Wild Boys

Jose Esteban Munoz, in Cruising Utopia, writes “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”

Wild Boys exists in an alternate universe that, while actively hostile, is a place where queers have agency. The tribalism, rituals, and anachronistic imagery throughout the work have their basis in texts by William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, and Hakim Bey. In this imperfect Utopia, intimate acts frequently transcend space and time and sometimes lead to death. These metaphors reference not only the stories of my youth but the current world we live in; a place where queerness is still “other” and must be defended if we are to do more than survive.

Wild Boys exists in this universe to open a narrow gap in a mechanized society, granting my peers a ritualized space to be fully alive and engaged, and to give a glimpse to outside viewers what always exists on a subconscious level. The narrative can only be understood in part, each image its own scene from a book still being written sometime in the past and somewhere in the future.