Cruising for a Feeling

G: “What do you take pictures of?”

J: “Something. Anything. Anyone that takes me to the feeling.”

G: “What feeling?”

J: “The feeling of not hiding. The hiding, it doesn’t make it go

away.”

LOG ON:

It begins with craving.

Ruled by desire.

Fear of being seen.

At any moment. Every moment.

Awareness, I am made by it,

trained to conceal.

Secret observations.

Discreet walking.

Don’t look too long.

Don’t make it obvious.

Don’t not look -

because that’s just weird.

I felt a photograph.

A practical, regular, everyday kind of photograph.

Clothing - sluggish, disobedient to mother’s march.

Then: seeing.

Briefs and boxers - erect fabric columns.

Decapitated torsos of Olympic proportion.

Furrows and grooves, smooth warrior limbs,

crisp white, full and round.

Blood rushed.

Like a switch gone off,

vision turned on.

Alarm.

Tightly cropped, tighter cupped.

Sightless images staring back.

Row after row.

One after another.

Flash.

Hands on the surface.

Fingers grazing.

The exterior: smooth, dry, hard, cold.

The interior: soft, textured, pliant.

Comfort. Immerse. Retreat. Change.

Fear of being seen.

Keep watching.

It haunts adolescence.

We act our way through it

perform for them, for him, for her.

This was my experience,

and it was his,

and now it’s theirs.

I am a performance.

A truth set within lies.

The carvings on the face,

the length of the body,

the roundness of freedom.

The image is transport.

Transport to a place where rapture

spills, unrolls, pools, coalesces.

The body is real.

Flesh with hair and fat and muscle.

Youth and age.

Love and lust.

Spit and piss.

It is given and revered.

Snapped, saved, shared.

Time moves forward.

Bodies repeat, multiply.

Same again.

And again

Show me more.

Less is more,

never enough.

I create, I show, I endure.

The thickness of the thoughts

grows as I look, as we imagine.

We imagine the touch.

We imagine the sex.

We imagine the life.

The Word of Gay is visual.

It speaks to us through the image of man.

The blood and the rush.

The image of Gay is persecutor and liberator.

Feeling locks in.

Looking for now.

Right now.

The photographs are mine

and they came from us,

snapper and snapped.

Connect.

Liberated prey

cattle not meant for slaughter.

Gesture.

The print holds it.

It looks back.

Recognition sparks.

The body concedes

gives back, comes out.

I look to feel.

I take to move.

Animated by making.

Usurping ubiquity,

shaping frames that reveal.

If the feeling doesn’t come,

then neither can I.

Only when I feel

am I seen.

Found.

LOG OUT.