Lights. Camera. Action.

This newsletter is celebrating sexual diversity, differing desires, relationship structures, 
and individual choices based on consent. Sexuality is an important part of being human.

Have a horny day.

A Christmas Coming Out Classic

The privilege of coming out on my own terms was taken from me at the age of 9.

I was in grade four. A very campy child from day one. I did not know oppression at home so I took this wondering boppy energy with me everywhere. My parents were coming off the earthy hippie generation - meaning I was very familiar with two things; brown thin corduroy and the health food store. They encouraged the person inside of me to explore freely - and I painted outside the lines any time I could. I often fought my sister for dresses in the playbox.

The outside world felt differently about my brand of joy. When a classmate informed me in front of a group of 9 year old boys that he was forbidden to play with me because his dad said I was a faggot. That was the exact moment I expanded my vocabulary; my classmates learned I was gay - and shockingly so did I. 

Later that day my mother also learned her 9 year old son was now the much talked about Mount Slaven Public School homosexual child of the early 90’s. To clarify my mother would tell me she knew I was gay from the get go; this was during my one night only performative “coming out” show for my mother when I was 18.

I decided the best time to tell her was on Christmas Eve - at the end of her 60 minute break she gave herself between vacuuming, cleaning, wrapping, cooking all day - and before welcoming a house full and hosting the family Christmas Eve yearly celebration. Everyone was in peak delirious holiday exhaustion and Christmas was minutes from starting. It was A+ timing from a drama perspective - take notes screenwriters - drama is merely uncontrolled intense energy meeting optimal timing. 

I asked my mother not to tell my father. She told him the next day.

Nothing was said for a complete year.

My father decided that if I was not going to do a holiday revival of my previous Christmas Coming Out performance then he would ask me while driving me home from University the following Christmas. We were speeding down the highway in our 1996 90’s grey Ford Aerostar - the van slowly being eaten away by rust on the back left panel. Mariah Carey’s Christmas song playing mercilessly on the radio. Snow blowing across the highway. I remember he turned to me and said “Do you have a boyfriend?”

I remember looking out the window in panic. The seatbelt felt like it was getting tighter. The sharp polyester felt like it was cutting my throat. The yellow lines on the road seemed to speed up and began blurring. It was hard to swallow, my throat was so dry. I could hear the GULP echoing inside me. For one moment I questioned my options. Would I die if I opened the old van door and let myself roll out across Ontario Highway 400 North? - and was that the better option out of responding? In quick reflection I had new limited edition Nike Air’s on and I was worried they would be damaged. 

Coming out stories are often one of my favourite to hear - They are our war stories. They are our pain; our triumph; our celebration and our protest - and it’s never too late to be who you are. Understanding the privilege of a safe time and space in which to do it on your own terms. And know most of all coming out to yourself is one of the greatest forms of self love you can do. The belief that you deserve to be you in all that you are. 

Two things I also took away from my dramatic coming out years of 9 is the joy of brown thin corduroy and gaudaur’s health food store. 

Love you.

Christopher Sherman (He/Him)
Instagram:@christophersherman_photo

NEW INSTAGRAM (deleted for a third time) @christophersherman_photo

FAVOURITE HORNY ART | ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE
Written by Mone Tamagawa

Robert Mapplethorpe's photos make me horny. My story is about how I realized about my sexuality through art.

When I was a kid I was alone at home most of the time because my mom was working and it was just the two of us, so when I was bored I would browse through her bookshelf. 

She has always been into art so there were lots of art books around the house and some of them were not really for kids and one day I stumbled into a Robert Mapplethorpe's photography book. There was a certain charm that drew me into the pictures that made me realized I was sexually attracted to his perspective of masculinity.

As I got the chance to write about this, revisiting Mapplethorpe’s images through the internet I realized that my sexual awakening was related to the idea of extreme masculinity but years after and though my experience in Canada and queer culture, I realized that my sexual attraction is not just about the general idea of men but to people in which I can find my own concept of what the masculine ideal is for me.

One of the strongest experiences that leads me into doubting what I thought about the idea of masculinity was in fact, meeting and talking with people who identity themselves not inside the gender binary concept that society have, and also people inside other sexual minority groups. Becoming friends and having different types of relationships, making the effort to try to understand and supporting each other’s in our daily situations made me reconsidered what my thoughts of sexual attraction was linked to “that masculine” were.

I am still in my journey into educating myself and searching to know myself better and what makes me sexually attracted as I have discovered a whole new world since leaving Japan.

Inside where I came from there is not much sexual diversity compared to Canada. It is still very hidden and not openly talked about, which didn’t allowed me to experience this kind of second sexual awakening until I came here, as there was also no references to see myself in my daily life or culture.

But this is just the beginning of my journey.

Mone Tamagawa (He/They)
@mne.jpg

EDITORS NOTE: The audio is from a raw interview of Robert Mapplethorpe speaking about the public reaction to his famous X,Y, and Z Portfolios (published in 1978, 1978 and 1981). The music sample is Patrick Cowley.

FAVOURITE HORNY ARCHITECTURE
Written by Miles Gertler

The Horny Desire to See

The built environment materializes by nature. Working in service of mainstream norms, architecture crystallizes broad fears and desires through deference and resistance to the codes and bylaws, client briefs, and the less articulated forces of preference and taste that altogether conspire to produce the milieu we inhabit. It’s for this reason that architecture is suited too, to enable the voyeuristic impulse to see, and host the counterpart performance, peacocking, and presentation of oneself for seeing.

Unsurprisingly, city-building has historically privileged the desires of those with power, but those who wish to live in less normative environments have often materialized their own within structures that originate in the mainstream.

Gay bars established in Toronto in the 1960s and 70s worked this way in service of a radical hedonism. In his memoirs, Rick Bébout, writer and longtime contributor to The Body Politic, points out that certain liquor laws aimed at the reduction of vice in cocktail lounges, beer halls, and other “notorious homo hangouts” were regularly instrumentalized in service of cruising and the horny desire to see. 

“Even the ambience of The Parkside’s male-only tap room was established in law: there was ‘not to be any obstruction preventing a full view of the entire room by anyone therein,’” writes Bébout, noting that the openness intended to enable a controlling supervision “amply abetted another vice: cruising.” Open, unobstructed views in gay beer halls allowed for an immediate audit of the bodies in the room, especially visible as they got up to make their way to the bathroom in establishments that, for a time, strictly enforced seated parties. 

Ontario’s early liquor licensing laws segregated spaces of consumption by gender from the 1940s into the 70s, allowing gay-coded bars to shelter queer gatherings under the guise of compliance. Architectural shifts in level would often designate the boundary between a beer hall and a cocktail lounge and draw the line between mixed gender and male-only spaces. Seemingly arbitrary shifts in level still characterize the interiors of Toronto’s gay bars today, where a step or two lift a curious viewer to a clear vantage, and where basement bathrooms still host intimate encounters. One enters both Crews and Woody’s having first taken a few small steps off the street—one giant leap for mankind—into another realm altogether. Inside, vision takes sensorial priority in service of a casual intelligence gathering, clocking bodies in the room as they dance, drink, and kiki. It’s a scopophilic accounting assisted by shifts in level and the accidental raumplan of the club.

Raumplan is the spatial concept developed by early modernist architect Adolf Loos which describes the sequential organization of rooms of varying scale in a progression of stepped levels. Often in his own work, split walls, columns, and portals framed deliberate views from one space to the next. In her 1992 text The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina elaborated the theatre box as a model for raumplan’s inclination to focus vision from one space to the next. She famously identifies sequences in two of Loos’s Villas (Haus Moller, built in Vienna in 1928, and Villa Müller, built in Prague in 1930) as tools in service of visual intimacy and patriarchal surveillance over the home.

In a recent cabin designed by my studio, Common Accounts, we use shifts in the floor level to stage the queer body. Don't Let Me Be Lonely (South Algonquin Township, Ontario, 2021) is a satellite building in orbit of a larger cottage nearby. In staking out a domestic space apart from the main house where the larger family group gathers, it shelters the queering of leisure for its inhabitants. The gay throuple that often stays there is not the cabin's only occupants—a rotating cast of guests, friends, and family of the clients come and go—but they are a group that we designed for with great care as their needs were distinct from those of the other family members in heteronormative relationships who were comfortably accommodated in the existing building. Our approach resulted in a continuous interior organized across many stepping levels. In approximating the site's slope below, this floor offers platforms the staging and presentation of the body and the activity it engages in. The bed is like a thrust stage at the centre of the north half of the building, projecting outward from the steps that flank it on both sides.

This is about more than simple fetishization, though. Platforming desire is only one dimension of the building's effect. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely seeks to elaborate the sociality inherent to a relationship of three people and finds an architectural idiom to support and nurture it. The various levels of the floor designate zones for separate and simultaneous use and the two beds—one large, one small—that punctuate the cabin's two poles put the inhabitants at the centre of it all. 

Miles Gertler
@milesgertler

Song: Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight. James Taylor.

FAVOURITE HORNY SONG | BREATHE ON ME. BRITNEY SPEARS.
Written by Jon Ali

Brtiney Spears’ “Breathe On Me” will forever be the song that sparks a sense of horiness and sensuality out of me -- and not just for it’s obvious metaphor to sex, but for it’s overall meaning at the time.

By the time we hit 2003, the pop princess wasn’t just tip-toeing around her womanhood anymore: Britney was a full-on liberated goddess and master in the art of seduction - genuinely pushing forward without fear and fully in control of her mind, body and soul. Her fourth studio album, In The Zone, was a true showcase of her sexual awakening, and at its center was the throbbing euphoria of “Breathe On Me,” encouraging us to whisper, blow and moan our sexual desires.

The line “Boy, don’t stop ’cause I’m halfway there…” over a pulsating dance beat is revolutionary to me now just as much as it was when I was just 13.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Britney even throws in an Old Hollywood reference in the bridge (“Monogamy is the way to go / Just put your lips together…and blow“), a take on Lauren Bacall‘s infamous innuendo from 1944’s To Have And Have Not: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and…blow.”

And from there, the song just builds and builds until it reaches it’s exhilarating finish. Like actual sex, the song teases you from the jump, providing gentle touches and kisses along the way until you reach your climax. It’s sex in song form, encouraging you to be insync with a sexual partner to reach that final blow - which is ultimately the point right? 

Yeah, it’s the kind of song I’d put on if I’d really want to make a boy fuck me good. If you’re lucky enough, I will put this one on and give you quite a show. Just breathe on and try me ;)

Jon Ali (He / They)
@Jon_ali

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Made in Toronto. Canada. Recognizing the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples.