Exclusive: How One Poet Turns Gay Intimacy Into Art
Poet Josh Tvrdy partners with photographer Cody Perry for a visual narrative in this Gayety Exclusive. “Compulsory Sex Choka” combines poetry and erotic images that will ignite your mind and body.
My name is Josh Tvrdy, an award-winning poet and author of Smut Psalm, and I love writing about gay sex. There’s just something about it. Thrilling. Sultry. Taboo. Dense with meaning, and deliciously contradictory. In other words: a fertile poetic subject.
Four years ago, when I was a budding content creator, I met Cody Perry, a talented photographer. After working together on a few shoots, Cody approached me with an innovative idea: what if we visually recreated one of my poems through an erotic photo series?
Poetry and photography, entangled like lovers?
The project was incredibly rewarding — both my poem and Cody’s photos were enriched by their interplay. This is our second collaboration of this kind, and we’re excited to share it.
The poem you’ll find below, “Compulsory Sex Choka,” was born from my on-the-ground, decades-long participation in a grand gay tradition: hooking up.
I’ve had great casual sex. I’ve had terrible casual sex. But mostly, I’ve had something harder to define, a hazy in-between. Sex that’s good and bad, hot and awkward, nourishing and demeaning. We tried to capture this contradiction visually. Shots that oscillate between decadent sensuality and basement-bar grime. Shots that spotlight bodies, followed by shots that spotlight objects — the couch, the jockstrap, the solitary bulb.
Like lovers, the poem and the photo series are autonomous entities, whole without each other. But also like lovers, when they’re together, rolling around in sweaty sheets, something else — something beautiful and distinctive — emerges. We want this project to feel triumphant and fatigued, sexy and rough, lonely and intimate, because most human moments are filled with more than one feeling.
We often forget how complicated we are. Art (and sex, too) helps us remember.
