Queer fine art photography platform BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! launched in 2020. Here, founder Ghislain Pascal shares key fetish-themed images from the BOYS! archive, and reflects on the project’s meteoric rise.
Sometimes I look at stuff and think ‘that’s gone a little too far’. Then I’ll think, ‘This was happening in the 70s! Put your big boy pants on!’ One man’s kink is another man’s repulsion – you have to accept it.
A photographer once sent me a picture of someone peeing in someone’s mouth. I took it out, put it back in… It was actually a really beautiful picture. Nobody bought it, but sometimes you include things based on merit.
We’ve never looked at kink as a specific theme at BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! but it’s there: jockstraps, trainers, leather, peeing, a lot of masks. Especially with gay and queer photography, the photographer’s personal fetishes come through.
The reference point, for me, is always Robert Mapplethorpe. He made kink very present in his photography, whether whips or bondage.
“Less willies“
My mantra, though, is always, ‘less willies’! I don’t want BOYS! to be perceived as another ‘sexy pictures’ outlet. There are loads of magazines, like Crotch and Yummy, that do that really well.
But I wouldn’t consider them – and I don’t think they’d consider themselves – ‘fine art photography’. That’s the prism I look through when curating. Over the years, my curation’s gotten artier. I try to make it distinct. I want to be surprised.
Art, at the end of the day, is about beauty; something you want to hang on your wall and enjoy, to look at. If it’s kinky, and maybe you’re not comfortable hanging it in your living room… hang it in your bedroom! At my house in rural France, as you go up, the mood changes. My living room’s very safe, but by the time you get to my private bathroom, that’s where the kinky stuff is!
