Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“Do you know what a cliché is? It’s a story so fine and thrilling that it’s grown old in its hopeful retelling.”

“Queerness is the pursuit of happiness embodied. Queerness is the pursuit of happiness registered as both a necessity and a virtue. Queerness is the statement—sexual, aesthetic, intellectual, and affective—that one’s happiness belongs to oneself and must be pursued as such.”

This edition elaborates understandings of the party by considering the hidden, the invisible, and the underground as material and imaginary forces, where partying is not only festive and excessive, but manifests in forms of social and political organizing, cultural and subcultural conversation, the maintenance of safe spaces and the building of parallel structures against established institutional forms.

“What Elsie Mendl had was something else that’s particularly American—an appreciation of vulgarity. Vulgarity is a very important ingredient in life. I’m a great believer in vulgarity—if it’s got vitality. A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste—it’s hearty, it’s healthy, it’s physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I’m against.”