When we first built Loverboy, we dreamed off an excuse to film Francois in his undies and have Janice Dickinson as our BFF. One of the things we could never have expected was that we would end up talking to different queer communities around the globe and work together with them on something like Peach Pulp Vol. 1. Yes, in the first of an ongoing series, Aubrey Longley-Cook shoots some of Atlanta’s queers while Jared Dawson writes an op-ed expressing his love for them.

There is a softness to Fannie. A swerve, a sway, a lazy redolence that falls from her eyes like a weeping Magdaline’s. Our Sacred Lady of It’s Lit. Adonis is quick – mercurial mayhem – a frenetic hopping like the cloud of electrons surrounding an atom – we may only guess at their possible point of residence at any moment.

 

 

 

Dear Fannie and Adonis,

I love you.

I loved you both first on the internet. And to be entirely fair, I loved you first, Fannie. I had followed you for a year or so before inviting you to be a part of this shoot.

I have liked your posts and updates – the currency of your cultural capital spends well in my economy. We like the same cartoons and have a similar sense of humor. I poach music, lqqks, and information from your identity. And this is, I feel, a two way street – or I, at least, hope it is.

I watched you two at several photo shoots that Aubrey did for parties. You learn a lot from watching a person get photographed. It is a sort of concentrated transmission of identity – can one take the expanse of their whole person and compress it into the time and space of several shutter clicks AND do it well? How does one behave under the scrutiny of a mechanical and unyielding eye? Do they wither and turn aside in a desperate attempt to dodge that gaze or do they meet it head-on, long neck, chin down, eyes to me?

The latter is how you two navigate this world – or at least it is how you publically navigate it from the vantage point of my persepctive. Adonis, you are shameless on the internet – producing a range of “content” from new jock strap selfies to narration of mental breakdown. Let me entirely honest with you, I would not have it any other way. When I think of you, I think of Wayne Koestenbaum’s words, “Display, evidently, is considered healing – steam released, trauma canceled. The psychoanalytic word ‘abreactive’ describes what we achieve by undergoing humiliation or by not making a secret of it. Abreaction, according to my trusty Oxford American Dictionary, is ‘the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion, achieved through reliving the experience that caused it.’ Writing is abreactive – I release the emotion of humiliation by replaying it.” You are an Acolyte of Abreaction, Adonis, and the stream of media you create is your medium by which this release takes shape upon this world. And you Fannie, you are the rushing recess of the ocean at the shore as a wave builds off the coast. You are the deep breath that is taken before the bellow. The second half of the 45th chapter of the Tao Te Ching reads, “Movement overcomes cold/ Stillness overcomes heat/ Clear quietness is the standard of the world.” I’m not entirely certain wtf this means but I always imagine you thinking shit like this when I see you. I’ve been trying to think all day of how to do honor to your person through language but I keep getting distracted and smoking weed, and masturbating and watching sailor moon. Somehow this feels like an appropriate offering to lay on your altar.

I love the two of you because of the visibility you bring to this world and Atlanta’s queer community. You are both so much younger than I but the particular collection of intersections that you occupy on the determining grid of gender, race, and class have forced you to mature so quickly into the confident and charismatic individuals I see. When I see you, hear you, share space with you, I know that the kids are gonna be alright. They know what’s up and more than that, they know how to take the political and social climate around them and synthesize it into their person, their look, their space and make it look good af. Existing before a camera is no great feat for you because you’re use to the scrutiny of the gaze and you meet it head on. Chin down. Neck long. Eyes to me. The future is bright and beautiful, ’cause it’s lit.

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