NAYLAND BLAKE

INTERVIEW BY JESSE PEARSON
PHOTO BY RICHARD KERN Styling Assistance by Annette Lamothe-Ramos, grooming by Shane Tison This guy right here is an artist and a professor and a bear and a pipe man and an S&M switch and—what in hell does all that mean? We don’t know. Let’s talk to him and find out. Vice: You were telling me that you’re about to go away for a very special weekend…

Nayland Blake: Does it have a name? That sounds kind of Eyes Wide Shut-ish. Ah, so you don’t want to get kicked off the list for next year. OK, then let’s talk about these photos that Kern took of you. For example, the garbage-man shot. You actually have a garbage-man fetish. All of the gear in that photo is your own, and it’s all authentic New York Department of Sanitation stuff. Why do you like to dress up as a trash collector? And these events you go to are full of people who are into playing with identity. A lot of people have wondered that. David Lynch comes to mind. I fear that behind all those closed doors, the ones where you wonder what kind of crazy shit is going on, there’s actually nothing going on. I feel like sexual self-repression is a big thing for a lot of Americans. I used to wait for the bus outside of this place in the meatpacking district. It was called the Hellfire Club. I think it was also called the Manhole. There were two signs there. Anyway, it’s gone now. That makes me sad. I liked the fact that that place even existed.
laughs You told me before that you’re a “pipe man.” What’s that? And how does that work? Do they get burned? There’s a big trust thing inherent in all of this stuff. Right. When you’re 20, fucking is plenty. At 30, you have to start getting weird. A lot of people with more traditional values would say that S&M is perverted or unnecessary, but I’ve always suspected that maybe you guys are just evolved beyond the rest of us. There’s some kind of deep self-honesty that comes along with getting into kinky shit. You guys are psychologically advanced! laughs Are there really safe words or is that an urban legend? Do you have one? Right, unless your deal is rape role-playing or something. We’re not great communicators. I guess in a lot of traditional relationships, there can be a lack of a certain kind of talk. Is there a flipside to that? Are there people about whom everyone says, “Listen, if you want to get tied up real fucking good, you have to meet this guy Joe”? It’s like how you need a special license to drive an 18-wheeler. Do you think people who aren’t getting into all this stuff are missing out on something? Or are some people only meant to do in-out, in-out, drop-a-load-and-call-it-a-day sex. Can it get constricting or limiting? Tell me more about your garbage-man thing. But still, it’s also sexually gratifying for you to dress up in the garbage-man gear. Isn’t it hard not to start cracking up when you’re role playing? So you’ll just have characters to portray and go from there? Like what? Give me a specific scenario and make it dirty. Ouch. And the ultimate goal is to service whatever psychological thing you want to satisfy. Like the garbage man in relation to the class situation in which you grew up. But there was also an endurance thing for you. What were they feeding you? Good one.
What were your first experiences with going beyond one-on-one straight-up sex? What about S&M? How did you learn about all that? Drummer What’s that? When you were going to the theaters at 42nd Street when you were young, were you already intellectualizing sex?
A lot of art films that included graphic sex had no other outlet but those places. I guess it’s a function of just being in New York City, but it doesn’t surprise me that the communities of so-called perverts and artists overlapped a lot.
Let’s hear it.
I like that way of looking at it.
It seems like this impulse is nowhere in the art world right now. Nobody is carrying on that tradition and I don’t know why. I had a really good theory about it a second ago, but I forgot it.
Shit, so there are no ideas in the art world right now?
And now, everything can be seen on the internet a couple of minutes after it happens. It’s the same thing with music. It’s way easier to be a poser and a dilettante with the internet as a research tool for more effective bullshitting.
Sometimes I wish the internet would die and we could just use the phone and the mail and zines and mixtapes again. Maybe that means I’m getting old.
That’s awesome. Nowadays if there isn’t a photo of something on Flickr, it’s like it never existed.
OK, so you’re an S&M switch, you’re a pipe man, you do the garbage-man thing… are you a bear too? I mean, what else are you? I would imagine that, after living in the queer world for so long, admitting that you’ve been sleeping with women could be just as scary as coming out for the first time years ago.
And then they became such a dominant thing—a bear world of their own. It’s similar to the way a lot of alternate cultures organize themselves, and it’s a fucking bummer. What starts as a refuge for weirdos becomes just another set of rules. The misfit kids from high school move to New York or San Francisco or wherever so that they can be among people they can have fun with, but then they create their own microcosms of the shitty world that marginalized them. It makes me want to puke.