The Brooklyn Rail

Pepo Moreno’s GAY THOUGHTS opens with a scribbled bookplate: “THIS BOOK BELONGS TO __________,” followed by “AND ITS” crossed out and replaced with “A PANSY OBVIOUSLY.” Then, later in the front matter: “SLUT.” All before the introduction.

Moreno wants to tease the reader. The Spanish-born painter has made a career of what editor and novelist Vicente Ferrer calls in his introduction “a mock and a celebration of gay stereotypes” expressed in playful visuals that trick readers into earnestness. The shallow reading of GAY THOUGHTS might mistake Moreno’s use of gay lifestyle tropes and internet vernacular (such as “I AM HOMIE SEXUAL” and “POWER BOTTOM AUTUMN”) as the book’s content—but these are the medium, not the message. Ferrer dubs these phrases, which are chopped and screwed into a collage of bitterness and sincerity, as “falsely superficial.” Millennial tenderqueer adspeak, or BuzzFeed Dada: this is the only vocabulary to stage the specific and eternal tensions between and within gay men. Approaching GAY THOUGHTS as a polyvocal text—a collective consciousness—the resultant ensemble of voices is not the Gay Men’s Chorus singing Broadway standards in harmony, but the thorny chatter of parasocial infighting, backhanded compliments lobbed across a Hell’s Kitchen dance floor.

Moreno’s previous art book, THIS IS A GAY BOOK, considers what exactly unites a gay community wherein the ties that bind are often arbitrary. Constituted of hand-painted memes, the earlier book haphazardly classifies: one page reads, “BJÖRK’S SWAN DRESS IS GAY,” the text disjointed by an impastoed portrait of the singer on the red carpet. THIS IS A GAY BOOK labels—outs?—with confidence, without consequence.

By contrast, GAY THOUGHTS operates with uncertainty toward any culturally-prescribed way of life and claims no single gay doctrine. Austere, it is mostly text, with each page a print of an original hand-inked phrase. The few intermittent doodles that do appear are morose and grayscale: a smiling face pocked with black tears, captioned “SAFE SPACES DON’T EXIST I GUESS.” These are psalms of desire, a sometimes illuminated manuscript dictated by the homosexual id and divinely inspired by dovetailing forces of rainbow capitalism and third-wave gay liberationism. Four consecutive pages each proclaim a series of “gay urges”: “BURNING EVERYTHING AND MOVE HAVING THIS BOOK”; “TAKING A MIRROR SELFIE AFTER THE GYM”; “BUYING EXPENSIVE COFFEE”; “DYEING YOUR HAIR AFTER A MINOR INCONVENIENCE.” By his last adage, Moreno’s pen is skipping—out of ink and so out of energy in regurgitating clichés based, embarrassingly, in truth.

Psychodynamics manifest in the subtle intentionality of Moreno’s longhand, or the drama of its error—scribbled, crossed out, almost-obscured false-starts and Freudian slips. One must approach each page not just semantically but compositionally and graphologically; an almost paranoid attention to slant, pressure, and word and line spacing is required in parsing each quippy maxim, playing dumb to closet its profundity. Outed, with effort, is a multitude of linework open to interpretive possibility. The ambling slant and light pressure of “BORN. GROW. POWER BOTTOM. DIE”—with pen strokes so skinny the words shrink from themselves—imply reticence, even shame; it is nothing like one bold and self-assuredly wide-spaced earlier page, “DON’T DISTURB I’M GAY CRYING,” ink-blotched to evidence emotion. Up to the very end (“THANKS FOR GETTING TO THE END DIVA”), modulations in pressure follow no traceable linear development. Rather, these mood swings seem to be guided by an erratic logic of “gay panic,” in both the archaic psychiatric denotation (non-functionality due to unrealized “gay urges”) and its common meme-ified sense (“yearning” for internet crushes and cartoon characters, which Moreno also does).

While most of Moreno’s thoughts picture as black ink against the white mindscape of the page, at several intervals the inverse inserts itself—white text on a black page, full-bleed. Tonally—both in terms of color and written mood—these thoughts are darker than their white-backed counterparts. In the realm of psychology, the recurring variation of these white-on-black single pages serve as Moreno’s articulation of the gay community’s collective shadow.

To place articulated voices of contemporary (uncloseted, commodified) gay discourse against their underlying rejected or unconscious affective network is an exercise in Jungian integration. Drenched in acid, a white-backed aphorism reads, “SOMEONE HAS TO SAY IT: YOU PASSED THE AGE OF BEING A TWINK.” Later, the anxious Shadow trails this faux-bravado: “I REALLY DON’T MISS CLUBS. I MISS COLLAGEN.” Fear of aging and the assumed consequent swan dive in physical appeal (the much-dreaded “twink death”) among gay men, gone unacknowledged, is projected onto the invented “YOU.” The shadow, here, is a compulsive superficiality inherent in a sexual marketplace supposedly built upon youth-worship and the primacy of beauty.

While there’s no universal “gay lifestyle,” queer creatives like Moreno still won’t typically chart their lives with the mythological signposts of heteronormative maturation: financial security, upward mobility, avowed monogamy, and child-rearing. “IF PETS ARE THE NEW BABI BABIES, AND PLANTS ARE THE NEW PETS, WTF IS NEXT? I AM SCARED,” reads one thought; inked anxious white on black, its shadow is a line graph measuring a proportional increase in age (after thirty) and “NUMBER OF CHIHUAHUAS.” Overmuch populated by the yipping designer dogs of moneyed and solipsistic muscle gays, the world of the GAY THOUGHTS closes on the note of financial anxiety: it’s final spread, “AT LEAST CRYING IS STILL FREE,” “ALIENS, IT’S TIME TO TAKE OVER. THANKS.” If it seems expensive to be gay it’s because the “gay lifestyle,” once discreet, has gone public. When Moreno confidently balks at others for living outside their means—“the gay urge” to buy text-based art books—it’s only because, in the unacknowledged conscious processes, he shares a disinterest in or misunderstanding of a system that wasn’t made with him in mind, but finds him increasingly profitable. The Shadow concedes: “OK, FOR REAL, WTH WHAT EXACTLY ARE BITCOINS?”

The consolidation of conscious and unconscious mental processes, a sort of group therapy for the many bickering voices of GAY THOUGHTS, is not Moreno’s only prescription. With the endearingly gimmicky “portable gloryhole” on the book’s back cover, Moreno says to get out of your head—maybe, by getting some. As the plain fact of the body contains the vast mind, so too does the cheeky suggestion of sexual physicality bookend Moreno’s scattered thoughts; and when intra-communal gay solidarity seems impossible, carnal fellowship is one lasting tactic of conflict resolution. If there is such a thing as a “gay thought,” it would be just like this—sometimes annoying, yes, but often funny; spacey and genius in equal parts; and, in the end, embodied.