Tim Barrus: The Truth is a Bitch From Hell: Boys Who Do Sex Work Take Photographs

In the Red Chair Poems, the Smash Street boys took on poetry http://theredchairpoems.tumblr.com. In Truth is a Bitch From Hell, the Smash Street Boys explore the dark America they know.

I am not curating this. They are. Who are they. They are when they allow you in, really in, very, very dark. Their sense of humor is perverse.

We think Tumblr will nuke us.

Poetry being so controversial. It’s a little pathetic on their part.

We have received the annoying notice.

Ordinary moments with a darker meaning.

Perhaps we might be safer here. Time will tell. Time is hard as rocks on any human landscape.

We will take you there. Our goal is to remove any identifying context that could in no uncertain terms explain to the audience what it is they are seeing.

It is not our job to explain.

You may choose to see or not to see. To see up close what the thing is or to not see at all.

All digital imagery, that ubiquitous animal, can be loaded with interactive tension. Where was this taken why was this taken who are these people and what are the issues involved.

Yet this is not a dialogue because there is no dialogue. The appetite of voyeurism in America is as predatory as the haunts we will photograph. It’s a dance of broken parts: color, light, and shadow. It will be disorienting and embedded deeply into subtexts that will tell a story of a culture at odds with itself. Ideals and values are distorted. The visuals are transient. They will win no photographic awards, and people will turn away.

This is the vision of the boy at-risk with a camera. It doesn’t have to be your vision. He is not required to share your vision. He is only required to have a voice. His camera will be that.

It does not belong to you.

The Truth is a Bitch From Hell: Ordinary Dark Images of America will disturb you. We are always being told to tell the truth.

You can’t handle the truth.

They are darkness. They are the darkness.

If they lick your face, they will run your eyeballs free. They will suck your cock for ten bucks but don’t cum in his mouth. If you cum in his mouth, that’s another ten dollars. He sucks you so hard — he is unrelenting — you cum in his mouth. Twenty bucks. Payment on delivery.

Tricks play all kinds of games with them that are, in fact, power plays. The trick who wants to be dominated is always telling you what to do. It’s all a negotiation.

As is everything else including but not limited to, memory. You know how the games goes. Or you wouldn’t be here. You know all the structures of how the thing is played. But why are you the darkness. Because, just look around. Back when you were getting beaten up, back when you were living under his roof, in his house, who did he think he was, your father. Your dark, dark father who was not never there. But for the times he was beating you as well. How is it you develop what is referred to as a sexuality in the middle of a war zone. How do you begin a process that is protective of one’s self.

You are conflicted.

It has defined you. You have not defined it. It has everything to do with every waking moment. Whether people understand that or not. It doesn’t really matter what other people understand.

They don’t get it because it just stays with you and it informs all of your decisions.

It’s a lot genetic.

I have rowed that boat to China so they kinda know I get it. Even so, they are darkness. They are the darkness.

It comforts them, the darkness.

But never in a boat, and not one being rowed to China.

It also kinda stuns you that you are not alone because you had always assumed you were but this was just an illusion. And you really do not know what to do with those relationships.

Somewhere in this, your step-father who is your father becomes your pimp who is your drug dealer and the cop who will bust you for tricking at the Hyatt Regency.

It’s all the same person and he just slaps you around, Cumface.

If the tricks get wind of this, you’re finished.

They suspect it. They are not quite aware of what they get — they cannot articulate it, but they’re vampires who suspect some blood — and there are molecules in the air of it and tricks are always on the prowl for the drugs that brought you here.

And then, I put a camera in your face.

In fact, I give you the camera.

The kid gets it right away. Were he to personify what he knows and what of the world and the landscape he knows, he knows he is thusly more than someone to cum on or cum in. Or at least the possibility is there. But will he use it, or will he let the moment pass. One way or the other. I am told they will sell the cameras. None of them ever has.

The adult world looks at this and doesn’t know what it is. When it’s eighteen, social services cuts it loose. Often, it cuts itself loose well before then. Convinced that if he stays, in whatever situation has been contrived for him, he will be murdered for what he knows.

What does he know.

Who does what to whom at least some of the time. How much any drug might cost. When the ship called Dronabinol for the HIV comes into port. They’re exhausting. They know too much. They are darkness. They are the darkness.

They’re taking their cameras out into the world today. Why.

Because they are photographers.