that it is an accurate way to understand the AIDS crisis.

But these statistics conceal as much as they seem to reveal. In three distinct ways, the “risk group” approach to conceptualizing HIV actually impedes efforts to end the crisis. First, it pathologizes all people within a broad category, regardless of their actual sero-status or real likelihood of contracting HIV. Under this simplistic rubric, all gay men or black women or injection drug users are treated as likely sources of infection.

Second, this approach diminishes our ability to properly understand and target the real vectors for the disease by hiding them inside nearly useless categories. After all, there is nothing inherent to being a black woman that makes one more likely to contract HIV. It is the social position of black womanhood in our society that puts these women at risk, not their identities.

Third, by leading us to believe that these broad groupings have some causal relationship to HIV infection, this model limits our understanding of the crisis to our local context. Because we are actually dealing with correlation, not causation, these groupings do not have the same relationship to HIV in other places. Efforts to work globally—or even in different communities in America—will always be hampered by our own preconceived notions of who is and is not at risk.

But what if we flipped the lens? What if we focused more on marginalization (and its real-world effects) and less on identities? What if we understood AIDS not as a disease affecting certain types of people, but rather, as a disease that affects those living at the intersection of a constellation of conditions, such as poverty, lack of access to education, inadequate health care, stigmatized sexual practices, drug and alcohol abuse (legal or illegal), and political disenfranchisement?

This would not only reduce the stigmatization of identity groups with high rates of HIV infection, it would also allow us to tailor our health remedies to those who really are most at-risk. For example, in a further breakdown of that statistic regarding rates of infection among MSMs, the CDC notes that the numbers of new infections among white and black MSMs were almost identical—despite the fact that non-Latino whites represent 63 percent of the U.S. population and blacks only 12 percent. Additionally, the greatest number of infections was seen in the youngest age group. Again and again, it is those who sit at the intersection of marginalized identities—those with the least social capital and political agency—who are most at risk. We must discard generic categorical bromides in favor of health remedies targeted to their specific needs.

Further, this way of understanding the crisis would turn our attention away from prevention models based solely on behavioral change, which studies have shown are often difficult to enact in real life. Though it is tempting to isolate a single action or inaction that could stem the tide of infection, in truth, we are complex social animals whose behaviors arise from our specific circumstances and experiences. Thus, without broader contextual shifts, our actions tend to be change resistant.

For example, behavioral models routinely admonish young women with little education, no access to health care, and a cultural lack of sexual agency to make difficult decisions in highly sexual situations. In an (oversimplified) metaphor, it’s like telling someone to use a condom every time they have sex—without considering where they will get the condom, who their partners are, how they will negotiate safer sex acts, what the word sex means to them, and so on. A more successful (and, to be blunt, fair) approach would be to ensure that these women are empowered to enter these situations with adequate support, knowledge, and decision-making agency—things marginalized groups often lack. This requires HIV prevention efforts that also work to create political power for marginalized groups; address issues of poverty and social justice; help individuals find or prepare for meaningful employment, housing, and health care; address mental health issues—efforts, in effect, that address a client’s life circumstances as a whole. Many, many on-the-ground service providers already work in this kind of model. But this is a long and slow process, which requires support from an informed populace and a government that sees the vital connection between civil rights, community empowerment, and HIV/AIDS.

By focusing on marginalization, not identity or behavior, we could begin to address the root causes of inequality that leave certain members of our society more at risk for experiencing any negative life or health outcome, AIDS included.

If we can stop AIDS and have chosen not to, the hard truth is that it is because certain lives don’t seem worth saving: They would cost too much, or have brought it upon themselves, or aren’t our concern, or don’t even exist in our worldview. And this is what needs to change. Until we see every life as equal, we will never end AIDS.