Our Share of the Work

Two years ago, the artist and filmmaker Matthew Lax convened a small group of gay men at a Los Angeles bookstore to discuss the state of identity politics in the US. Each of the seven men had read Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture (2023)—a study of how “knowledge, attention, and values become distorted and distributed by power structures”—and drew on the book to comment, sometimes bitterly, on crises in gay culture: from race and class prejudice to the hazards of assimilation (Pete Buttigieg chiding the Democratic party for investing in DEI), to a dearth of meaningful outlets in US civic life. “I’ve come to realize that electoral politics is a dead end,” remarks Jaime, in the first of several pessimistic statements voiced during Gay Men’s Book Club (2025), Lax’s film documenting the encounter. Another participant, Kevin, a therapist in his fifties, delivers a terse opinion of Táíwò’s thesis—“my reaction was one of ‘no shit’”—and speaks of the “despair” he feels surveying his community: “I see trauma everywhere,” he tells the group, “people are trying to fill themselves up because they feel worthless or ashamed.” Then there’s Sam, 28, the youngest at the table, who seems ready to write off the conversation entirely: “This book is for academics, not real people,” he says of Elite Capture, adding “I don’t believe in solidarity,” and questioning talk of identity after the depleting culture wars of the ’90s and 2000s: “It’s pointless.”

Judgements like these won’t surprise the many, many gays who share them freely, candidly, among one another. Yet it’s unusual to hear something so stark and dispiriting in an art-adjacent forum, since one of the art world’s favorite means of elite capture is appointing queer people, and gay men in particular, as avatars of refinement, lucidity, competence, and of course inclusion. We’re constantly tasked with making institutions respectable, lending them social currency, and at the same time humanizing their fundamentally inhumane cultures of consolidated wealth and power. Rest assured, Matthew’s intelligently conceived film is indeed tasteful, and the men are likewise thoughtful and ready to listen to one another. But the many disagreements, the obvious generational gulfs, the sense within the group of paralysis, moral constriction, even disdain for others at the table, suggests a community at odds with itself, subject to the same structural problems as society more broadly, yet also short of the real social agenda many of us want and are eager to fight for. This could be a description of the taciturn US Left more generally, but to witness so many dysfunctions among these men elicits the troubling sense that gay life is not, at present, defined by any distinguishable motives or values, much less a politics.

The hope one does feel watching Book Club comes mostly from the past. Matthew’s co-facilitator, 85-year-old Don Kilhefner—co-founder of the Los Angeles LGBT Center and, with Harry Hay, the Radical Faeries—has pushed for dramatic social change all his life, and now devotes his time to conducting intergenerational dialogues with younger gay men. In Book Club, he poses questions to the participants—“Who defined us as sexual beings?”—and provides them with frameworks and definitions—“The basic premise of community is that we assume responsibility for each other.” Don also acts as historian, conjuring local queer ancestors: first the Mattachine Society, formed in LA the 1950s and criticized, lately, for promoting benign conformity; then the more oppositional, post-Stonewall Gay Liberation Front, “a young generation of gay, lesbian, and trans people who came together and started a revolution that’s allowing us to be here today.” The other touchstone mentioned in Book Club—this time by Christopher, a graduate student from Philadelphia—is the Combahee River Collective, a group of black lesbian feminists who coined the phrase “identity politics” in 1977 to respond to the “interlocking” systems of patriarchy and racial capitalism which pervaded even progressive groups like NOW and the NAACP. They asserted a right to “create political priorities and actions and agendas,” in the words of Combahee founder Barbara Smith, based on a specific experience of the world. 

These histories remind us that real change can occur in a few decades—even less. “It doesn’t have to take years,” as Don points out. Yet any concerted effort to reshape US society, or—more modestly—to reform an infamously segregated and unequal city like Los Angeles, will mean allying with others, fostering radical consciousness in our communities, and, yes, holding ourselves accountable for the regressions we’re living through—the horror-show of a second Trump term, of course, but also long-simmering problems that liberal politicians don’t want to touch, even as they celebrate expanded protections for cisgender gay men and lesbians. What will we say about the impossible cost of living? Or the huge economic disparities everywhere in the developed world? Or humanitarian catastrophe? How will we stand up for our trans and non-binary friends?

I spoke to Matthew about these issues last month as he prepared to screen Gay Men’s Book Club at We Can Talk About Something Else, a group show themed around conversation at Loods6 in Amsterdam, and recently after the film premiered at the 54th Rotterdam International Film Festival. I asked him about queer politics, dialogical artworks that influenced his film, and the extent of elite capture in art and academia.

Nicholas Gamso: You mention in an opening title card that you had participated in a gay book club once before. What drew you to that intellectual space? What was that experience like? How did you select the participants for your film and choose the book?

Matthew Lax: A few years ago, right after the second Covid vaccine, I participated in a book club that was for gay men and run by gay men. We actually met in the back room of the same store that my film was shot in, Counterpoint Books and Records in Los Angeles. From the very beginning, I was fascinated by this self-selection process that brought us together. We read Didier Eribon’s Insult, a literary analysis of homophobic insults from Victorian times through the present, which concludes with a chapter on the idea of “defamed selves” taken from Hannah Arendt. We also read Sexual Hegemony by Christopher Chitty. None of us were academics—our conversations were not structured or guided by any one participant. 

I started to think about what I could do or make within this format—a non-hierarchical intellectual exercise with no specific goal outside of learning together. As I conceived the film, I considered what it would mean to bring in new participants, a more diverse population, with a broader spectrum of experiences, ages, and perspectives, who didn’t necessarily know each other, as many in this original book club had. I also knew early on that I didn’t want to read a “gay” book—those conversations are important, but they are ultimately too insular, particularly outside the scope of the “gay male experience.” Don actually suggested Táíwò’s Elite Capture after discussing the project with me. Just as I wanted an expansive group of participants, I was looking for an expansive conversation.

Nicholas: We’ve talked before about influences—particularly the works of artist Sharon Hayes. Your film reminds me of the first installment of Hayes’s Ricerche series in which she visits a Provincetown queer family event and asks the children of gay and lesbian couples questions like “how are babies born?,” sparking conversations among the group. The piece was inspired by Pasolini’s documentary Comizi d’Amore (1963), a sequence of man-on-the-street interviews about sexual politics and modern life more generally—industrialization, consumerism, the postwar Italian situation. I also thought of Hayes’s Gay Power (2007/2015), where she dubs footage of an early Pride event with commentary by the writer Kate Millett, and then reads a statement from the organizers warning participants to behave, to act respectably. That piece is about a real queer politics emerging as part of a broader coalition—particularly the anti-Vietnam War movement—and also illustrates some fissures among gay activists. There are other antecedents. 

Matthew: Sharon Hayes’s work is a huge influence, as well as Leigh Ledare’s film The Task (2017), which experiments with certain models of group relations that come out of social science research in the 1950s at the Tavistock Institute in London. Like a lot of clinical exercises from that period, The Task is borderline sadistic, pitting participants—twenty-eight adults living in Chicago, described by Ledare as a “cross section” of the city’s population—against each other in plays of authority and submission. Ledare himself is in the room, observing these interactions the whole time. So there’s a tension between the participants who are engaged in an imaginary self-analysis, which also touches on superficial aspects of their identities—how they are perceived based on race, gender, age—and who they are at a more fundamental level. The speakers don’t know each other either but they are aware of Ledare, and the whole apparatus—cameras, lights—is visible. 

A lot of my recent films originate in an interest in what happens when you bring a group of people together, but I’m also motivated by a desire for the conversation to engage the world outside of the film or performance itself. The Task is provocative, but I am not convinced that it is invested in social change. Gay Men’s Book Club is about revolution. It’s about thinking through solutions and communal paths forward in a moment of crisis. Sharon Hayes is definitely interested in this wider world, as well as queer history. She’s also committed to a kind of reciprocity that I try to emulate in my own work, where the artist and participants both get something out of a given project, and authorship is diffused for the sake of this growth. In Ricerche, this is as simple as her literally passing the mic from within the frame and inside the huddle of people, who appear all together with her in a wide shot. This isn’t “passing the mic” as a deferential gesture as described in Elite Capture, but a technique to keep the group together, making sure everyone is heard. Instead of the typical interview format—cutting from filmmaker to subject—which establishes a power differential, Hayes’s interview is democratic, conversational, among the subjects.

Nicholas: Compared to Hayes, you and I are speaking from a younger, less economically secure, and perhaps less politically engaged generational vantage, yet one which is, at the same time, highly educated, involved in art and ideas, maybe also somewhat self-conscious about not experiencing history in the same ways as Don, for instance. Your film is also specifically about gay men, not the queer community at large.

Matthew: I really responded to this idea of a case study because it gets at what is so uncomfortable about who is allowed to participate. There is also a lot of economic theory and speculation that centers around gay men as double agents—DINCs (disposable income, no children)—in capitalist society. Someone might watch my film and think, who are all these educated homosexuals having this well-mannered conversation? Leftism has this history of engaged discourse and actions through formal and more ad-hoc education, but I think these conversations are actually occurring all the time, not even in overtly political spaces, but simply because these issues have become unavoidable. At the same time, the flaws of these structures become evident really quickly, particularly with race and class. While I would not say Don and I are “in charge,” we are certainly the guiding forces of the project. And Don and I are white. That privilege is going to affect the flow of the conversation. It’s also why I gently push the group to criticize the project from within the film.

Nicholas: I’d be curious to hear how the men respond to that question now. Also to learn if any had misgivings that they decided to suppress or set aside for the sake of the project. So much of the piece is about the difficulties of making even temporary alliances, and perhaps also the sacrifices involved in any collective enterprise. Certainly the conversation feels very gay to me: there’s an earnestness, and a grammar, and as you suggest we recognize some of the characters and interactions. But there are also gaps in age and background and experience. What’s most striking to me is a reluctance to patch them up, or to articulate what, if anything, defines gay identity or community today. When gay life is discussed explicitly, it’s not exactly celebratory, or affirmative. The men don’t speak positively about their relationships or friendships—just the opposite. This surprised me a little.

Matthew: Recording the process definitely inhibits people. I think that tension around honesty is inherent to documentary filmmaking, but the project also invites that continued reflection. In Gay Power, Hayes talks about gay rights as “power lite.” She’s revisiting archival material, ’70s pride parades in the early aughts at an earlier period of the neoliberalization of gay culture. In these periods it was especially precarious to be publicly queer, let alone queer on film, which is not to say that queer rights and trans rights in particular are not in peril right now, obviously they are. But gay men, especially white gay men, have subsequently lived through a period of assimilation, particularly in Western metropolitan areas. Often, the word queer signals a political identity, gay man usually implies something else. We say “love wins” ironically to each other and have a disdain toward Pride culture and rainbow flags—that’s another reason I didn’t want to do a gay book. I’m more interested in where the culture goes now.

Nicholas: And yet it can be hard to get past the divisions. I struggled to suppress some of my assumptions around the participants’ ages for example. And race is something the members do have to confront—I think of Jaime, who complains about passive racism at the Community Services Center in Hollywood (now the LA LGBT Center), where he worked a few decades ago. These fissures are really at the heart of what you’re presenting. It’s a real conversation where participants are talking past each other, struggling to find the right words, changing their minds. You could say this indicates politics in a truer, more “agonistic” sense—motivated by disagreements and conflicts—but from my perspective, the conversation, with its loose ends and non-conclusion, is most appealing because so many contemporary, political, identity-driven artworks come with an implied argument or analysis. You’ve left an unusually wide margin for the men in the film, and for the audience.

Matthew: The conversation is built around the structure proposed at the beginning of the film: we introduce ourselves, everyone shares an initial thought about the book, then there’s a back-and-forth discussion, followed by a sort of summation. It’s a classic, almost Socratic formula. This structure is really about and acknowledging and hearing everyone’s perspective, but it lends itself to a kind of arc too. In the beginning, Sam starts off very opinionated, irritated even, as I think many people his age are right now, but by the end he’s saying something slightly different. There is a shift. Maybe that’s also fatigue. These conversations are exhausting. Even what Richard says at the end, about being conscious of who’s not in the room—that is a kind of arc. In editing the film, I think my challenge was firstly, not to edit myself, or make myself seem more articulate, or assuage the flaws of the project while also—I hate to say this—keep the entire conversation moving, acknowledging that these conversations are inherently repetitive and frustrating. 

Nicholas: I wanted to bring up generational difference. For me, befriending older queers has led to the most enriching and happy discoveries. I also sense a deep concern among certain queer elders for our generation—probably also for younger people. They see us as out of touch with the urgent political projects of the past, as living a shallow, professionalized, gentrified queer existence. Your friendship with Don—tell me how you met him? What’s your take on his position vis-a-vis the other participants?

Matthew: When I was first scheming this project, several people from the LA Tenants Union mentioned Don. We had an immediate rapport and Don became a mentor figure to me. Just listening to him is invigorating. Don distrusts a lot of visual culture from a Marxist perspective—he’s seen art, like so many other fields, become professionalized and commodified over his lifetime. This is elite capture. Initially he advised on the project and helped me find someone with similar training and background to be in the film. That person could not commit, and Don had said he’d be willing to formally participate.

As someone who hadn’t previously considered himself as an organizer, I learned a lot from Don about working with people and listening. Don’s generation is very concerned about us. We have this idea that since we grew up with the internet, we know everything. But they have the luxury of hindsight. Don was a founding member of the Radical Fairies, co-founder of the LA LGBT Clinic, and he’s been involved in community organizing for decades. He’s incredibly well-read, as demonstrated in the film. He has seen everything. It’s hard not to be inspired by him.

Nicholas: He’s also the one man in the room who believes in the possibility of social transformation, having witnessed huge changes in his lifetime: “You were born into a community which only knows elite capture,” he says, “you haven’t known anything else. If that’s all I knew, I would be despairing with you.” I’m not sure he convinces the others. What do you make of his optimism?

Matthew: I sometimes wonder if that’s how he really feels or if he just doesn’t want to let me see him sweat. Which is such an educator move. He is really patient with me and Sam. He always teases me—“do you understand what gay culture is now?”—and of course I understand gay culture historically, but I’m living in gay culture under the conditions of “elite capture.” It’s not that we don’t have a culture, but we have a problem within gay culture. 

Nicholas: Don also speaks about a “willful narcissism” and “intellectual laziness” (Táíwò’s terms, borrowed from Frantz Fanon) among many of the gays he’s encountered and presumably worked with as an analyst over the years. It is a powerful moment, and one of the most pointed remarks in the film—and striking because he is otherwise so positive. He seems to imply that identity without politics—community without politics—only serves to alienate people and destroy their innate curiosity. This is a crucial idea, since we live in a time of social isolation, where there is a hunger for any kind of social contact, yet when the outcomes aren’t necessarily happy.  

I wanted to ask you about Kevin, he’s a therapist, too, right?  He seems to suggest that having a culture built, as he sees it, around the pleasures of carousing, drugs, parties—practices that are often celebrated, understandably, in queer art and culture—can mask a sense of loss, and there’s a sadness to it. It is a provocative statement, but not a new one. I think of Larry Kramer.

Matthew: Yes, exactly. Counter to Don’s pragmatic approach, Kevin acknowledges the harsh realities from a deeply personal place with profound empathy. He brings a lot of darkness to the conversation. That’s another arc. He begins as extremely critical of academia and by the end he’s emotionally talking about coping, addiction, and loneliness. I believe in liberation as a speculative aspiration, I just do not see how we get there currently. A mental health professional acknowledging hopelessness through his own tears is actually really refreshing in a society where we have literally commodified “joy.” Kevin names my own issue with gay culture, namely its penchant for youth, for sex. I am trying to locate something sustainable that isn’t fleeting or aesthetic.

Nicholas: These are serious questions that require many conversations in small and large groups—though, as Táíwò points out, too much talk can mire political agency in battles for deference, or feelings of guilt over problems that are, in fact, structural, historical. I don’t exactly disagree, but I do feel we have to make space to voice despair, longing, grief, and, yes, trauma in our communities—even if what gets expressed turns out to be regressive or politically useless, or if it gets corrupted by elite capture. I see your film as a forum for airing these feelings, not just for participants but for your audience—I listen to what the men say, I want to respond, certainly I hear things I disagree with. Art can be a space for processing these mixed feelings, and making them visible, palpable—it can help you develop political consciousness—though obviously the problem of elite culture persists.

Matthew: So many people, both inside and outside the art world, continue to question the efficacy of art, or dispute the correlation between art and activism. I think this is a dead end. Another influence is Lizzie Borden’s Regrouping (1976), which documents the formation of a feminist collective. The film becomes about failure, both failure of the group as well as the era. When I was editing my film, I was also reading Ethan Philbrick’s Group Works (2023), which has a whole section dedicated to Regrouping in connection to big protests of our time—Occupy Wall Street, as well as the Pussy Hat protests from 2016, which named a problem without specific demands. Philbrick is interested in the collective ambivalence of people sharing space together—and proposes this gathering process is what is actually generative. In my film, we got together and had a conversation, and acknowledged the despair rather than hiding from it. We may not solve anything in ninety minutes but that doesn’t mean the artist isn’t accountable or responsible, or that art is about a solution proper. The resolution has to happen outside of the film, outside of the museum. 

Nicholas: I am in the middle of another conversation with some art historian friends about the legacies of participatory art and social practice—and the way these experiments have been absorbed not just by museums but the whole creative economy. We are so networked, so identified with our professional communities. Much of what we do and say—even the conversation we are having now—is in a sense legitimated by our institutional and professional attachments. Of course it’s not always the case. We do have our private lives and friends and partners. But the reach of proprietary institutions, the prestige economy—these make it difficult to have these conversations with strangers without some risk of exploitation.

Matthew: I think of Andrea Fraser’s This Meeting is Being Recorded (2021), where she performs as all the different members in a white supremacy task force. Fraser’s performance is brilliant, parodying these hopeless institutional conversations and her own practice at once. But there’s also something really smug in the virtuosity of the performance that distracts from the real issues at hand, namely racism and capitalism. What if we had a real conversation, removed from the conventions of performance or institutional validation, embracing the real difficulties and potential for actual failure, that has actual ramifications? If we’re so aggravated by social practice, maybe we should try framing the conversations differently. Why criticize social practice and organizing using the same language or conventions we use to make and critique painting or film? No one challenges the grandiosity of someone calling themselves an artist, but we always question the generosity of social practice. There is something else going on here, again, outside the frame. 

Nicholas: You’re identifying one of the ways elite capture works—even how it works on critiques of institutional culture. A project fails and that failure is recuperated as experiment, or performance. I worry that we sometimes condemn ourselves to failure because we know it can be recuperated, the stakes are lower, the rewards are the same, we expect less from everyone.

Academia is like this too—eager to cede its own potential. I think we have to remember our successes, and fight for more. Fields like Black Studies and Ethnic Studies were part of social movements—they broadened access to higher education, they changed what education is. In the US—in California, where I live—universities have been way more socially transformative than, say, policy think tanks or non-profit “public scholarship.” Millions of students are passing through these institutions each year. The effects go way beyond what is statistically measurable. Look at the way queer and gender studies changed the conversation on trans identity.

Matthew: Places where you are actually allowed and encouraged to think are so rare. I wonder if that aversion to academia has something to do with the perceived classism… or debt. 

Nicholas: The critiques are not unwarranted. And some situations—Columbia University’s capitulation to Trump—reveal the thirst for money and social positioning at the heart of elite institutions especially. Still, we have to protect those spaces where resistance can be seeded and real conversations can happen. 

Matthew: I disagree that Elite Capture is written for academics, by the way. A lot of people are having these conversations. One of the useful things that I think came out of #MeToo and trans rights is trying to publicly unpack so-called masculinity or, more accurately, pervasive patriarchy. That’s why I wanted to work with gay men. This is a faction, not represented in my film, that doesn’t understand our intersectionality, they don’t see that it’s both the conservatives and the neoliberals that are coming for us. I think we need to constantly reevaluate our institutions and also acknowledge the importance of maintaining some kind of flexible educational infrastructure. We criticize these institutions because we need more from them. People need spaces to think, to experiment. Very often these mantles are taken on by our trans siblings and lesbians. Capitalism does not afford them the same autonomy, and I think it’s time for us—as damning as “gay men” may sound as a term—to re-politicize that identity and do our share of the work.

Nicholas Gamso is an art critic and editor. He teaches at California College of the Arts.

Matthew Lax is an artist-filmmaker and writer who often collaborates with animals, non-actors, and the “everyday ensembles” found within families, lovers, hobby clubs, and kink communities. Working between documentary and narrative, his films and installations extrapolate from the participants' real-life relationships and Lax’s own autobiography to explore group behavior, power dynamics, language, critical exchange, and labor production. Lax’s screenings and exhibitions include Viennale (Austria), IHME Contemporary (Helsinki), Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin), MIX New York, table (Chicago), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), and Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, among others. In 2025, he was the subject of a survey presentation at the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Film stills and clip: courtesy of Matthew Lax

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