Johnny Murdoc

On his blog, Big Shoe Diaries, Colby Keller wrote about Baltimore’s alternative currency, the BNote, and invited people to design their own Colby Buck.

If the idea of local currency excites you as much as it excites me, submit your own rendering of a Colby Buck (Naked) . . . or whatever you’d like to call Colby Cash . . . and I’ll exchange your bill for a DVD featuring me buck naked (as long as supplies last).

Always up for a design distraction, I spent a small part of my morning creating the above image and it’s Buck (Naked) alternate:

And here’s an animated .gif version that flips back and forth, for the hell of it.

The non-nude photo of Colby is by Greg Endries, and I’m not positive who the nude shot is by. I stole them both from the internet.

Because absolutely nobody asked for it, a picture of my workspace:

To the left of my computer is the Butt Calendar (of course.) Above, four prints by one of my favorite writer/artist/designers (there really aren’t that many of those), Brian Wood. To the right is a magnet board, where you can see posters and cards from Adrian Tomine, Erika Moen, Homo Riot; thank you notes from Patrick Fillion and the editors of Headmaster Magazine; a flyer that I designed for a friend’s going-away-part (I miss you Austen!); and various things I need to be reminded to do, like renew my license plates.

Right in front of the computer is a personalized coffee mug from Yellowstone National Park (thanks Mom!).

Here’s the bookshelf that covers the wall opposite to my desk:

The shelves were bought from Borders when they went out of business. They’re the one sad, silver lining to that cloud. If you look closely, you can still see the shelf marker that reads “Titles may contain mature content. Parental supervision advised.”

And the view from my office window:

If you look just past that telephone pole, you can see the Arch. I could say something goofy, like that the Arch is a constant anchor for St. Louisans, that you only have to look up to know where you are in the city, but the truth is that you really can’t see it from most places in the city. It is how you know you’re almost home when you’re coming in from the east.

If you check out the past few posts on my blog, you’ll probably notice a theme: I want you to support Travis Mathews. I can give you the grand reasons why I think you should (Mathews is capturing and sharing the intimate, honest stories of young gay men in a time of unprecedented attention on the gay rights movement), but really my motivations are entirely selfish: I want more Travis Mathews films. I want Travis to move to St. Louis and set up shop in my basement where he can create films just for me.

But I don’t think I can make that last part happen.

I can help him make more movies, though.

And I am:

And I did.

Now you need to.

Travis has two days left on his Kickstarter, and less than $800 $400 to raise. If he doesn’t raise it in time, he gets nothing. And you don’t get a new episode of In Their Room. That would be sad.

Do it.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, I recently had a chance to sit down with Travis Mathews and ask him a few questions about his work. By “sit down” I mean “email” of course.

For the past few years, your work—whether it be fiction or non-fiction—has focused on documenting the intimate lives of gay men. Why do you think that’s so important to do right now?

We’re living in an unprecedented time of flux, especially as gay men who are — in many cases — coming of age in a broadening world of social acceptance and with new technologies to connect us. I’m interested in what this means for intimacy among gay men and I’m interested in intimacy more generally speaking. In most cases gay intimacy and gay sex have been couched as something lacking of emotion, primarily hypermasculine, and hard. Or, it’s been coy and sweet and lacking of anything hot and all that sexual. I feel like we’ve advanced enough to start bringing something more integrated together that can be as flawed and messy as it is hot and playful.

We’re living in a very particular time that’s not quite sorted itself out. I’m thinking of the exponential rise in gay rights coupled with technology in particular. As early adopters, gay men have embraced new technologies as a way to connect, find love, sex, intimacy. But these are all new advances that are moving fast and furiously away from how we used to connect while pointing toward how we might in the future. It’s an in-between moment in time and in-between moments often say more about someone or a group than the past/future hugging either end. It’s where people are moving away from or toward something and what you choose to do there which is infinitely more interesting to me.

Now that you’ve had a few years of this under your belt, and you’ve started taking these films around the world and showing them to the public, what has the response been?

I think a lot of guys (and a surprising number of women) are hungry for representations that they can relate to which also feel 3-Dimensional. We very rarely see/hear men being vulnerable as a show of strength and humanity so guys are responding to that. That’s my goal and that’s what I hear largely. And I think people new to my work are surprised by how non-porny it is.

You’ve worked with different producers in your various projects, including NakedSword for you latest round of projects. What was it about doing a Kickstarter campaign that appealed to you for In Their Room – London?

Basically, I wanted to start owning — at least some of — my work and the time frame suggested that I’d have better luck with a 30 day Kickstarter campaign than I would hustling for private financing with such a short window of time. With three weeks left, this remains to be seen!

I’m wanting to go to London because the first preview screening of I Want Your Love is playing there on April 12. I’ve also been a self-diagnosed anglophile since high school so there’s a sweet excitement when thinking of London in general. Similar to how I went to Berlin for the Berlin Porn Festival in 2010, I want to make the I Want Your Love screening as an opportunity to do a new In Their Room episode.

This changing time I’m riffing on is just as relevant with means of production and distribution for artists. It’s a wild wild west of sorts and everyone is scrambling to figure out what gets viewers and dollars for new work. I’m certainly open and eager to work with producers but the chance to diversify ownership of my work feels smart and exciting right now.

The exploration of gay men’s stories has always been an interesting struggle. What started as independent endeavors that still had to be couched in the mores of the time. Over the past few decades that morphed into something corporate, where the public is served happy couples wearing sweaters and smiles while the in-group is served waxed and pampered sex objects. The reality, as you know, is a lot more complex. I think there’s more of a demand, within the culture, for realistic representations.

Do you think the proliferation of new media distribution technologies are making it easier to return to that independent nature, where more people can tell their stories the way they want to?

Of course! I don’t think there’s any debate, it’s happening. There’s a gazillion people — gay and otherwise — making their own media and starting to tell their own stories. Streaming video, people’s increasing willingness to sit in front of their computers to watch more than three minutes, and accessible production tools — like the Canon 5D — have really empowered people all over with the idea that they can tell their own stories. Representations of queer life are just going to be more numerous because of this. It’s a good thing.

 
Do you think that freedom is going to inspire people to share their real stories, or do you think we’ll continue to push forward the fantasies that we want to see, or that we want others to see?

It’s a both/and kind of scenario. People are going to tell stories that are deeply personal and affecting to micro-demographics and others are going to aim for glossy fantasies that reach the masses. What’s different from the past — and I think this can be said for all cultural trends — is that we’re sort of in a moment that’s “everything all of the time” where no one trend is dominant. Simon Reynolds book Retromania talks about this in a way that’s dead on, compelling, but a little despairing at times.
 

Your early documentary work focused on the body issues of gay men. What role do you think do you think those issues play in your newer work?

There’s a pretty clear throughline in my work that focuses on gay men talking about, showing, “doing”, braving and skirting around intimacy issues. If you look at my first documentary, Do I Look Fat?, it’s focusing on a group of gay men who are being quite brave and candid about vulnerable issues that have impacted the way they see themselves and their bodies, issues that have a great impact on their relatedness to other men. I’ve continued to do that with the In Their Room series and with I Want Your Love. I approach it from a different angle, but it’s all still under the same tent. As I started to make work that involved sex and naked bodies, I was clear from the start that these would be representations that — to the best of my ability — didn’t harm people with how unattainable and unrelatable they were. Just like with Do I Look Fat? my hope is that gay guys watching any of my recent work will have moments of “I feel that too” or “that’s happened to me” in a way that’s inclusive, comforting, while also entertaining.

If you had the chance to sit down with each and every one of your potential Kickstarter investors, what would you tell them?

I’d want them to know that while I love what I do, it’s more than my “interesting project”. There’s a lot of value in these video portraits and small stories of modern gay life that I’m telling. Ultimately, I think it’s important to the gay community in terms of creating representations that many gay men can relate to but also in terms of historical documentation of the zeitgeist.

I suppose everyone thinks that the moment they’re living in is special, but we are in an unprecedented moment where gay visibility/acceptance is coinciding with technological tools that have completely redressed the way gay men look for, find, and deal with connection, intimacy, loneliness. To me, we’re in a very in-between moment that’s going to look like a transitional time when we have the value of hindsight. And in-between moments are what I love capturing. Whether it’s an in-between moment during an afternoon, or an in-between moment in one’s life, or an in-between moment with an entire community’s growth, I think it’s a rich thing to witness, and an important moment to capture. These are the moments that are often edited out of films, but it’s really where the magic is to my eye.

Mathews is halfway through his Kickstarter campaign, and he’s still looking to raise another $6000. Check out his video and then dig deep into your pockets.

After wrapping up my Kindle Select experiment, my ebook Hard Lessons is available again at the Queer Young Cowboys shop again! This means you can buy it in three different formats now to fit your ebook-reading needs!

Hard Lessons collects the latest work by Johnny Murdoc, including his Best Gay Erotica 2011 contribution, “Bodies in Motion.” Each of the four stories in this collection were previously only available in some of the best erotica collections of the past few years, including Murdoc’s contribution to Headmaster Magazine.

In “Kick, Push,” a young banker crashes head first—literally—into the living embodiment of his former punk days and finds himself throwing caution to the wind once again. “Man, They Say Cutter’s Gay” tells the story of a young boxer-in-training who finds himself naked in the locker room with the gym’s boxing champion, a man he happens to be deeply in lust with. “Here There be Rebels,” continues the tale of Headmaster Magazine’s titular character as he finds a way to channel the raw masculinity of the student body into a relationship with Elliott, a young Applied Mechanics professor. And finally, in “Bodies in Motion,” a science teacher and the assistant coach find themselves redefining the jock/nerd experience as first-year teachers at their old high school.

That also means that the special “dirty cover” edition is available again! Head over to the store to see that one!

Almost two years ago, I posted this scan from a notebook where I’d started writing a story:

That story became a project, and that project had a lot of ups and downs, but today I’m pretty excited to show you this:

Expect an announcement soon.

As I mentioned in my first post about Amazon’s Kindle Select program, my enrollment in the service expires on March 10th. In use-it-or-lose-it mode, my ebook Hard Lessons is free through the 11th, and then it won’t be free again! On the plus side, it will be available for sale through more outlets and formats, including my own Queer Young Cowboys store!

If you want to read it for free, grab it today!

Everyone knows that I have a creator-crush on Travis Mathews, the director of In Their Room – San Francisco and I Want Your Love. I’ve written about the man and interviewed him about his various projects throughout the years, and I’m always eager to see what he’s working on next.

Turns out, he’s working on a new installment of his In Their Room series, this time in London, and he needs your help:

In Their Room (2009-present) is an on-going multi-city documentary series about gay men, bedrooms and intimacy. The series veers into the bedrooms of men where you see them doing everything from the most banal to the sometimes more erotic. Complimenting the revealing nature of their everyday activities are confessional interviews about fantasies, turn-ons and vulnerabilities.

The throughline of the series highlights the ways in which gay men in disparate cultures deal with connection, intimacy and loneliness in the modern world. In an age of accelerated gay acceptance and visibility, it’s shocking that many of these stories are being left undocumented. My inspiration for the series came largely out of such a frustration. If representations of my life -and that of my friends- were largely going unseen in the media I reasoned that I should be recording these stories before they were lost or forgotten. I do this as best I can focusing on what feels authentic, modern and uncensored.

Head over to his Kickstarter page and pledge a donation. Mathews is doing valuable work. He’s created more media that reflects my experiences and those of young gay men that I know than generations of gay media and culture that feel alien to me. Whether it’s his documentary work like In Their Room or his narrative fiction work like I Want Your Love, Mathews is getting at the emotional core of a new generation, and reflecting it back for everyone else to see.

(stills from In Their Room – Berlin and – San Francisco)

It’s a naked stormtrooper kind of day today.

The other day, Class Comics announced some of their upcoming projects, including All in a Night:

ALL IN A NIGHT #1

“The sound of Nico’s skateboard on asphalt used to sound like freedom. Tonight it sounds like fear. Nico thinks that he knows the alleyways well, and on a good night, he does. Tonight is not a good night.”

Nico and his friends are no strangers to the local cops. Their cat and mouse games of graffiti, vandalism and petty thievery are petty enough to warrant a slap on the wrist or occasional blow job. But things get out of hand when the lads decide to turn the tables and create a digital recording of the cops as they dole out their justice.

ALL IN A NIGHT #1 is a gritty urban drama created by Joseph Hawk, illustrator for The Initiation and creator of Long Road to the Sea, with Johnny Murdoc, writer of Crash Course. Working together, Hawk and Murdoc have forged a comic that blends rebellious youth, the law, hot sex and authentic danger.

All in a Night is an interesting project that I’m excited to be a part of. When we get closer to the release date, I’ll be sure to tell you guys more about it!

I spent most of yesterday morning designing this for Sex Positive St. Louis, the organization I co-founded:

And here’s the stormtrooper, sans helmet and PBR can:

(via Is Anyone Up, who I’m ethically opposed to, but I’ve already pointed out that I don’t masturbate intelligently.)

Have you bought anything from the Queer Young Cowboys shop lately?