Fever Freaks

Documentary about gainers, men who intentionally put on weight for their own and other men's pleasure.

A queer rewriting of the events surrounding the 1968 National Democratic Convention from the point of view of the controversial French writer. This “thief-video” combines disparate textual sources, contemporary reenactments of historical events and archival footage in order to relate the uneasy fusion of the French poet’s criminalized sexuality with late 60s American counter-culture.

A 2014 short by Moffet.

A film titled Dance Movie appears in many Warhol filmographies, but no work with this title can be found in the collection. The lost film, starring dancer Fred Herko gliding on a single roller skate, was shot in 1963. Herko was a talented dancer and choreographer who cofounded and performed with the Judson Dance Theater. Herko was also associated with the Mole People, a group of queer men and women who came together to get high on speed and listen to opera. In October 1964, unhoused and strung out on drugs, Herko leapt out of an open window while dancing naked to Mozart’s Coronation Mass in C Major. Although the current location of Dance Movie is unknown, accounts of it do exist, including Warhol’s evocative description in POPism of Herko “gliding in dance attitudes and looking as perfect as the ornament on the hood of a car.” Goddess of Speed poetically reimagines the missing film.

In a large room of a galley or public site, two walls facing each other are covered by video projections displaying a series of portraits originally shot on 16mm film. On one wall a succession of men are posing alone next to a pool table at Touché, Chicago’s oldest leather bar. There are six men of different ages, styles, body types and races. The performers all look directly in the camera. The framing remains the same for the six shots. Each shot is the length of a hundred feet of film complete with the leader and flares at the beginning and end of each roll. On the opposite wall, five men are posing in front of a mural within the same formal system. Once projected in a room, the men will appear to be cruising each other from opposite sides of a virtual bar. Since the number of portraits is not the same on each wall, when the videos loop, the men will be flirting with a different partner.

An allegory recycling images from the past, still relevant to the present moment. “Horses are lucky, they’re stuck with the war same as us, but nobody expects them to be in favor of it, to pretend to believe in it.” — Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 1932