The Brooklyn Rail

The front studio at Kestrels in Gowanus transforms into a club. Red LED tubes illuminate the audience’s faces and gogo dancers’ asses. Sparkly dance music embraces us. On one wall, bearded faces contort gently while muscular forearms jerk off invisible dicks. Ian Lewandowski’s film installation loops; the dancers switch shifts. Wearing ripped fishnets, harnesses, and black boots, they gyrate in simulated pleasure. It’s giving something between a weeknight gay bar, a gallery, and a sex club hours before the action.

Brendan Drake and Matthew Bovee are already seated when we arrive in the back studio. They’re wearing thick spiked leather collars attached to thin silver chains, which are held—one in each hand like reins—by a slim masc domme sitting on the couch. The domme’s face is obscured by an opaque black hood. Drake stands. “Dad,” they say, pointing. Bovee nods. “Dad!” They take turns identifying dads in the audience, and mothers, and moms, and babies, and daddies, and mommies, and baby daddies, and daddy babies, and audience members are cackling and sort of hoping they get called something that they know they are, deep inside, and the litany stops.

The performers sit. They’re on a date. On Grindr. On Sniffies. They’re interrupting each other in an operatic exchange, asking to be kissed and slapped and manhandled, finishing each other’s sentences like an insistent chorus of pop-up ads on Pornhub. Through the cacophony of desires, they’re indicating a new depth to the phrase “hungry hole.” Something’s coming undone. The space goes dark and the domme pulls them in, chains clinking, and they crawl out the first door into the red.

The second door opens. Green light spills out. Ollie Iturrieta stands looking at a body in a bodybag, its head covered in a black hood. Daddy becomes body. They stay like this for a long time.

Something rises from the middle of the bag, creating what I guess you’d call a ghost boner. The bag opens like a cicada molting and Marcus Serjeant emerges into a frightening solo, lit by a flashlight and accompanied by the percussion of his own gravity. Wearing loose, belted jeans and a black turtleneck, the hooded figure crouches and leaps and extends, contorting into impossible released spirals of kinetic force: a haunting boyishness inscribing the dark space with sudden muscular effort.

The lights flare up. The other dancers reappear from the second door to join Serjeant’s ecstatic momentum. Still holding that pleasure-focused, internal gaze, Iturrieta, Nikkie Samreth, and Jace Weyant shake and preen to Stephen Sondheim mixed with Kim Petras. A second figure in a black hood and jockstrap crawls through the audience. As the dancers throw their bodies around with fearless abandon, I want to shout, “Who is the ghost?” As if revealing the ghost’s identity makes the specter less spectral. There is a haunting; that’s the point.

The dancers pace and pause, judder into languid turns and slap the air with their legs. Something vaguely communal is brewing here: an expressive orgy of subjectivities, an excess of limbs and organs; then, an exit. The green door opens again and a tall figure in a mechanic’s jumpsuit stands in the light, wearing the black hood.

Okay, it’s Drake. They kneel, peel off their black rubber gloves. They perform a luscious phrase, replete with floppy wrists, cascading momentum, frisky syncopation, and nice shapes, while Serjeant lies naked on the floor. Does recognition make a ghost less scary? If you know the ghost, if you’ve hooked up? Is there a difference between a jumpsuit and a bodybag, between one zipper and the other? Both go down to show a body underneath. Drake grabs the mic and we are plunged into darkness again.

This time, it’s a darkroom. Drake reprises the text at the beginning, but solo, whispered, making their way between implied bodies to get to a good spot for fucking. They’re coaxing and laughing, cursing as if dropping a condom on a dirty floor, groaning as if bending over for a gloved hand or a hard cock. I feel the thighs and torsos of leather-daddy ancestors brush past me, smelling the fragrant armpits of mascs I will never know. In this sonic conjuring, I imagine the AIDS crisis infiltrating New York’s clubs and dungeons and bars, killing an entire generation of queers. I consider the current erasure and defunding of the NIH and the CDC and feel history—a kiss of death—emerging into the present moment.

The groaning builds, and they cum, or at least yell really loudly. The lights reveal a third hooded figure on the couch. Drake climbs into their lap, kissing their ghost mouth and grinding on their crotch until the domme grabs their neck and forces them down. Serjeant crawls over to switch places and Drake does a series of what I guess I’d call dick calisthenics, doing a gymnastics pose to pop their cock out from between their legs. They open their mouth and three teeth clatter to the floor. They’ve come undone. A grand gesture of more than just queer failure, but literal bodily disintegration.

Drake ascends into a shoulder-stand, legs and arms suspended upward as if floating. Serjeant crawls backward from the domme’s lap, pulling yards and yards of white tulle over their naked body in a steady stream as if covering themself in ghost-cum. These images are hilarious and sobering: a way to say the unutterable. Through striking juxtaposition and blunt physicality, Ghost Porn touches the haunted places in the queer erotic imagination. This piece makes a tenuous glory hole for the phantoms of history to enter and remind us—they never left.