Today you will hear the views and ideas of our pozcast guests. And while we respect their expertise, they do not represent the views of positiveeffect.org, or the MAP Center for Urban Health Solutions. Welcome to the pozcast we are created by and for people living with HIV. On each episode, we explore what it means to be poz. We challenge the status quo and we share stories that matter to us. I'm James Watson and I'm HIV-positive. If you're living with HIV, listen up.
But you know, there's three times out of 10 where it's going to be something totally different, like someone from the audience is gonna faint, you know, or like my pants catch on fire.
This is my guest today, Mikiki. We have a great show for you. This is pozcast.
Today we're talking about the power of art in HIV activism, and more specifically, about the work of my guest, the always innovative Mikiki, an HIV-positive performance and video artist and queer community health activist. Mikiki, welome to pozcast.
Thanks, James. I'm really happy to be here.
I'm thrilled you're here. So let's just dive right in. So I've noticed from reviewing your work, that it showcases a really complex entanglement of identities. You're performance artist and visual artist, a dancer, a singer, you're a drag queen, you're tuba ayer, you're an actor, and much of the art that you make seems to pull directly from your background as a sexual health educator and harm reduction worker. So I want to start just by reflecting on identity. And on a quote that I read when doing some background research that really resonated with me and kind of amused me. So in 1991, way back, Sylvie Drake, who was a critic for the Los Angeles Times, wrote about the American performance artist, Tim Miller. She said, He is the most terrifying of hyphenates: a gay militant activist artist whose sexual preference has become what propels his art.
So I wonder what do you consider are your hyphenates and what propels your art?
It's a hyphenate? It's that's a great question. I think the only thing that was left out that would be relevant because it's like quite a list, I'm surprised you've got so many of them. But there's also an ongoing kind of interaction with and reflection around food security, and, you know, and cooking and food service and devotion, and like kind of those, those kinds of things. That's really the only other part of my work that I think you didn't, you didn't cover, you kind of got all the other bases. And I think that it really starts from...I started, like, I went to art school thinking that I was going to be basically like a slogan painting, you know, like two dimensional, like I was going to do painting, you know, I wanted to be an activist artist. And in my head, as a teenager growing up in Newfoundland in St. John's, like, art is a sculpture painting, and, you know, printmaking or whatever. So I just assumed, that's what I would have to do. It's like, I want to make political art, so therefore I'm going to make political images. And these are the ways—these are the tools that I will have to use them. And then I got to art school and because I was a lazy slut, I forgot to register for the painting course that I wanted to get into, and I was like, Oh, well, I guess I can't be a painter. What else can I take? And I found this amazing video art course that was taught by this incredible queer woman named Kathleen Tetlock. And she told me about the history of, of like video art as a queer history and as a feminist history and as an activist history for people of color, because it didn't have the weight of 500 years, plus plus plus, of the Western canon of art history. It was people gaining access to these technologies as they were becoming more accessible in the 60 and it didn't have all of that background and baggage. So with that in mind, I was like, Okay, well, I guess this is what I'm, you know, like, I realized that my videos were mostly performative. And there were some things that I wanted to do that resistant the frame or required a live body as opposed to something on a screen somewhere. And it was kind of thinking, thinking about that. And then and then I worked in galleries for a little bit in St. John's and in Calgary, and then and I'm not a very great administrator.
So, I found another job that was kind of more aligned with the activist work that I was doing as a teenager, which was teaching sex ed in the public high school system in Calgary. Then I worked doing work in the HIV response and in sexual health, sexual reproductive health education, in various kind of capacities in various agencies across the country. And then just kind of did my artwork off the side of my desk. I still considered myself an artist, but I was making art, like making maybe one or two projects a year.
Do you always consider your art activism at this point?
Well, you know, that's another great question. Yes, I do. It took a little while. And it took some convincing. And it also took, I don't know, a couple $100 worth of therapy, not so much. But considering the 10s of 1000s, I've plunked into that machine. But it's, yeah, it was like an interesting thing for me, as someone that has done ground level entry, you know, like, on the ground kind of service delivery, for the better part of 20 years, as you know, as volunteer, as program deliverer whatever, you know, program coordinator, and peer and, you know, whatever. I've had all of the roles kind of in doing service provision, but all you know, like paid roles, but most mostly paid roles. But then when I stopped— when my day job stopped being the activism or contributing to these kind of social service and social issues that I that I am concerned with, I was concerned and I had this kind of crisis of, well, now I'm going to be a performance artist, which is kind of like literally the most selfish kind of decision that I think I could think. Like, Oh, well, what's your next job going to be? Are you going to work at a community health center? No, I'm going to, I'm going to be a performance artist. And I think one of the things that resonated with me was the conversations I had with other friends that are artists and activists in various capacities, was that one of the things that is the most difficult to do is actually to shift the culture that we're in. It's one thing to try and do poverty mitigation work at a community health center, and I did that for years. And, you know, working at Toronto People with AIDS Foundation, I was doing a sexual reproductive health promotion program, but essentially it was like talking about the crushing effects of poverty for people living on ODSP and how we manage our substance use in relation to that poverty. Like that's, that wasn't the job that I was hired to do, but that's what the job ended up being. And that's what a lot of AIDS service organization work, I think has become is about how do we reckon with the fact that we are disenfranchised and disheartened and don't have a lot of money? And this is a capitalist world that is becoming more and more about, about income, and income disparity. So shifting the culture is a hard ticket, but it's apparently the one that I pulled.
Yes, it is. So how did acquiring HIV impact your work, then? Your creative work?
That's also a good question. I'm just gonna say that every time we ask a question.
That's excellent, makes me look so good.
Well, you are good. It's funny, because I was doing work related to sexual health and gay men's health and HIV before I contracted HIV, or before I was diagnosed with HIV, which are two different times, there's like a timeframe of kind of weird overlap in there. But I was already doing work that was about the HIV epidemic, like I developed a makeup library, a makeup lending library for folks that didn't have access, either economically, or kind of ideologically weren't comfortable to come and purchase their own makeup, or didn't have the money to do it, and made like a safer makeup sharing campaign, which was kind of based on harm reduction principles, as well. And the, like, the promo for the makeup library kind of mimicked first generation, like first wave AIDS epidemic kind of safer sex materials. So when I got an HIV diagnosis, it was really important for me to be able to speak to my own lived experience and not speak for other people, which is why I, well two reasons why I didn't go into theater. One is that I don't like the idea of fictionalizing experiences of other people when I don't have, you know, like, I don't have the background, I don't have the experience to be able to actually tell someone else's truth. Not that there aren't people that do that brilliantly. And I think that actually maybe can shift culture and shift popular opinion, better than unseen performance art. The other thing is that I'm terrible actor so I needed to become a performance artist because I literally have no hope of acting my way to the Crown Royal bag. I don't know if that actually answered your question, but it's about the authenticity of my own experience and being someone who thought and still feels like it's important to, as David HO, who is this amazing person in the HIV response in Ontario and one of the founders of the AIDS Committee of Ottawa, who was a mentor of mine in a professional setting at Toronto People with AIDS Foundation, and he said that the work that we were doing in that project, and I've taken this on as well, is that we're creating a new community value around believing that HIV-positive gay men in this instance, are responsible people, right? Regardless of the endpoint of our decisions about sexual health, drug use, etc, etc, you know that we're allowed to believe that we are inherently responsible, because we prove it to ourselves when getting an HIV test, even though we might be scared of it.
Right, right. So how do you think that the HIV art activism of the 80s and 90s, with its sort of life and death urgency has changed now in the present day?
Hmm. I think that, for a lot of those of us that are making HIV-related work, or HIV specific artwork, a lot of us don't have to worry about death—the immediacy of death. And I guess the difference is that we have, you know, like, there's access to medication that, for the most part, if you have the time and energy to make art, you have access to meds, or like the ability to kind of, you know, navigate that system. And that is a product of time. However, there's definitely a lot of people who don't have access to medication currently, and it is still a life or death issue. The issue, I think, around that, and why we're not seeing more artwork from people whose like living situation or context is about lack of access is that there's like, there's other issues that they're trying to deal with, and making artists kind of—is either less of a priority, or it's just not getting to the channels where it's able to be kind of disseminated and seen by people. So I think that's actually one of the things that we saw addressed in the AIDS ACTION NOW! project poster virus that started, and I got to be a part of that—I was one of the artists that was selected in 2011 when it first started. I think it went on for like four or five years where they paired artists with different community organizations that were working in the HIV response. And I think it was specifically to try and create, to create posters—to create artwork, in the form of posters, that were responding to some of these, some of these issues, that AIDS art, you know, like air quotes, AIDS art, in the late 2000s, had just wasn't talking about because our lives were better than they, you know, than people's lives living with HIV had been in the 80s.
Do you think art can still mobilize people and institutions and create change?
I really hope so. I really hope that there is still the capacity for art to mobilize and to change. I think that we see, we see different avenues, different venues for kind of politicization to be happening in cultural production. And I think of like, I talked about my art practice as like cultural production, as much as I talk about it as art making, because it's also...Art making makes it seem like rarefied and, you know, expensive and, you know, like, right, elitist or whatever. You know, there's this idea that, that regular people kind of don't get art and I was just reading, I was actually reading that interview with myself, which is ridiculously pretentious, but I'm thankful I did because I remember now I'm able to quote myself, which is the maybe the most pretentious thing that someone could do.
That's even better.
Right? I'm here for it. But it's in response to this idea that art is this, you know, it exists in a rarefied air and, you know, real people don't get it. I think that's garbage. I think that if you have a lived history, like a history of experiencing things through your senses, and you have, you know, like, you can see things you can hear things, touch, taste—as long as you have access to whatever senses you've got, and you've got a history, you've got a history of visual culture. You've got a history of taking in the world around you and whether you get exactly what the artist wanted or not, you know, like, sure, there's a couple of art historians that were able to nail exactly what this person wanted to put the world. And a lot of other people that saw it and really enjoyed it or didn't or were, you know, motivated. And I think that like, one of the things that I am enjoying about this kind of cultural moment, one of the rare things I'm enjoying about this cultural moment is seeing people using the breadth of and diversity of video editing tools—like TikTok makes editing things super easy. There's so many people now that have tools to create culture and you know is, whether I like it or not, TikTok is culture now. There are people and younger and younger people are having access to these tools to be able to tell stories in a different way and tell stories in a way that has the potential to reach and move and motivate us.
And what change do you hope to elicit with like with your artistic practice?
[Laughs] Was that sigh audible? I, you know, obviously wanted to change the world. I identify mostly, you know, like when I started teaching Sex Ed, I had this incredible queer—and like surprise, surprise, I was raised mostly by like—or politically raised mostly by queer women, and who were very patient with me being a total dumbass for a long time. And I had this incredible boss at a Planned Parenthood affiliate in Calgary now called the Calgary Sexual Health Network, and she really helped me think about how important pro-choice feminism has been to queerness. And I now kind of think about myself as a, like bodily autonomy activist, which is maybe a bit of a clunker to kind of think about, but it really is about, like, supporting people to make whatever decisions they want to make with their body. That's kind of what freedom is, is to be able to decide what you do with your body. And it's ridiculous that we are again having a conversation about rights to reproductive choices, you know, especially like whatever's happening in the dumpster fire just below us, like it also affects our political reality as well, you know. So that conversations and questions about bodily autonomy are still on the table means that there is still work for me to do to address it, and I think specifically as a person living with HIV, because culturally that is seen as I have at least one, like scarlet letter on—like, I have this biomarker on my electronic health file or whatever, you know, like I have evidence that I have made at least one bad decision. I mean, truth be told, I've made a bunch.
[Laughs] Right.
But it's kind of, you know, like, it's seen as evidence of a poor choice, you know, like, of a choice that is stigmatized around either sexual promiscuity, drug use, whatever. It's rarely framed, you know, like, it's, it's interesting too, like, because I've done so much as we know, and we've talked about, like, I've done so much work in sexual reproductive health education and talking about, you know, talking about my status and my experience, and also my experience as a sexual assault survivor. And like all of these things, I talked about, like getting diagnosed and what that process was and how it impacts me. It depends on who the audience is, like, I have four or five different ways of telling that story, where it's like, do I want to elicit sympathy? Do I want you to feel more, you know, compassionate toward people living with HIV? Or am I telling this to a roomful of people living with HIV, where I'm going to give you the real shit? Or am I talking about how gay men are also survivors of sexual assault? Like, there's so many different ways that we kind of use the kind of tools of rhetoric to be able to bring along or bring bring in an audience to, to kind of share or stand alongside the kind of opinion that I'm, I'm trying to put into the world.
And is it always the truth? Are you always telling a truth?
That's a really, I said that I was gonna say, it's a really good question. Every time I'm gonna say, this is a real complex one. I am, I...Oh, okay. I want to be honest with you. I'm not interested in telling lies. And I also know that my, you know, like I said, my reality is also, you know, like, it has been built on me lying to myself about a lot of things. You know, I was just telling my boyfriend earlier today, that I thought my childhood was idyllic until I was in my 30s. My therapist was like, so this thing that you said, and this other thing that you said, you think this is idyllic? And I said, yeah. Oh, oh. You know, so like, even the things that we know to be true and can say...and can say and can see, still sometimes even the truth, it can be a lie. We tell a lot of, a lot of stories to ourselves to get through.
Yeah. But the story that you tell changes, depending on the audience that you're speaking to.
Yeah and also, all of those stories are true. I'm not fabricating any facts. It's just...you know, do I focus it more on this or is this you know, like, specifically in relation to like sexual assault stuff, I can tell my story of contracting HIV and I never have to mention it. But if it's potentially like an audience of public health nurses, and I want to ensure that they are going to provide compassionate care to people living with HIV, I'm going to break out all my tiny little violins, you know? And then I will like, at the same time, I will also say, and I am a sexually liberated person who's entitled to make the decisions, to not just, you know, try and find connection and intimacy because it's a basic human right, but also pleasure, which I think is also a basic human. So you know, sometimes it's like breakout, all of these, what I like to do, which I don't often get the opportunity is to be able to tell all five of these stories in the same setting of the same event, you know?
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I want to talk a little bit about your drag. And then I want to talk a little bit about the creative process. So I mean, you've been doing drag for over 20 years...
25 years, next year.
25 years now. Oh, my goodness.
Quarter century.
And but you're not your typical drag queen, right? I mean, you don't do desk drops or you don't usually lip sync. You know, you play the tuba, and you riff off Golden Girls episodes and give sermons on queer identity and politics. So I wanted to know, like, how does drag fit into your artistic practice and into your activism?
I started doing drag when I was 15. It was not popular [laughs]. And it was not really welcome. I mean, like it was welcome in the gay bar. It was welcome in the like, anarchist, youth activist fundraisers that I was hosting. Like the weird punk shows and...
Yeah, I've seen videos of the drag race where you were all in heels running around—what was it? With the center of town or...was that where it was?
Yeah, it was. It was Scotiabank Plaza in downtown St. John's.
It's looks hilarious and also poignant.
Yeah, there was like one of the videos, I think that the edit might not be up on YouTube, but one of the videos is actually us being chased around the Scotiabank by the security guard. So I started doing drag when I was a teenager, because it was an opportunity for me to do some necessary exploration of my femininity in a cultural and sexual context where, you know, like, as a queer man where the feminine was, and kind of still is pathologized and dismissed and derided. And I got some feminine energy in me. And also as a very, as a very artistic little boy, there's just so many options for, so many options for female attire, and makeup and hair. And like there's a lot of room for creativity. Granted, we torture women and like men, culturally torture women with this as well, but there are still lots of opportunities for creativity. So I was really excited to be able to get to do some of that. And, again, I'm very thankful to have had this, you know. I'm trying to think of the the best word but this, you know, like, kind of like cohort of incredible, older queer women that were like, okay, be careful around this stuff. We'll have none of this language, don't you go referring to us as this, you know. So I really thought school did a really great way, when I was quite young about how to be a drag queen, but also be respectful of my audience, you know, like to acknowledge that part of drag is kind of making fun of femininity. And you have to tow a very thin but in my opinion, a very necessary line about making fun of femininity, but not making fun of women.
Right, absolutely.
So once I was told that it's like, well, this is political, by these older cool women, then I was like, Oh, well, then obviously, let's use this political angle in it. And when I was a kid, like a youth in this activist group in St. John's called, Youth for Social Justice, we were housed in the Oxfam office in downtown St. John's. And this is great CODCO commercial for Oxfam, with Mary Walsh and Kathy Jones doing this like, working for change kind of bit in the commercial with their amazing townie accents. And, obviously, I was in love with this, like old bitty drag from a young age. But we had this group called, Puppets Against AIDS from South Africa, that actually came to St. John's to work with Oxfam, and help develop a youth group that was going to do—use puppetry as a tool to combat social issues. And we were I think, specifically working on like, either low level flying over any land in Labrador, or something about inco mining. And I didn't want to do the puppeteering stuff because I just was not as interested, but a bunch of my friends were in this Puppets For Change troupe that kind of developed out of this workshop. And through our conversations and like doing a lot of acid and smoking a lot of weed, I had, you know, like the realization that like, one of the things that was said by these incredible South African activists was that you're able to use a puppet and say things that you would be, you know, run out of town for, if you were to say, as a as you know, as a member of the community, but you can talk about the mayor, you can talk about how the society is, is constructed with a puppet. And then you can always say, oh, we're just telling the story. I obviously don't believe these things. And that is one of the beautiful potentials, political potentials, of drag, as well, is you're able to put on this mask, essentially, maybe only millimeters thick, but you put on this mask, and then you're able to say things that would have real world consequences if you were to do them outside of drag.
So in your, with your performance art, I'm interested to know like, how planned is the audience reaction that you're eliciting. When people pass out in your audience, are you surprised? Or are you expecting something like that when you draw blood from your arm and spray it into your eyes? What kind of reaction are you expecting?
To be honest, I was not expecting that reaction at all. I did some tests. I have a couple of doctor friends that I will run most of my ideas by just to be like, so I want to lick an entire public washroom clean. And yeah, and you know, Jason Brophy, who's from Newfoundland and does HIV works, like pediatric AIDS care, whenever he was like, Ah, so you'll die. Just like this will be your final performance. Yes. Here's a swan song. A mangy swan. Thankfully, I have some, some people like I have done harm reduction work now for over 10 years, you know, in various capacities. And I know how to do a blood draw. I know, I know, the basics of phlebotomy. I've also talked to, you know, like my medical team about like, you know, these are some of the things I'm thinking of doing in the performance, what do you think the risks are? To me, to audience members, whatever. I try to consider what are the like—is there a risk of biohazardous material, you know. Like, I feel like I even make a joke about it in the performance where I do this self-administered blood drawn and put the blood of my eyes, I make a joke about how long each of you lives inside the body, and then make a joke about Ronnie Dee work that got the National Endowment for the Arts defunded in the late 80s. Like this isn't a Ronnie Dee performance, blah, blah, blah, which there was also no risk of HIV transmission as well. Like, I get how someone fainted from that, I recognize the like, vasovagal response, and that some people like, what happens physiologically when some people see blood, and I also tend to be someone that gets lightheaded when I see other people's blood, thankfully not my own. But the funny thing is that, that specific piece, that specific performance project, and the the, I'm not doing it for the audience, I'm really doing it for me, because it's about looking through the lens of HIV, like looking through my rose, like my rose colored glasses, like I'm literally coloring my vision with HIV, which is what is always happening, is that I have to find a way to see through the lens of HIV in the work, you know. I mean, in my life, and then so this is like, is making that literal. I don't know if people necessarily take that away from it, but it becomes a layer for for people to experience. I also know the first you know, like, I need to make rooms a little bit more ventilated when I'm doing it. It's just you get a hot room, and then people see that and they're all crammed together. Thankfully, Corona is maybe going to make that easier.
Right, right. So there's no—when you're planning, I mean, with performance art, I mean, there's a lot that goes into performance art. And when you're planning it, are you planning around the impact you want to have on your audience? Or like you say, are you planning this just for yourself?
That's a great question. I think I have to balance all of those things. I don't know if this is the appropriate, the appropriate thing. I've actually been told by a couple of friends of mine who are better artists than I am that my work can be a little didactic sometimes. And they're just like, we have this idea and you just illustrated and hit us over the head with it. Like I'm trying to allow myself to be a little bit more like lyrical. But you know, I kind of believe that I'm kind of constructing this set of clues or cues for you to respond to with, you know, like your history of seeing things, smelling things, tasting things, you know, hearing things. So some of it has to be about what's going to go on in your body and how it's going to impact you, I definitely am thinking about how is someone going to feel? Or how is someone gonna...Like, what are the things that I want someone to take from it. And I also am really interested in...Well, there's an internal logic that can get created in dance and in performance, and I would assume sometimes theater. But definitely like in situations where it's it's less scripted. And there's a you know, I have like a set of rules. Most of the times, there's like kind of a set of tasks or set of rules. And I know, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. And then with each one of those, it's like, I'm going to do this, and then there's a couple things that could happen. And try and anticipate, like, what are those things, and then, you know, I would say, seven or eight times out of 10, what I have anticipated actually happens, whether it's one, two, whether it's a, b, or c, but you know, there's three times out of 10, where it's going to be something totally different, like someone from the audience is going to faint, you know, or like my pants catch on fire. And one of the things that I love about the kind of the education that I got, and the peers that I have, and just like something that I think is actually really beautiful about performance work. And performance art is that you have to trust the logic of the project, you know, like, I set this parameter or these parameters, I have these instructions, therefore I should be able to trust what would be the reasonable response to you know, someone fainting and my pants catching on fire?
So how much pressure do you put on yourself to do something?
Less than I used to. I get really excited about like a call for submissions, or I get a new idea, you know, like I have, I have this what my old instructor Jan Peacock, who's this incredible video artist to talk about like this, you know, you kind of have your cloud, and your head's in this cloud. And you're occasionally like, you know, raining down these, like kind of projects that are finishing, hopefully before they hit the ground. And I really like that way of working, but I also like I love getting the opportunity to think about something new or like, I will get distracted because I have this idea that it's like, well, I'm working on this other thing, but this new idea came in and I really want to get my teeth into it. And in 2016, I think, I got to perform in my friend Antonija Livingstone's project called, Culture, Administration & Trembling, and she was performing it at the, or presenting it at the American Realness Festival in the Lower East Side in New York City. And one of the other dance—I was a male breast feeder in this project of hers, and one of the other male breast feeders was this incredible queer performance artist named Diane Tor, who's originally from Scotland, lived on the Lower East Side forever, and does a lot of drag king work, and was asking people to talk about like, well talk about your practice, talk about what you do as an artist and talk about you know, like, whatever. And at this time in my life I just didn't like talking about whatI did, like, it's a new thing for me to feel more comfortable talking about my art making. And they were really great at being insistent, like, you know, they've kind of gone around the room and asked everybody what they were, what they were doing. So what like what's making you happy? What's making you tick? What's your work about? And I had, I guess, conspicuously slipped out of those conversations. And the way, when I talked about it, Diane just said, I'm still getting cheques from colleges that are paying me to do a project that I made in 1967.
Wow.
Yeah. It's like, there's this idea that you need to always be making something new and always be making something new. I think we see this in the HIV response too, with like, the with PHAC funding, where I was just like on this call a couple of weeks ago, where you know, like a bunch of us were complaining about how it's like, why don't you just give operational funding to the projects that are working, instead of requiring us to be innovating every single time. Like there are sustainable projects that work. And it was such a wake up call, and like this kind of like psychic slap in the side of the head that I really appreciated. Because they were like, this project that you told me about sounds great, why don't you try and tour it like what would you need to do that? And I was like, Oh, well, it all actually fits in the suitcase, it doesn't really require a whole lot. And then I started touring this work and it's, you know, it's not done and also like, to be honest, I'm going to, I'm going to do a project in Warsaw in like three weeks that is something that I did for the first time in 2015 with Alex McClelland. It's, you know, about HIV criminalization and, you know, did it at the conference in Amsterdam, the AIDS conference in Amsterdam, and now we're getting to do it kind of, and also bringing in Polish HIV activists to talk about how that relates, you know, like, we're gonna do like a little lecture kind of alongside and, and Alex is going to Skype in and I like...
Oh, that's exciting
Yeah, and I like that there's ways to kind of make it relevant to not just like, you know, make it relevant to the time that's different, but also make it relevant to the community context, like we're gonna have someone speaking in Polish, kind of naming some of the cases that have happened there, as opposed to just speaking English and talking about Canadian cases. So I like being able to kind of go back and dig into projects that I've done in the past because you know, things—the world is changing.
Yeah, just repurpose because it worked the first time, so...
Yeah, I was onto something.
Yeah, that's right. Here's a question...
Uh oh.
You're in love. You're in love. So do you get this gets this gonna ruin the creativity for the creative process for you?
I love that you asked me that question. No, I don't think so. I have never subscribed to the idea that artists need to be in pain to make meaningful or beautiful work. There's enough fucking pain out in the world that I can just take a handful of that and throw it into my practice.
Dip into that any time...
Yeah, I've also not resolved my own trauma history, like I've been working at it for long enough, but there's still quite a bit of meat on those bones. And also I like, as much as I am a bit of a jaded SOB and a dyed-in-the-wool nihilist, I also believe that like, I'm a very cheerful nihilist. And I think that nihilism is, you know, is a way for us to talk about queer accountability in the present moment. And always in the present moment that this is all that we know that we have, is this moment right now. So I'm beholden to you to be truthful and to be kind and courteous and whatever else the girls gets to...
Right. Well, that's fantastic. So, I'm going to—I always close pozcast with a lightning round—five lightning round questions.
Okay, great. Okay.
So you have to choose one of these. But there's a time limit on your thinking. So here we go. Silicone or waterbased?
Silicone.
Heels or Dr. Martens?
Heels.
Daytime or nighttime?
Nighttime.
City or country?
City.
Sex or drugs?
Drugs and sex.
It's one or the other here.
I don't know if you have noticed that gays are really good at combining sex and drugs.
This is true. Sex and drugs, not sex or drugs. Alright, well, fantastic. Thank you so much, Mikiki.
This was a total pleasure. Thank you very much, James.
That's it for us this month. Thanks for tuning in. We hope you'll join us next time on pozcast. And if you have any comments or questions or ideas for new episodes, send me an email to James.pozcast@gmail.com. Pozcast is produced by the MAP Center for Urban Health Solutions and positiveeffect.org. The Positive Effect is a facts-based, lived experience movement powered by people living with HIV. Technical production is provided by David Grein of the Acme podcasting company in Toronto.
