How did the idea for Pulp come around?
I work at GAY TIMES, and Jack Rowe is the art director. Previously, GT would do these very hilarious, and sleazy and cringe things in a specific period, roughly between 2008 and 2012 when it was in print. Like a ‘Naked Issue’, and the current cast of Hollyoaks would be nude in it, and Jack and I were talking about the publication’s links to soft porn.
In 1977, one of the magazines that would become GAY TIMES
lost one of the last blasphemy cases in the UK, because they published this poem that eroticised Christ on the cross. It was bought by another magazine that did soft porn, and the publication had a long history of floating in between being political and porny. Then in the 2008 to 2012 it had this Hollyoaks guys period, and would do things like ‘Fitty of the Week’ – very gay male gaze. It was before any conversations around desirability politics, and Jack wanted to bring back the naked issues, but do something reflective of the current times – have a bunch of different body types, people from different backgrounds and ethnicities. That never happened.
I’m guessing it was a “no” from the publisher?
It’s also really hard to get people to pose naked. But yeah, that never went beyond us talking. Then Adonis, the London-based LGBTQ+ rave, made a zine to raise funds. It features erect dicks in it, and now it’s stocked in the British Library. Jack did the design, it’s very cool and really cemented Jack as someone who has a cheeky sense of humour [to me], and is interested in eros and sexuality in a fun way. We both really wanted to bring a bit more fun into the sex space.
We had been able to do some stuff at GAY TIMES, like we just did ‘The Package Issue’ that was all about dicks, which was great, but when you work with a magazine, you have to consider being social media friendly and think about the audience. But we wanted to do something a bit more experimental. With my background of writing about sex and relationships for seven years, in that time I’ve seen a lot of changes, primarily to do with how social media and the internet are the primary arbiters of how we think about sexuality. Machines and AI interpret how we talk about sexuality and deem what is and isn’t appropriate. That is incredibly frustrating, and while there’s a lot of sex in the mainstream, what is considered sex and what is considered valid in terms of sexuality is still very orthodox. A lot of minority sexualities or kinks are played as kind of a joke, or something sensationalist or freakish.
