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Bertie Marshall, Travis Jeppesen, Marcas Lancaster, et al.
Dorian’s Attic
23 February 2025 2:00pm – 6:00pm
Event type: readings, performance, screening
Event location: Verdurin
The Rainbow Museum of Queer Life is a popular Sunday attraction for the whole family. Its displays promote pride and inclusion and offer insights into the entwined nature of love and progress. Each visit is a morally corrective experience. But one room is forever closed to the public: The Dorian Gray Attic, a repository for all artefacts that are too hideous or politically dangerous to unleash on the unwitting punter.
Dorian’s Attic is a tour through this idiosyncratic collection of art from a living gay history that has been banned, cast out, or simply conveniently forgotten. The afternoon will feature live readings by Bertie Marshall, Travis Jeppesen, and Marcas Lancaster alongside screenings of fringe video art. Other readings will be voiced by Jack Jacobs and Oliver Bennett.
The event will reconstitute a vision of Dorian in his prime. Any artefact deemed too terrible or even too dangerous will enter the public display at the Museum.
Programme highlights
Travis Jeppesen: The Suiciders and recent short stories
“Once you learn how to love, you will also learn how to mutilate it.”
In Travis Jeppesen’s The Suiciders, a group of friends living in an indeterminate house in an unidentified American suburb and replays a continuous loop of eternal exile and youth. Permanently in their late teens, the seven young men are fluid and mutable ciphers, although endowed with highly reflexive, and wholly generic, internal lives.
Jeppesen’s fiction is an unflinching portrayal of desire. His narratives confront the physical and emotional realities of gay life, merging explicit eroticism with alienation. The prose is at once minimalist and vividly sensory, mirroring the fragmented yet intense experiences of his characters.
Bertie Marshall: Gottfried
Gottfried, the beautiful ugliness is performance monologue culled from the final part of Bertie Marshall‘s new unpublished novel Kodeia which features a young actor who starred in many of the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The monologue, inspired by Plato’s symposium, is a 20-page rant unfurling topics such as fame, misfortune, the close up, life, death, and dream.
Marcas Lancaster: Anathema
“The ‘Libertas’ of the ancièn regime – freedom from subjection to base desires – gave way to ‘Liberty’ – freedom through desire – res publica to res idiotica, the cunt to the ass. The citizen, bound by the tyrant custom via reciprocal ties of loyalty, duty and obligation, was usurped by the artifactual ‘individual’, trumping the church’s claim upon an immaterial soul via Machiavellian appeals to self-interest.
We were no longer to be judged according to our behaviour but became entitled automatically to every good thing. Everything was for everybody, including children who, as Freud had shown, were sexual beings in their own right. Paedophiles were duly emboldened and, encouraged by (almost exclusively French) intellectuals, formed associations such as NAMBLA. ‘To Boys Unknown’, the Uranian verse of a Norfolk vicar, appeared as an exquisite, limited edition printed on Japan Paper.”
The unquenchable sexual appetite of the male liberal subject spurns a section of Marcas Lancaster’s forthcoming Anathema. Written from the perspective of a self-proclaimed “failed gay”, the text reflects on the consequences of generations of men breaking sexual taboos. The text follows them pursuing extreme erotic pleasures to sorry ends and far beyond. Graphic and shocking – even to an audience hooked on PornHub – Anathema is a moral reckoning for homosexuality’s role in the ongoing sexual revolution.
Show more +Dorian’s Attic responds to Return to Sodom on Saturday, 22 February 2025. This symposium programme of critical reflections by artists and writers challenges the history of queer art.
Dorian’s Attic is organised with Amir Naaman and is part of Gay Amnesia.
People
Bertie Marshall
Bertie Marshall is a writer and performer of plays, poems, and fiction.
Travis Jeppesen
Travis Jeppesen is the author of numerous books and the creator of object-oriented writing.
Marcas Lancaster
Marcas Lancaster is a writer, producer, and self confessed ‘failed gay’.
Jack Jacobs
Jack Jacobs is an actor and audiobook narrator.
Oliver Bennett
Oliver Bennett is a writer, actor, and director and co-founder of The Base Creates.
In the store
Victims by Travis Jeppesen
Travis Jeppesen’s debut novel, first published in 2003, set literary culture off balance by giving voice to the demented lifestyle of cultists. Victims returns to reanimate these spectral figures, and the forces and forms hidden in their shadows.
£14.99Close to the Knives : A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz
“I am glad I am alive to witness these things; giving words to this life of sensations is a relief. Smell the flowers while you can. “
£10.99