Twelve people sit around a long conference table facing an old projection screen. In front of each, strewn about the tabletop, sit some bags of Hot Cheetos, a few Slim-Jim beef jerky sticks, Jello-O brand chocolate pudding cups, and a simple worksheet introducing them to this setting: the Public Access Party Orientation. They will be shown a short video of previously made programming to give them a sense of what sorts of shows are accepted and presented on our airwaves. This Queer Public Access Channel is not rooted in one geography, small town, or era; it is a strange utopic space held together by old kitsch, fake houseplants, high-saturated green, and an odd humble belief: making fun of oneself is a path towards liberation. The worksheet ask questions like: What do you think you’re good at? Whenever I [fill in the blank] people usually ask me to stop. The goal is get to the epitome of yourself—or some aspect of self—and to exploit it, then perform it, and make it completely absurd. Only a couple around the table partake in the snacks, as some seem skeptical of the spread and the dreaded foreshadowing of audience participation. [Ghoulish screams].
See, for the past decade, I have asked friends, crushes, lovers, and (chosen) family to don personas for performance and performance-for-the-(Hi8)-camera. This has not been for any discernible long-term project or sense of accumulation; it has simply been a way of being together, of laughing together—a “love language” if you will, if I must—yes, I must!
At this orientation, the twelve people are my fellow cohort members for an MFA program, and this is their first engagement with “my work”—a phrase completely too serious for what’s going on here: See the baby dyke singing her made-up song I’ll be at the Seesaw! Feast upon store-bought cookies in a cooking show for repressed Jews with Christmas trauma! Lick the chocolate from Ronald Reagan’s lips after it’s been feltched out of George Bush Sr.! Yes, yes, step right up to this freak show that churns old shame into gleeful kinky pleasure! Forget what you’re good at! Laugh at yourself! And maybe fall in love with a clown, the circus, or the wandering journey!
I offer these time-jump reflections as your orientation into a world of queer kinship rooted in play: a world fed by my idols, communities, and disparate locales. This archive of audio-visual collaborations from 2012 to to 2023 highlights the ways that I have attempted to find queer liberation in the pursuit of wild pleasure and art-making. At its core is an invitation from Barbara Carrellas, who pleaded that “ecstasy is necessary.” And while living a joyous life is the aim, it is inherently a goal born out of grief: see, we queers first have to survive the onslaught of shame, governmental regulation and damning legislation; then, we have to enjoy, even if only for an evening, a fleeting fuck, or the flash of seeing ourselves in an old movie.
If you don’t need this introduction to absurdity, then I hope you can simply bask in your fellow freaks, equal parts entertained and enlivened by my autobiographical anecdotes as we slip between sex work, media studies, activism, and the academically inappropriate. Perhaps more than anyone, I need this orientation to myself—to pick apart my fictions from reality, pretend play from “the real.” I dunno anymore, ask Debord, or Derrida, or Deleuze for that kind of thing. I’ll be over here pranking my lover.
Talent is a Vampire:
autobiographical reflections on a decade of collaboration by a.r. havel
September 2023
I’m crying, again:
hunched over a cafe table, heaving for air as I giggle uncontrollably. I had asked a friend to record a short message as a receptionist at a Mexico City doctor’s office, and then to send it to Victor. He’s across an ocean, and we’ve been developing a sonic form of intimacy through all-day voice notes: sweet, absurdist, joke after joke, heart-gasming with each surprising turn of the narrative. Andrea, the fake-receptionist, is actually from Mexico City, but she’s been living with her girlfriend in New Orleans for love and a visa; she played some city sound effects on her laptop, found a vintage phone ring, and played it spectacularly:
Victor is different from anyone I’ve ever dated in how effortlessly he is willing to play along. “You can get off this ride whenever you like,” I tell him. “The safe word is: Please. Stop. Why are you like this? ” I see whole chronologies of misunderstandings before—how I had constructed strange dramas for my romantic audiences: once in college, I threw myself on rough carpet to scrape my skin in blood (I thought it would be funnier, somehow); on acid in Mexico City, I try to initiate a game of hide-and-go-seek, but my betrothed will not go-seek—he’ll only say: Please. Stop. Why are you like this?
“Me mandó un mensaje a mi,” Andrea reports. And then I receive one from him, too.
“Basically, I’m going to become a giant turd.” This is all a long game of yes-and. And all because I got vulnerable with Victor, too: telling him about the submissive client I had a few weeks earlier. He was this well-to-do psychologist from San Francisco who met me for a scene in my Centro apartment in Mexico City. He saw a small roach in the bathroom and convinced himself there was a bedbug infestation; and then he shit all over the floor while fucking himself on a large dildo. That, I honestly didn’t mind or try to shame him. I too had shit the bed the other day while a masc-Top scolded me: “you’re a bad bottom!” That dumb-dude was dismayed because I couldn’t stop laughing. But, in my session, when sub-psychologist couldn’t re-enter the kink scene, he admitted: “I just wasn’t expecting your apartment to be so low-class. I thought it could be hot, but it was just distracting.”
I thought to remind him of the rules for our engagement: he was the successful married gay who wanted to be ruined—who wanted to be told he was worthless, his achievements hollow bullshit. And I was good at it: telling him his degree wasn’t even worthy to wipe my ass. I thought to say: I never said I was a good capitalist. I had made him a series of hypnosis audio files, undoubtedly the most intense I’d ever recorded; and, he ate those up like the boot-licking faggot he knew he was. But in the physical space of desire, in the material reality of his fantasies, even hypnosis wasn’t enough. Please stop. Why are you like this? felt pointedly different this time. And, I knew I’d never hear from him, again.
Victor asks me if in the next hypnosis—during the long descent into trance-relaxation phase—“instead of every part of you is turning into warm liquid, will it be…” I cannot help but take the voice-note, remix it with some bad blaring italo-disco, and harmonize over the synths; then, walk the streets of the city listening to my giant turd whisper-moan the words like a morning lover—my one-morning lover, separated by a whole sea, yet inhabiting a grander expanse between my ear-canals. And I’m crying, once again. So completely full of joy, cowering behind the entrance to a metro where I’ve surrendered to giggles. Will it be everything turns to shit? For now, I’ll trust the gushing feeling that’s bursting my chest, this delightfully pleasurable payaso—a laughing lover. Sweetness, absurdity, back and forth, forever. ))<>((
May 2023
Chola Discourse:
…my P.O. [parole officer] basically told me to come in and talk about a show I seen…and it’s free, so just join.
Many of my friendships are an invitation to take oneself less seriously. Marina and I met in an indigenous feminist seminar; I clock her chola vibe immediately: she’s eating hot Cheetos with a blank stare letting you know she is not impressed. Or, maybe she’s just tired. Nooo, but I when I tell you I haven’t been able to sleeeeeeep!
She meets peak-Echo Park when we go out for lunch one sunny day and I tell her I’m considering dropping out of grad school: “No, but Aaron. Listen—I figured it all out! Just staaaay for two more years and get a PhDee, and then after the two years you can literally fuck around wherever you want doing field work. Bitch!—don’t leave me!”
Since that first day in Marcela Ernest’s seminar, Marina had been talking about developing Chola Discourse; she and Marcela shared pictures of their teen-times, all bandanas and lip-liner and smacking words like their idols in Mi Vida Loca and Mi Familia. After months of being loving made fun of, I invite her to try out her Chola Discourse as if it were a public access television. I give her the parameters: pick a super white ‘90s sitcom, and analyze it like a Chola circa 1995. Among glamour shots of Selena and movie posters, I print a prison-photo of Richard Ramirez in the off-limits art department office, putting little red lipstick hearts around his flowing hair. “It’s the details!” Marcela laughs.
Of course the video is too long! You can’t pay homage to public access without the excess: this is, after all, a no-talent show, and you’ve got one foot on the Stairway to Stardom. I had initially found videos of that public access basement program while in undergrad, and it became the inspiration for a whole other series of work. It wasn’t just the aesthetic of fake vines around plastic trellises, or the creepy host with his 70’s sharp collar; it was this simultaneous feeling of performative camaraderie and entrapment—it wouldn’t surprise me to learn these people were cast-offs who found each other liberated in front of a video camera, or forced to kick-ball-change by a cult leader—playing out their celebrity fantasies somewhere between Otto Muehl’s commune and the Scottish highlands in Harmony Korine’s awesomely bad Mister Lonely.
March 2013
Lonely? Just dial my number:
I have a high tolerance for terrible music. If it’s kitsch, it’s my kink. And, right now, I cannot stop watching the music video to The Village People’s “Sex Over the Phone.” Don’t wanna be alone, you just pick up the phone!
I would blame it on some analytical research centering digital hook-up culture and the history of technology and intimacy; but, that wouldn’t explain my obsessively listening to Laura Branigan’s “Self Control.”
I’ve just recently met two feminist trailblazers of sexual activism: Carol Queen and Annie Sprinkle. Queen came to my undergrad campus to give a talk called “7 Billion Sexual Orientations,” generating far more open-ended questions and declarative answers. Most of the audience responses began with a baffled: “So, what you’re saying is…” followed by an oddly endearing shrug her shoulders and an optimistic smirk. For context, the last time I was in the lecture hall, it was to watch a conversation between a trans-woman comedian-activist and her ex-lover, a sex worker who is literally allergic to sunlight and was completely wrapped in black fabric and eye-shades. Queen’s thesis was basically that all forms of “normalcy” were breaking down and we should be open to ambiguity, to limiting our desire to create easy definitions or boundaries around our sexual identities. This concept is so seductive: living in a larger world where there are no constructed sexual norms, where everyone has the agency to speak about and act on their own defined “sexual orientation.” But, I’m unsure what that activism would look like: how can I help myself and others realize that their pleasure should be celebrated?
When Annie Sprinkle visited, she stayed in my friend’s apartment and like a long-lost Aunt, she brewed us some tea, laid out a spread of tarot cards, and freed her giant breasts that had been bound by a corset all day. Then, we watched her incredible documentary “Orgasm,” wherein sex experts, performance artists, Carol Queen herself, and others talk about orgasms as any and everything: laugh-gasms, the sensuality of a lover passing, extremely light touching; Carolee Schneemann talks about “the ancient position,” as she gets on all fours atop of a stack of hay. It’s all green-screened, accompanied by Annie’s extremely playful sensibilities, giving the interviews a hilarity rooted in sweetness and understanding.
It’s not an easy task: breaking down the constructed boundaries of your sexual self. And clearly, there’s no finish line, no prize; nobody can claim from the mountaintop that they are fully liberated without looking like a jack-ass. I think so much about being gay, about being queer and male at the same time. Friends at school are using all forms of different pronouns: they/them, zi/zir, Xem, and even my friend Gabriella who forced a professor to use her new pronoun, Pussy. I support all of this; but, truthfully, I see myself in the middle-aged and older men who survived the plague; I feel a false-nostalgic affinity for them—sex, activism, loneliness. Craig just drank himself to death at the age of 60, but for how long did he sit around at night, drunk and wishing he could talk to all his friends and lovers who never made it past thirty.
December 2021: I revisit this concept for my friend Kitty O’Connor’s 40th birthday party. I reached out to many of her friends scattered across the world, and asked them to record a very informal 1-900 video as different operators at 1-9-GIME-KITTY:
Sex and lonliness. Intimacy and technology. I remember David: actor or background player, I’m not sure, but over the app, the man was sending photos of himself in different costumes, giving a thumbs-up with different B-movie celebrities. I agreed to meet up with Dave on one of those nights where desperate loneliness dovetails with testosterone so forcefully that the wood-shop goes up in flames. A small fiery orb did extend outward from Jesus’s palm; he hovered on a poster facing outwards from David’s window, on a little creole cottage on Orleans Ave. If that wasn’t confirmation of a crazed Christianity enough, the house was painted in Easter pastels of canary yellow and 50s refrigerator green; a seasonal flag was hoisted from the wood molding that exclaimed: “He has Risen!”
Still, I knocked. And when David answered the door, a whoosh of musky air blew from inside the house: that specific smell of grandma’s house. I can’t say I was catfished: the photos David had sent were in fact him, but they were probably the him of 1995. I could have done the research, I could have seen the time-stamped celebrities with their bad blonde highlights, I could have even acknowledged the glaring flash communicating that these were cell phone photos of much older glossy 4x6 Walgreens prints. Still, testosterone wins in any fight with logic, or is more about the deep longing and necessity for connection?
I didn’t have sex with David. I told him a lie that was also a prayer and completely true: “I’m doing research on digital hook-up apps and how they’re changing people’s sexuality.”
He responded with subtle anger and annoyance, yet without irony: “That’s not right! You shouldn’t lie to people!” David and I probably talked for two hours, a conversation more than occasionally punctuated by him asking “are you sure you don’t wanna suck my dick?” Yes, thank you, I’m sure. What I learned was that my habitual nostalgia had gotten the better of my critical thinking. “We were always horny,” he said “You’d be in the produce aisle, wondering if this or that guy wanted to fuck, and sometimes they did. Then, we’d go home and get on the answering machine service or call a 1-900 number.” It’s not that I thought Grindr and the internet had made us all more mindlessly horny. I think I believed it had taken the romance out of the whole cruising affair. In some ways, it surely had in material ways—you can’t even find out if a physical cruising spot exists now in the U.S. without looking online, and even then, they’re usually pretty dead. I had never conceptualized Grindr and the like as just an updated phone sex service.
When I started the installation for #Dial My Number# I was initially imagining 6 video screens arranged like a Brady Bunch intro: The Bunch being my queer friends, having inter-screen contact via eye glances, touching, and pouring various viscous substances onto each other: Ruse Flytrap, Blair’s praying mantis drag character, emitting some gooey green liquid onto the subject below her; Penny being doused in honey from above; Mama Sass, Mateo’s meat-market persona, pulling a Vienna sausage from someone above.
Once I began filming each subject, I realized that there was much so much these characters. They are all exaggerations of the “actor"s” performing them; and, the green-screen room became a liberatory space where they could perform the epitome of their absurdist selves. I wanted to hear their voices, I wanted to hear their desires, what they found pleasurable. Out of these interviews and filming, I made each persona a 1-900 ad: Dusty Jupiter, Mama Sass, Slime, and Pansy Narcissus. They were projected in a highly visible public entryway to the university’s library; and next to the installation, a rotary phone allowed guests to call in and leave their own voicemails. I so wish I still had these recordings; it was incredibly satisfying to hear strangers come up with their own characters, asking out the 1-900 personas with creativity, flair, and total silliness.
What it all comes down to, is that everything is gonna be fine, fine, fine
August 2023:
“You know it’s really fun to fall in love me,” I say. “…Until it’s not.”
“I never questioned that.” Kitty replies. “Both parts.”
From the tarmac where his plane sat for two hours, Victor writes to me: “I have no idea what will happen now, and I feel at ease with that uncertainty. This seed could rot for flourish. It could stay dormant for years. I will be okay when it comes to what it comes to.” How can I express to him how intimately I understand, how this is precisely the way my friendships flourish: going months without seeing one another, and then picking up exactly where the last punch-line ended. We swing from adoration to complete sarcasm, from theatrical caricatures to the sincerest forms of listening.
The next morning, I lay in bed in romantic confusion: where is he, how could he not be wrapped up in me. He’s 8 hours into the future, but I’m waking up with some typical morning hormones, so I ask Victor to send me a nude photo. What follows becomes our first long-form narrative joke.
Customer service is a recurring theme within Victor and I’s long distance courting. In addition to this Grindr cease and desist, he’s sent me e-mails from a fake medical facility, Clínica Arcoíris warning me that I too will soon turn into shit. There have been tutorials from Dell Computer Services helping a confused customer turn on her laptop: “okay, m’am, what you need to do is press the botton that is an asshole with a dick in it!”
I returned to New Orleans a month after the first message from Grindr Customer Service was sent, and aside from the moments I shared it with friends, I mostly forgot about it; it was joke-case-closed as far as I was concerned. Victor would sporadically ask when I would see Kitty under the guise of wanting to speak with her over video chat. I finally stayed with her for a week, in a small wooden shack in her backyard, next to the trampoline her kids and I would play on. One morning, I woke up on that lofted mattress, let my hand slide under my pillow and almost gave myself a paper-cut from the postcard placed there:
Over the following three days, I found other postcards throughout Kitty’s house complying with Customer Service’s stipulations to “send pics with one hand in your pocket while the other is…playing the piano…hailing a taxi-cab…and lighting a cigarette.” When I attempt to relay the story to my friend, photographer Meg Turner, she stops me half way through, saying that she is the person who printed the post-cards.
“So, basically, what you’re saying is…” I begin to tell Victor, “you initiated a community art project just to prank me?”
“…because this is 1,000% my love language.”
Still, there is no (non-disappearing) nude photo sent. So, I call in for back-up, my friend Kitty who is always willing to clown around:
Riot Mueller reads the message from Veemer’s legal representative.
