About the Cover Image

Abstract

This issue's cover image: As part of the same AHRC-funded research project about gay male “pig” masculinities that led to the conference behind this special issue, I had the pleasure of working with an incredible film crew to produce a short experimental documentary titled Oink!. Having originally planned to shoot a feature-length documentary, the first COVID-19 lockdown was eventually announced to come into force one week after we had planned to start filming in Berlin. Adding to all the anxieties associated with a new, not fully-known, pandemic, we had to change our filming schedule and concept in order to respond to the virus. As such, a film that we had planned to film over a whole month and across a variety of locations, private and public, to document a gay male sex culture in which exchanges of bodily fluids have a core role, we were forced to condense filming into the last week before lockdown and to cut out all the plans to film in sex clubs and dark rooms. The film thus gained an unexpected layer of nostalgia for a very recent time when bodies had been able to touch and exchange fluids (once again) without fear. For the most part, the bodies in the film are alone in their private spaces, and intimacy and the intensity of sex becomes something that is only talked about, visually alluded to, but never shown. In that context, the photo in the cover of this issue, a production photo I took during filming, is somewhat charged with that very longing. It no longer just depicts a man looking for a hookup on a mobile phone app, but it also signals the painful desire for human contact—for touch, sex, and intimacy—at a time when public health measures were about to be put in place that would restrict the satisfaction of that important human need. I would like to thank Liz Rosenfeld, Rob Eagle, Rufai Ajala, and Liam Byrne for having gone through that journey with me. And special thanks to Giovanni, depicted in the cover image, for his hospitality and candor.