Body and Soul
All about Highways' gay performance-art orgy
BY MATT FALBER
SEX TAPES, controversial nudity, and masturbation with cucumbers—no, it's not the next Jerry Springer Show. Those are subjects that will be explored by award-winning gay performance artists in a show of daring solo performances called Gay Bodies! Gay Souls! Frontiers was able to catch up with organizer and performer Ian MacKinnon to get the inside scoop on the show.

ON STAGE
FRONTIERS: There are five original pieces
in the show; yours is about Zeus and
Ganymede. Is it about the pursuit of
youth?
IAN: It's more the awakening of
the gay soul. I see the myth as symbolic,
rather than man-and-boy love or something
like that. It's symbolic of the gay desire that
awakens inside of us. Zeus takes the form of
an eagle and swoops down, and to me it's sym-
bolic of gay desire—the first time I saw a man
and got turned on or fell in love with him or
wanted to fuck him. The power of gay soul
emerging, and you're swooped up out of the
hetero world. It's symbolic of this awakening or
coming out.
What made you choose this myth?
I felt like it wasn't told enough. It's just intrinsi-
cally meaningful. Initially, I was going to
weave in a bunch of myths like the epic of
Gilgamesh. It was all getting very heady, so I
decided to just stick with one.
You say the myth isn't told enough. Do
you feel our community should be more
aware of homo history?
Yeah, I think that's totally true. As gay people,
our histories are really gutted and denied. I've
found accounts of the myth that somehow
amazingly ignore the gayness in it—actually
turn it into something else. The same is true
with the epic of Gilgamesh. That's exactly one
of the reasons that I chose to do it. There's all
of this lost history. We focus so much on cur-
rent gay culture and what's going on right now,
or look back at Stonewall and think that gay-
ness began there. The gay soul has been
around since the dawn of humanity. A lot of
people want to, or try to, deny that. So obvi-
ously there's some powerful purpose for gay-
ness, for society, for humankind, since we've
existed for so long.
Tell me about some of the other pieces.
Michael Burke, who is coming in from New
York, is doing a piece about gayness in chim-
panzees. It uses physical gestures that gay
chimpanzees use.
Complete with Freudian exploration of
the banana?
Actually, it's cucumbers. It's called Cucumber
Dreams. It centers around a freaky date that he
went on involving cucumbers.
What kind of chimps do they have in New
York?
I know, you'd think it would be banana dreams.
Crazy.
Steven [Lavine]'s piece—he's been very myste-
rious about his piece. I think it has something
to do with a videotape he filmed of himself, in
high school, having sex with his boyfriend. [It
was] the end of a graduation video, and his
parents asked for the video and unfortunately
watched it through to the end, and that was
how he was outed.
Sounds intense.
He's working with Michael Kearns on it.
Michael is directing it. He's fabulous. He just
won the L.A. Weekly's Queen of Angels award
for lifetime achievement [in theatre arts.]
Martin [Wiech] is doing a piece about
AIDS and the people who've died, and remem-
bering them—another way of reclaiming that
lost history. There's two generations of artists
that aren't in this city creating, providing
opportunities, or being someone's dad.
Danny Hill is doing a piece that is totally
struggling with the gay identity and what it
means, what it means to be sexually active in
the city. I know he's using the zombie apoca-
lypse. It's set as if the zombie apocalypse is
happening in Los Angeles.
Are you excited?
Very. It's going to be a great night. Of course,
there's going to be lots of nudity. Michael
[Burke] e-mailed me; apparently he did
Cucumber Dreams in Chicago and assumed
that since it was a Chicago theatre that nudity
would be all right, and it turned into this huge
ordeal. It's going to be a great night. A fun,
sexy, yet meaty evening.
Gay Bodies! Gay Souls! runs Fri. and Sat.,
May 18 and 19, at Highways Performance
Space. Tickets: 310/315-1459 or www.high
waysperformance.org.