GRABBING LIFE AND LOVE BY THE BALLS
Chosen families are an integral part of the LGBT community. Camilo Godoy captures these unique relationships in his work.
Chosen families are an integral part of the LGBT community. These intimate bonds go beyond mateships but are not romantic, and are created in place of our “given families”. Camilo Godoy celebrates these unique relationships in his work. Story by Ian Horner.
Artist/dancer/photographer Camilo Godoy was born in Colombia and moved to New Jersey in the United States at age 10 with his family. At 18 he went to art school in New York. Now 31, he lives in Manhattan, teaches in Brooklyn, and his passion is creating art, usually images, and usually a little confronting.
As a young boy, then as a teenager, he had to reconcile his emerging sexuality with his strictly conservative South American background. While navigating that, he was also learning to distinguish his “given family” from his “chosen family”. Not that one was more important than the other, simply that each family expected different things of him.
In a nutshell, his given family side-stepped his gayness while his chosen family celebrated it. For a decade now, he’s had three especially close friends, Brendan, Carlos and Jorge, with whom he shares an amazing liberty and freedom. It’s not a sexual relationship but it’s a friendship where sexuality is open, honest and lived. He calls them his chosen family and they’re very tight.
He took a stunning self-portrait of himself with the guys, a sensual image of intense intimacy, and it’s mounted as the huge centrepiece in the current exhibition at The University Of New South Wales Galleries in Sydney, called Friendship As A Way Of Life, highlighting the work of 20 queer artists.
“The title of the exhibition is a quote from Michel Foucault, words that’ve been a very important part of my life and art,” Camilo tells us via Skype. He loved the concept of the exhibition – to explore close queer relationships in all their forms – and was honoured to be part of it.
“In the ’80s, Foucault was saying how the only way to survive is by taking care of one another. Well, how appropriate for this current pandemic!” he says.
DNA: What was it like growing up as a gay boy in Colombia?
Camilo Godoy: I knew I was different at age 7. I was painting my nails with a marker in the first grade and my teacher stormed towards my desk, grabbed my marker and said, “Boys don’t do that!” A visceral moment. Suddenly, I was aware of being controlled. And it wasn’t cool! Actually, it was disrespectful. I saw nothing wrong with painting my nails.
The message was that you were unacceptable. Absolutely. I used to cross my legs as a kid and my older sister said, “Boys don’t sit like that.” I was bullied. In middle school and high school, to avoid the jeering and bullying, I behaved in the most normative way I could. The first-grade classroom had a theatre space with wigs and costumes and adult clothes. I’d play beauty pageants with the girls. Had I continued that kind of free, unapologetic behaviour I would’ve had more violence, verbal and physical. To protect my soul and my spirit and my heart and my body I had to be the most neutral I could be to survive.
Family is vital in giving you permission to be yourself. Did your family do that?
Only to an extent. They knew I was creative. At home I was always performing but when it crossed the gender barrier things weren’t okay. My mother made wedding dresses and when I wore the fabrics I was yelled at: “This is not what boys do!” No gender defiance was permitted. Colombia is Catholic, very binary and rigid. My parents were the product of this. My father would tell me how to walk: “Your chest is broad, show the pride of your chest outwards!” At family gatherings a boy’s handshake was very important, not my gentle wave. My father and sisters watched my handshake. As children our bodies are conditioned into this male/female binary. This is how you shake hands, how you walk, how you sit. Growing up involves undoing that.
Your work now is part of that undoing. What’s the relationship between you and the three guys in the self-portrait?
They’ve been my best friends for a decade. On the far left is me, then Brendan, Carlos and Jorge. Our friendship is so deep. I have my given family, my biological family – then there’s my chosen family, the people I choose to befriend and share space and time and ideas with, >>
They’ve been my best friends for a decade… Brendan, Carlos and Jorge. Our friendship is so deep.
>> things I may not be able to share with my given family. I have so many intimacy experiences with Brendan, Carlos and Jorge I wouldn’t be able to talk about with, say, my sisters because there isn’t that kind of understanding.
Such as?
Sexuality. I’m unapologetic, unafraid with my best friends to be loud and outspoken about my sexual experiences. My twin sister can be very conservative. We’re gay men. We understand homophobia and growing up with parents not accepting us. Brendan, a gay man of 38, still confronts awful shunning by his parents. The kind of support we three give him is very meaningful and sustains him.
How did this image get to headline the Sydney exhibition?
I’ve been putting my images into zines I call AMIGXS [say Amigex], a gender-inclusive Spanish word for friends. They’re annual publications I do with photos of my friends and lovers engaged in moments of love and lust. This particular image was in my zines, which were in a group exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum for Stonewall’s 50th anniversary. José Da Silva at the UNSW Galleries in Sydney emailed me saying, “I was really moved by your work at the Brooklyn Museum and I’d love to include you in our Sydney exhibition.” I’m really honoured!
Your zines are also on show. Are you in the other photos?
There’s also one of a friend, Giovanni, sucking my feet, one of my hand with my friend Justin and there’s a close-up in which I’m holding Brendan’s balls.
Grabbing a man by the balls makes him very vulnerable. How did that shot come about?
It just happened. I had this idea to capture a photo of the moment of ejaculation as Brendan was masturbating. This is my friend who I’m kissing in the photo with my three friends. We’ve never actually had sex. We’ve been at sex parties and together in spaces of deep lust, but we’ve never engaged sexually. I’ve never desired that with him, but there’s an intimacy and freedom with our bodies that make this kind of experience just normal for us. I’d texted him saying I wanted to take a photo of the moment he ejaculated. He came to the studio, we made the photo, and it didn’t really work. But what did work was the one where I’m grabbing his balls.
This radical idea of friendship and togetherness means we’ve abolished a lot of boundaries that friendships can have. We have a very healthy friendship. We’ve been naked together, even though there’s never been a sexual manifestation. It was a calm, peaceful way of just sharing the moment and embracing art. We’re both artists and my creative mind >>
>> wanted to make this photo and we were able to work together to make it happen because there’s this mutual trust.
What did Brendan think of the photo when he saw it?
That’s interesting, I don’t think we’ve talked about it. Obviously, he’s seen it but we haven’t actually talked about it. I don’t show photos as soon as I take them, that’s my homework. I’m actually seeing Brendan, Jorge and Carlos tomorrow for dinner so I’ll ask him! [Later: “He laughed and said it was a gorgeous photo and that I was wild and wonderful!”]
Brendan has these beautiful balls that remind me of the balls on a bull on the sculpture Hercules And The Cantor in Florence in the Loggia dei Lanzi, next to the Uffizi Gallery, where I studied one summer. I’d draw the hind of this bull all the time because it was so profoundly sexual, so erotic. Ever since, I’ve had this image of balls and wanting to create a photo of balls and suddenly Brandon was the perfect body for it. He’s got beautiful balls that hang in a very similar, erotic way as the sculpture in Florence. It’s a reference to this sculpture, but it’s also a self-portrait of me touching another body. And it’s also this idea of grabbing him by the balls, as you say!
You’re 31. You’re redefining what family and friendship mean to you. You have a given family and a chosen family and a partner. What will be the shape of the family you create? Will you have kids?
That’s a loaded question, especially right now. I love kids, I’m an educator, I pay my bills in New York by teaching. I wonder how I’d raise a child. Kids are expensive. I don’t know where I’d live. I don’t drive; I’m a city lady. I love New York but it’s hell expensive. My boyfriend lives on 190th Street. Last year he proposed I move in with him, then freaked out. His career got crazy and he asked for space and time. So we gave each other space and time.
We kind of ended our relationship in December and it wasn’t until corona that we started talking more and showing up for each other. This weekend I was with him uptown and I began to wonder what living with him would be like.
I’ve never lived with a partner. I’d love to be together with someone I deeply love and desire. If I’m financially established to have someone with me then yes to kids, but more important in terms of family is how can we all care for each other right now. This crisis has shifted how we prioritise.
My friend John is 77, lives by himself in a sixth-floor walk-up in SoHo, and during this pandemic I go to the grocery store with him. I check in with him every other day, have lunch. He can’t walk much due to surgery. He was a Broadway director and his apartment is filled with history. He won’t move out but I fear him falling on the stairs.
I see him and think a lot about ageing. I’m only 31, yes, but what’s it like to be almost 80 >>
>> with a failing body, having to depend on people? I think a lot about the importance of partners and friends who are present for each other. I want a family but maybe it’s not attached to my partner. Maybe I live with my three friends and we create our own kind of wild, wonderful family in our home where we care for each other.
We’ve grown up with a focus on the individual and being self-sufficient but through this pandemic we’re all confronting the importance of the collective. If somebody’s sick and we’re in the same space most likely we’ll all get sick.
There’s a theme here. Grab life, and love, and your chosen family, by the balls while you can? Exactly! How can we be there for each other in ways we never have before? Maybe I didn’t visit my mom as much as I should have, maybe I didn’t check in on this and that, and I can’t do anything about it now, but I can really shift the way I build my life with the lives of those I deeply care for. •
We’ve never engaged sexually, but there’s a freedom with our bodies that make this kind of experience just normal for us.