Boy Parts(28)

The first draft of a reply is aggressive, accusatory, (My shirt was clean you flaccid rapist fuck), the second is too breezy (lol it’s cool chill out omg) and I settle on making him feel guilty, delaying gratification, twisting the knife. I think I’m going see if I can get the pic of him wanking in the photobook.

Okay! Hey it’s fine, don’t worry about it. Thanks for reassuring me. It’s really scary to black out like that, it’s all wrapped up in some childhood trauma stuff I don’t really want to get in to.

But yeah, the other night I went to fucking space mate so thank you for looking after me. Soz if it felt like I was being inconsiderate of your feelings, it honestly just didn’t cross my mind you’d feel that way about me. If it makes you feel better, I did just genuinely click with Henson, and I’m a little ??confused?? that you’d assume I was chatting him up to ‘fuck’ with you?? I also don’t appreciate being called ‘bitchy’ even if your feelings are hurt.

I really was just sleeping…

I had kind of a rough night, idk if you noticed haha.

Feel free to pass my number on to Henson.

No hard feelings?



The response is almost instant, as if he’d drafted it.

None at all! Sorry for all the psycho messages. Comedown and bruised ego. I passed your number on to the big man. He’s over the moon, glad you guys clicked! I hope we can still be friends. Honestly if I could delete stuff I already sent… I am such an idiot tbh, I wouldn’t fancy me either lmao!!!!



I roll my eyes and reply with a smiley face. I go back to my archive.

I loved my next project. I still love it. It’s this video/photography combo project called What would you do to be my Boyfriend? I screened the film at uni before Christmas and my tutor had this massive whinge about how the project was really exploitative, and how I’d put my safety at risk, and how she refused to mark it in case it encouraged me to do something like this again. I just asked to be moved tutorial groups. They put me with a good, unscrupulous male lecturer who gave me a distinction for my bold, risky work.

I spent the summer of 2010 picking up strange men, taking them back to halls, stripping them down to their underwear, and photographing them. I filmed and interviewed while I photographed, and asked them various probing questions about their personal lives, finishing on do you want to be my boyfriend? And what would you do to be my boyfriend? This is when I started experimenting with street scouting and photographing different kinds of beauty in my work. Less traditional models. No out-and-out monsters, mind, but some interesting faces, if you will.

The accompanying photobook I made is actually a really beautiful object. I had it printed and bound properly. I made five copies; four were on sale at the solo show for an obscene price (all of them went, and even after Anne’s cut I made about a grand) and one stayed with me. I have three or four photos per page, with the full interview transcript accompanying them; the DVD of the film is tucked into a sleeve at the back.

I flick through the photobook. While I did sneer when my original tutor said I’d put myself in danger to make this, things did get a bit dicey on a number of occasions. I rang building security three times, and on the third occasion, the security bloke came back up to my flat to tell me he wasn’t going to throw any more weirdos in their underwear out of the building for me.

I find the diciest bloke on pages 21–30. He was such a fucking serial killer. Credited here only as ‘Forbidden Planet’, named for the hunting ground where I acquired him.

Games Workshop, Travelling Man, miscellaneous indie comic shops, were all great for finding weird blokes, but I’d actually gone to Forbidden Planet that particular afternoon for personal reasons. I’d intended to pick up Kitty Media’s recent unrated Blu-ray/DVD combo release of Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend. They had it in stock, but behind a glass case, locked, like jewellery or something. I got a member of staff to grab it for me and ended up talking with him. Tall bloke, blond, very blond, hard bone structure, his face almost like a skull. With a little more weight and a box of dark hair dye he’d have been handsome, I think. But with that Children of the Corn aesthetic, you’d never give him anything past striking, and striking would be generous. He had a blue vein which ran from the corner of his mouth to his neck, like a fat drop of ink.

I remember licking the corner of my own mouth, chasing an imaginary vein with my tongue.

He raised his barely-there eyebrows at me, and said, ‘Huh, hardcore,’ when he passed me the DVD. It isn’t a good film, more of an interesting artefact. Urotsukidoji was one of the first anime to get an English language release, so there are lots of reports of parents renting the video for their kids, not realising it was super violent and full of fucking.

I remember him saying, ‘You do know what this is, right?’ I told him to get someone else if he couldn’t sell me tentacle porn without patronising me, and he apologised, and started making desperate conversation with me: do I like any other anime? Do I like other tentacle stuff? Am I into comics, etc., etc.; each answered with a shrug or a not really.

He followed me out of the shop. He really was sorry. Could he get me a coffee, to make up for it? I told him he could let me take his photograph.

Still no business cards, so I gave him the address of my halls. I found him outside the gate later the same day, grinning, like he thought he’d just stumbled into the meet cute bit of a rom-com that reviewers would describe as screwball and edgy. Being mistaken for a Manic Pixie Dream Girl has served me well over the years. I’d go out disguised in a non-threatening sundress and flat sandals, slouching and leaning heavily on my left hip, shrinking myself down to a less intimidating height. Drop a niche interest here, and a little sass there, and they eat me up, every single time.