GAYLETTER

Tell me about the name Teesaddy. It’s just like a name that stuck in high school. That’s what people would call me. It was also my Myspace name.

I thought your name was a play on the word zaddy. It’s not directly related.

When did you start posting sexy photos of yourself? I guess I started posting selfies in college to get attention from guys that I liked.

What were you studying in college? I was president of a small fashion newspaper in college. I started writing for a few fashion journals. My dream was to sit in the front row and analyze things. I used to post on Twitter, and a lot of the tweets that I would make about fashion wouldn’t get any attention at all, but the shirtless pictures that I posted after the gym would get lots more attention. In order for me to get featured as a writer, I would have to have a following, so I was like, “okay, I’ll just throw a jockstrap on!”

Hiring people based on what their social numbers are is silly. It’s really crazy that skills are less important than the amount of followers you have.

Are you interested in modeling? I wanted to go to New York and study design, so I have been interested in menswear and of course male models.

What’s your favorite part of your body? My legs are long.

How did you get into OnlyFans? My ex-boyfriend, he lives in Michigan where I lived during the pandemic. …

Isabella Lovestory is like the Kate Bush of reggaeton with the hip bones of “Slave 4 U”-era Britney Spears. A pop star of her own invention, Honduran-born Isabella’s artistic sensibility gives her hot-girl visuals and radio-ready bangers a twisted brilliance. In fact before she released her first EP Humo in 2019, she was showing up in all the cool kid group shows at New York galleries (even while living in Montreal). In the last few years, she’s been making music her focus, often collaborating with Chicken, the downtown New York producer behind the party Club Eat. She loves a super low rise jean and a kitten heel. in fact, she wrote an entire song about the latter.

So you wrote a kitten heel anthem. Who is she, the girl who prefers a kitten heel to say a stiletto or platform wedge? She’s someone who doesn’t need to be desperately loud (or desperately tall) to be the supermodel, the center of attention. She knows she has it all and everyone is obsessed with her. Subtle, iconic, lazy, gluttonous. The world waits for her. She can run faster and dance better than the rest because she’s got the comfiest shoes. The sexy underdog — I mean undercat. She’s definitely a part of me, although I contradict myself everyday. One leg wears a kitten heel and the other a platform stiletto.

You have a very romantic name. What’s your favorite love story, real-life or fictional? A Woman Under the Influence always makes me cry. …

Honey Dijon has been DJing since she was a kid at her parents’ house parties in Chicago. While she’s been a longtime mainstay of house music and queer party scenes since moving to New York in the 1990s, the last few years she’s really grown, doing everything from creating mixes for Kim Jones’s Louis Vuitton menswear shows to headlining dance festivals in Europe to launching her own clothing brand with Comme des Garçons, titled Honey Fucking Dijon (exactly!). Honey was refreshingly open and honest when we spoke, serving up plenty of pearls of wisdom — it was a pleasure to spend some time with her.

When you were a kid you used to DJ at your parent’s parties. I was curious if you remember which songs and artists you were playing? Like many African-American families, music was a huge part of our lives. My parents were middle-class/working-class, and every weekend they would have these massive parties. It was awesome because I would sit at the edge of the stairs and I would hear glasses clinking and people cursing each other out. I was just so attracted and drawn to that energy. I think the laughter and the joy was probably the thing that really attracted me because it just seemed like people were having such a good time. I grew up at a great time when there was a lot of conscious music — you know, music was one of the things that helped black people deal with oppression and racism and all of these things. …

This past November, the Friday after Election Day, We spoke with Urayoán Noel and Raquel Salas Rivera, each a Puerto Rican poet, scholar, and performer in their own right.

Urayoán called from the Bronx. His seventh book of poetry, Transversal (forthcoming), reconfigures the border between Spanish and English to create new possibilities of their arrangement, fusion, and division. Raquel called from Santurce, Puerto Rico. His eighth book of poems, While They Sleep (Under the Bed is Another Country) (2019), describes in Spanish and differently in English the grief, rage, absurdity, desire, and numbness that are the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States.

We are grateful to both poets for sharing original poetry with us. Read on, where Raquel and Urayoán discuss the historic shifts in today’s Puerto Rico, the island’s anarchist history, finding places to grow, loving Philadelphia, remembering Sylvia Rivera, and building a lineage from 
the cracks.

Maybe we could begin with an overview of what’s going on in Puerto Rico today.

Raquel: We still have the Oversight and Management Board, la Junta as we call it here, which goes above the legislature and the governor. This election follows a mass movement of a size we haven’t seen in recent history. People have compared it to Vieques. It seems to have broken through a wall, and that’s undoing a belief that has existed for a long time. I grew up hearing we were just too divided as a people, that there was no way we could come together for something. …

Reno Gold has been making money from his immaculately sculpted body since he was an 18-year-old stripper in Reno, Nevada. Names he went through before he got to Reno Gold include Sebastian Valentino and Richie Rose. Now at 24, Reno has moved his talents to OnlyFans. He’s been doing it for two years, but in the last year his income on the platform has exploded. Even with the 20 percent cut the company takes, he often manages to pull in over $100,000 a month. In total he’s earned over $1.2 million. The quarantine has been a golden opportunity for Reno.

“Covid has been really good for business just because people are craving that human interaction.” Reno now resides in Miami, but he was born in Illinois. He is currently single, telling us that his number one focus is his work. “I talk to my subscribers every single day. When I wake up, I immediately check my messages, answer them, and then hit the gym. Then I come home and film. I think it’d be kind of hard to have a relationship.” When asked to give us an official job description Reno responded with “local Internet hooker” or “digital panhandler.”

Reno loves his eyes but he says, “my dick brings me the most pleasure, so he’s gotta be my favorite.” Reno has plenty of fantasies, and he’s been lucky to fulfill some. “I actually lived out one of my fantasies a couple of years ago when I was traveling to Paris.” …

Where are you right now? I am on Fire Island.

How did you get to FIP during the global pandemic? OMG! We’re already outing me as a Corona traveler. I get tested every week in Los Angeles, got tested Wednesday. I just had to leave L.A., it was just getting to be too much. L.A. in August is really sad.

Why is L.A. in August sad? August is a sad month for everyone because we feel the summer ending and we don’t want it to happen. And then L.A. on top of that it’s just a sad city. So, you bring August vibes to L.A. vibes. It just feels like stale and sad, and no one can be free, so I had to bounce.

What makes L.A. sad? I think L.A. is all unfinished business. I think there’s a lot of ghosts there. L.A. has only unfinished business. It is literally the land of dreams that were crushed and dreams that never got made.

Do you feel like you have a lot of unfinished business? No, I feel like I am doing my business. I can’t believe that I am going to say this, but if I do believe in reincarnation, I feel like we might be close to my last time. If it’s not this one then the next one. I feel like I am close to something.

That’s a good place to be in, spiritually, in a city like L.A. Yeah. I feel like you have to be really spiritually strong to be able to navigate such a morally complicated place. …