GAYLETTER

Roddy Bottum and Joey Holman are the musical duo MAN ON MAN. The two started dating 14 months ago and during quarantine this past spring, they began working on an album together, due out early 2021, they have already released two singles, “Daddy” and “Baby You’re My Everything.” Both songs are gorgeous odes to man-on-man love and lust.

“Daddy” is a thumping, melodic rock song made for moving your body, while “Baby You’re My Everything” is slower in tempo and golden-toned — it’s made for smoking weed and cuddling with a lover. The music video for “Baby You’re My Everything” features Roddy and Joey in khakis and casual button-down shirts, meditatively wandering hand-in-hand in the desert. They eventually make it to a river where Roddy baptizes Joey by spitting in his mouth and then dipping him under the water.

Roddy has been creating music for decades. During the ’90s he was the keyboardist for the massively popular rock group Faith No More. Joey has been playing music for some time, but is newer to the industry. MAN ON MAN was born out of necessity. Both men had recently lost a parent, and their answer to the grief that was all around them was to get busy. The restrictions OF quarantine only fueled their creativity: “As queer people, we work well with parameters. The history of our culture is judgement and homophobia that we’ve had to work around for our whole lives.”

How did you two meet? …

Before the shutdown, Junior Mintt was one of the most booked and busy queens in the New York and Brooklyn drag scene. Junior likens her shows to “queer church” full of “confetti, balloon pops, laughter, costume reveals, comedy mixes, motivational speaking, political statements, great music, and above all respect!” We connected with Junior to discuss her love of candy, the beauty of Black trans power, and who she looks up to the most.

What’s the story behind Junior Mintt and her rise? I wouldn’t necessarily say there was a “rise” to Junior Mintt, I prefer to think she was with me from birth. Junior Mintt is the piece of me that kept me going and kept me seeing my own worth when I didn’t think I was worthy of love. Being trans you’re born into a world that reminds you everyday it isn’t meant for you, so growing up I internalized every hurtful thing that everyone would say. From being very overweight to my femme personality to being too nice, Junior Mintt was the voice in my head reminding me that just because I don’t fit in here doesn’t mean I don’t fit in anywhere. Junior Mintt was always there and always knew who I was, it’s just a matter of me getting to know her now.

Where does your name come from? My name outside of drag is Junior as well, and when I started drag, I knew I wanted to use my real name. I started off as Junior High, and then when I was rewatching the Seinfeld episode that’s all about Junior Mints, I remembered that growing up my mom would call me her little Junior Mint, and that was the moment when it clicked! …

Chiquitita, the artist formerly known as Juku, Juku for now and before that Harajuku, has been performing in the Brooklyn drag scene since she was 18 years old. Her recent rebirth as Chiquitita came about after co-starring in a transcendent performance of the Abba song of the same name with one of her favorite people, Charlene Incarnate. We asked one of our favorite people, drag performer Baby Love, to sit down with Chiquitita for a one-on-one conversation. The duo are good friends, and even host a podcast together, Shows BK. we had no doubt the conversation would get real deep, real quick.

So I’m here, reporting live for GAYLETTER from my living room. So formal.

I guess I don’t really know the full story about what’s going on with you and the magazine. They told me I had to do this or they would kill my family. I’m kidding. I’ll just say it. I love talking about myself. They asked if I was interested in doing a birth of Venus shoot, sort of in parallel to like the birth of me, because I just changed my drag name to Chiquitita after a year and a half of contemplating names. It is a rebirth in a way. I don’t know where it’s going to be in the issue, but I hope that it’s the cover because it’s really stunning.

Why did you change your name? I started doing drag when I was 14. I chose the name Harajuku when I was 14, 15. …

This autumn, Shamir released his seventh full-length release, Shamir. Our favorite countertenor has been taking his time to nurture his craft, game, and it-ness in Philly’s DIY scene. Since Hope and Revelations (both released in 2017), Shamir has released the full-length statement records Resolution (2018), Be the Yee, Here Comes the Haw (2019), and Cataclysm (2020). These document Shamir’s artistic growth from cutie caterpillar eco-nerd toward the winged pop star we encounter, cocoon-less, on Shamir. We love to see it. I spoke with the artist in the late summer about pop stardom and visibility, the butterfly, mental health, Scorpio, Capricorn, the Oracle Twins, and two pairs of twin moms. Peep our star-crossing conversation below.

I noticed you began to use the butterfly image during Revelations, and by now it’s really flourished and multiplied. What does the butterfly help you symbolize? It was always a natural thing. It’s weird, one of my closest friends lives in Ottawa, and there’s a moth outburst there. At first, we thought it was butterflies, but he actually did some research and talked to his neighbors, and it’s a moth outburst. They’re blind; they run into you and hit you, and that shit hurts, you know? Anyway, I told him, “moths are cousins of butterflies,” and then I sensed this tingle — this was literally yesterday — and I was brought back to another time in my life. At the beginning of middle school, that’s when I was an eco-nerd, I had three different fish tanks in my room. …

How did you become a wrestler? Before pro wrestling, I played baseball from little league through college. I was an NCAA Division I athlete at Seton Hall University. I wanted to play baseball professionally. Eventually it didn’t really work out there and I transferred over to Montclair State University where I continued to play baseball. And also I got a degree in TV and radio production. I’ve always been a pro wrestling fan. As a child, I was pretty shy. I was timid. I was very skinny. So, becoming one wasn’t really an option. I would have loved to, but I just didn’t know how. So, I played baseball. I fell in love with that, played that through college and then once I got to my final year, I started having pain in my elbow and I just kind of lost my love of the game and I stopped.

There was this time period for five to six hours [a day] that I was used to being on a baseball field, for the last 11 years, which I was having trouble filling. So I wanted to find something fulfilling that I could fill that time with — a lot of filling. [Laughs] Pro wrestling has always been my second love. It was my first love and then baseball kind of took over, but it kind of popped back up. I forgot which hurricane it was, but it delayed my friends from moving into their dorms and we were bored. …

How do you represent a person who is no longer here? How do you humanize someone who has already been dehumanized? George Floyd’s murder, along with so many others before and since, has become a lightning rod for this discussion. Should images of police brutality and its victims be circulated to demand systemic change by spreading awareness or do these images desensitize us to horrific violence, making a spectacle of Black death? Since the beginning of 2020, at least 40 transgender and gender-nonconforming people were fatally shot or killed by other violent means, the majority Black and Latinx transgender women. Representing these individuals has its own politics of optics; often the media uses the last photograph taken or whatever pictures their family allows for publication. But the memory of someone does not exist in a snapshot, or to be more clear, a photo is maybe best used more for rejogging the recollections of those who actually knew the person rather than providing real, substantial context for a life. Perhaps portraiture offers an opportunity to better render the complexity and the humanity of those whose lives ended tragically, but who were so much more than just victims.

Artist Anthony Peyton Young’s ongoing project Say Their Names memorializes Black lives through prismatic fragmented collaged portraits. His series started representing individuals taken by police brutality, but it’s since expanded to include all different Black lives, including transgender and gender-nonconforming people of color who have been the victims of hate crimes. While Anthony believes positive queer role models and images of transgender women as powerful, prosperous, and glamorous are important, he also demands we do not ignore the dark reality of the continuous violence against Black bodies. …

David Wojnarowicz had already lost so much to AIDS. But there was no bigger loss than Peter Hujar. So the day he lost Peter — November 26, 1987 — David asked their friends to leave the hospital room, to guard the door and not let the nurses in.

David got out his camera and took 23 photos, one for each pair of chromosomes in a human cell. He took a picture of Peter’s lifeless face, lips parted, eyes still wet; a picture of Peter’s open hand; a picture of Peter’s feet and toes. Like almost all of David’s photos, these 23 are black and white. We aren’t privy to Peter’s discolorations and wan skin, nor his pain and humiliation.

He wanted to offer some words in memory of his friend and mentor, his closest companion, but David — a poet prone to fiery, righteous rants — was speechless. “Nothing came from my mouth,” David wrote in his journal. “[A]ll I can do is raise my hands from my sides in helplessness and say, ‘All I want is some sort of grace.’ ”

After his own HIV diagnosis, in 1988, David would collage these photos into a painting, Untitled (Hujar Dead). Over the collage he printed a passionate paragraph condemning deathly homophobia and describing life with HIV: “I’m waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping amazonian blowdarts in ‘infected blood’ and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government healthcare officials.” It wouldn’t be the last time David threatened public officials. …