GAYLETTER

Any practice that aims to control who has access to information, such as banning or removing books from libraries and schools, has always been about delineating whose voices and ideas matter in this society. The objections to who and what readers have access to amounts to a fight over who we empathize and align ourselves with in this world. In this moment of rampantly rising attempts to challenge and ban books across the U.S., books that explicitly take on issues of sexuality, race, gender, or that explore multiple intersections of these identities, are typically the first to face backlash. These are often books that reflect back the feelings and experiences of the underrepresented. The vocal minority advocating for the removal of certain books from public life complain about unfiltered depictions of sex and sexuality (often labeled as “pornographic”), violence, matters of race or racism, even citing “death” as a topic that warrants censoring.

Books have a power that no other media has successfully replicated — they fully immerse you, the reader, alongside the consciousness of someone else. To engage with a story in print is to take it into your mind, to feel and think with the text, and it’s that realm of thoughts and experiences that can be the best bridge to understand someone else’s life, it’s the closest we may ever get to seeing the world through another’s eyes. And it’s exactly this ability to inhabit alternative selves, to empathize and connect, that makes these books targets for removal. …

San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair is the world’s largest celebration of BDSM and leather subcultures. It takes place on Folsom Street between 8th and 13th, in the San Francisco neighborhood named for being South of Market, SoMa. The first event was held in 1984 in part to protest the redevelopment of SoMa which supported a thriving LGBT community, including many leather bars. The event was also conceived as a fundraiser, the donations taken at the entrance gates going to local and national charity groups.

My Folsom project began when Visual AIDS, a nonprofit supporting HIV-positive artists, asked me to set up a pop-up photo booth at New York City’s Folsom Street East in 2015. It was enlightening. I met and photographed so many incredible fetish enthusiasts in their gear. That experience inspired me to keep photographing and to explore the other iterations of Folsom, Folsom Street East, and World Folsom in Berlin.

My adrenaline always starts pumping when I near the entrance to Folsom and see all the fetish enthusiasts pouring in alongside me. I love to witness the BDSM and leather communities out in broad daylight, smiling, laughing, and flogging. The camaraderie between spectators and strangers is infectious. From Barbie to gas mask fetishists, and a whole spectrum of exhibitionism in between, it’s all there, and that’s why I love Folsom so much. By documenting Folsom, I’ve been able to explore my number one fetish, photographing people embracing their deviant side. I’ll definitely be back next year with my cameras in tow. …

A calm self-confrontation allows artist Jordan Ramsey Ismaiel to wonder at their own paintings, “Who can I be for myself? How much support can I get from a relationship with me?” They see the work as a mirror reflecting possibility — a way of imagining subsistent selfhood. From the outside of this triangulation, the work might seem to reify the evergreen queer themes of self-plurality or the binary, or even notions of doubled life — twins, clones, doppelgängers. But it isn’t similitude or arrogance that drives the artist’s process, but a perennial pursuit of self-love and self-care, without the customary deprecation of a comedic apology.

The poses for his figures are mostly developed from memories with friends and family, recasting themself in the position of the loved one. Ismaiel begins by making photomontages using Photoshop — staging two selves in quick digitally-painted plans for landscapes or splashy patterned backgrounds of flowers blooming and blossoming. From high noon to half moon, Ismaiel’s landscapes are vast expanses in dreamy Technicolor — perhaps informed by their time spent in the Great Plains of Iowa and Nebraska. In effect, the portraits feel soft but powerful, like a much-needed warm hug.

“And the track plays again and again” (2021).

“Wasteland Love” (2021).

“These little bits of paradise” (2021).

“Let’s stop here for some time” (2021).

“Hold your breath while we walk through this corn maze” (2021).

“When the curtains close on this tragic act” (2020).

SWEATER AND PANTS BY INSERCH, JACKET BY LEVI’S. …

There are many ways to shut a lover up. You could, for instance, kiss them. But if you pine for drama, you might opt to plug the cosmic reach of their speech with that planet-shaped device called a ball gag — a sphere, typically made of rubber or silicone, kept in place with a strap that orbits the head of its wearer. Like many implements adopted by BDSM and fetish communities, the forebear of the ball gag is inextricably linked to several sordid, interwoven histories of torture, subjection, and animal “care.”

Deriving from the Old Norse adjective gag-háls, meaning “with head thrown back,” premodern iterations of the gag, or gag bit, were used by equestrians to hold up the sloping heads of horses from the insides of their mouths, as aid to teeth cleaning, balance lessons, showing off, and reining in. A more figurative usage of gag appears in the mid-16th century and refers to an implement used to suppress vocalization, as of a heretical Catholic or gossiping woman. Consider a 14th-century Scottish invention, the Scold’s Bridle, which encased the gossip’s head in an iron mask that came attached to a small metal disc to penetrate her open mouth. Early American lawmakers further perverted the use of the gag, expanding its speech-suppressing qualities to include unsurprisingly debased forms of civic disenfranchisement: a 1798 gag law curbed certain freedoms of the press; and the gag rule, instituted by the U.S. House of Representatives between 1836 and 1844, forbade the House from considering any petitions against slavery. …