GAY THOUGHTS
Pepo Moreno
Parip\u00e9 Books, 2025<\/p>\n
Pepo Moreno\u2019s\u00a0GAY THOUGHTS opens with a scribbled bookplate: \u201cTHIS BOOK BELONGS TO __________,\u201d followed by \u201cAND ITS\u201d crossed out and replaced with \u201cA PANSY OBVIOUSLY.\u201d Then, later in the front matter: \u201cSLUT.\u201d All before the introduction.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ca mock and a celebration of gay stereotypes\u201d expressed in playful visuals that trick readers into earnestness. The shallow reading of GAY THOUGHTS might mistake Moreno\u2019s use of gay lifestyle tropes and internet vernacular (such as \u201cI AM HOMIE SEXUAL\u201d and \u201cPOWER BOTTOM AUTUMN\u201d) as the book\u2019s content\u2014but these are the medium, not the message. Ferrer dubs these phrases, which are chopped and screwed into a collage of bitterness and sincerity, as \u201cfalsely superficial.\u201d 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\u2014a collective consciousness\u2014the resultant ensemble of voices is not the Gay Men\u2019s Chorus singing Broadway standards in harmony, but the thorny chatter of parasocial infighting, backhanded compliments lobbed across a Hell\u2019s Kitchen dance floor.<\/p>\n
Moreno\u2019s previous art book,\u00a0THIS 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, \u201cBJ\u00d6RK\u2019S SWAN DRESS IS GAY,\u201d the text disjointed by an impastoed portrait of the singer on the red carpet. THIS IS A GAY BOOK labels\u2014outs?\u2014with confidence, without consequence.<\/p>\n
By contrast,\u00a0GAY 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 \u201cSAFE SPACES DON\u2019T EXIST I GUESS.\u201d 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 \u201cgay urges\u201d: \u201cBURNING EVERYTHING AND MOVE HAVING THIS BOOK\u201d; \u201cTAKING A MIRROR SELFIE AFTER THE GYM\u201d; \u201cBUYING EXPENSIVE COFFEE\u201d; \u201cDYEING YOUR HAIR AFTER A MINOR INCONVENIENCE.\u201d By his last adage, Moreno\u2019s pen is skipping\u2014out of ink and so out of energy in regurgitating clich\u00e9s based, embarrassingly, in truth.<\/p>\n
Psychodynamics manifest in the subtle intentionality of Moreno\u2019s longhand, or the drama of its error\u2014scribbled, 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 \u201cBORN. GROW. POWER BOTTOM. DIE\u201d\u2014with pen strokes so skinny the words shrink from themselves\u2014imply reticence, even shame; it is nothing like one bold and self-assuredly wide-spaced earlier page, \u201cDON\u2019T DISTURB I\u2019M GAY CRYING,\u201d ink-blotched to evidence emotion. Up to the very end (\u201cTHANKS FOR GETTING TO THE END DIVA\u201d), modulations in pressure follow no traceable linear development. Rather, these mood swings seem to be guided by an erratic logic of \u201cgay panic,\u201d in both the archaic psychiatric denotation (non-functionality due to unrealized \u201cgay urges\u201d) and its common meme-ified sense (\u201cyearning\u201d for internet crushes and cartoon characters, which Moreno also does).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"GAY THOUGHTSPepo MorenoParip\u00e9 Books, 2025 Pepo Moreno\u2019s\u00a0GAY THOUGHTS opens with a scribbled bookplate: \u201cTHIS BOOK BELONGS TO __________,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320919,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[2606,116226,116225,90509,7793,3444,116228,116229,8271,2766,20905,77,4072,3063,269,116230,116227,31103,32519,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-320918","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-art-books","10":"tag-art-critic","11":"tag-art-reviews","12":"tag-artists","13":"tag-books","14":"tag-brooklyn-art","15":"tag-brooklyn-culture","16":"tag-contemporary-art","17":"tag-culture","18":"tag-dance","19":"tag-entertainment","20":"tag-fiction","21":"tag-film","22":"tag-music","23":"tag-new-york-art-scene","24":"tag-phong-bui","25":"tag-poetry","26":"tag-theater","27":"tag-uk","28":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114978505975450178","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}