CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/7/2023

Pride Month Staff Pick: ‘Jack Pierson: Less and more’

Featured drawing (2020)—with its titular phrase in black marker—is reproduced from Jack Pierson: Less and more, a staff pick for Pride Month 2023. “I like to tell this story about where my obsession with stuff comes from,” Pierson writes. “During the height of the AIDS pandemic in New York, every night after the clubs along Second Avenue closed, there was an open market of people selling stuff on the street on bedspreads and blankets. I would be out night after night, after a club, maybe a little high, and looking at this stuff. You’d get to certain blankets and you could tell it was all of a piece. This was somebody’s stuff and clearly a gay person because there’d be this stack of little physique magazines, an ashtray from Capri, or there’d be a particularly good Hawaiian shirt. At the time, I thought to myself, because also I’m super square, ‘This is all stolen. I shouldn’t really buy it, but the porno magazines are only twenty-five cents and they’re five dollars at Physique Memorabilia. I’ll take these.’ I’d look at it and I’d think, ‘Oh my God, this gay life is so … something.’ Then it finally dawned on me. They weren’t stolen, this was all stuff scavenged from garbage cans of gay guys dying of AIDS. And I realized I could easily be one of them. That loosened me up. I’d come to New York with the idea that I was like Jean-Michel Basquiat and would be riding on the Concorde with Grace Jones. But these objects made me think, ‘Who the fuck am I? This isn’t going to happen for me and I’ll probably be dead before it does.’ Something about knowing that just made me want to leave a trace.”