This is a gay book

Description

What is gay? Apparently nothing, apparently everything. Many of us grew up in a world where nothing was gay, only to later discover that, according to some, everything has now become too gay. In this way, Pepo Moreno’s drawings—acrylic on paper, rendered with a trembling line and saturated colors—depict food, celebrities, plants, drugs, animals, saints, politicians, feelings, dictators, and entities, all with bulging eyes and smiles frozen in time. They function as celebration, parody, and a statement on the so-called gay agenda said to corrupt the world. The gay agenda is gay. If everything is gay, then nothing is.

Gay existence itself, like the technique of these illustrations, cannot be learned. It is dissident, amoral, and free. The gay, like this book, is filled with strange icons, despair, mistakes, anarchy, fetishes, flamboyance, masculinity, onanism, unhealthy desire, self-loathing, love, and trash. All of that is also gay, and it is drawn with a childish, naïve line, because immaturity is gay—and, in a sense, all children are gay.

Consuming culture embodied in a physical object in the year 2022 is gay; paying for a book to see things that are freely available on Instagram is gay. But from now on, money is gay. And Pepo Moreno is too.