Abstract
Manchester Penetrated (@mcrpenetrated) is a multi-disciplinary transgressive queer art construct created and curated by the dual personalities of Patrick Baxter/Dr. Sebastian Baxter. For a half decade they have created an array of embodied deviant art and experientially informed sensual scholarship. In this chapter, they shall illustrate their practice through focusing on autoethnographic (Holman Jones & Adams, Autoethnography Is a Queer Method. In K. Browne & C.J. Nash (Eds.), Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research. Routledge. pp. 195–214, 2010) storytelling as a form of deviant declaration, the sexualised drug subculture Chemsex (Bourne et al., The Chemsex Study: Drug Use in Sexual Settings Among Gay & Bisexual Men in Lambeth, Southwark & Lewisham. Sigma Research, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, 2014; Hakim, Cultural Studies 33(2):1–27, 2018) as an illicit queer congregation of dissident sexual citizens, and ketamine-induced multi-model hallucinations provoking occultist psychosexual urban art explorations and interventions.
This chapter is unconventionally structured in three distinct text-based movements each with its own distinct tone, texture, and style. It argues that their multi-sensory and self-reflexive work is not only nominally deviant by transgressing social mores, criminal law, political consensus, and so on (Becker, The Outsider: Studies in the Sociology of Deviancy. The Free Press, 1963; Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Routledge Classics, [1972] 2011), but in more abstract sense, dismantles established routes of conceptualising, constructing, and disseminating knowledge of analogue deviancy, hence is the only conceivable means of uncovering and unleashing the truly deviant city.
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Notes
- 1.
The de-facto definition of Chemsex established by ‘The Chemsex Report’—despite its limited scope—has remained persistent throughout research fields: “Engaging in sexual activities while under the influence of drugs. Often involves group sex or a high number of partners in one session…Chemsex is commonly understood to describe sex between men that occurs under the influence of drugs taken immediately preceding and/or during the sexual session” (Bourne et al., 2014: 6, 8). For a more expansive, though we argue not definitive, definition see: Baxter, 2021b.
- 2.
The established clinical, academic term is men who have sex with other men (MSM). We feel that as scholars of, active participants in the lived experience of, and artists who create reproduction of Chemsex subculture, we have the privilege of discarding with what is a very anodyne imposition of language alien to the people it refers to. Men who fuck men feels to us more appropriate as it is consistent with the type of language people use in daily lived queer deviant settings, while acknowledging that we have coined the term and are not suggesting that it is a widely distributed neologism.
- 3.
It is notable how many secret societies had a distinctly artistic congregation; the nineteenth-century scene was littered with the literati, from Parisian Romantics (Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Rimbaud) to Old Albion/New World Gothic Romantics (Bryon, Wollstonecraft, Poe) all expressing affiliation with the occult or Satanist/Luciferin ideas. Cree** into the twentieth century, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and Arthur C. Clarke were all quite centrally involved, running in similar circles to Aleister Crowley. Jazz and rock music became the prominent carrier as the twentieth century progressed, though we note that queer art exhibits a high concentration of practitioners and enthusiasts—see section “Cine-Hex ‘We Are the Skin of the City’ and Cut-Up Graffiti Art Series”. For more on literary occult history, see van Luijk, R.B. (2013) Satan rehabilitated? A study into satanism in the nineteenth century unpublished PhD dissertation, Tilburg University, Rotterdam, Psilopoulos, D. (1995) A Conspiracy of the Subconscious: Yeats, Crowley, Pound, Graves and the Esoteric Tradition Unpublished PhD dissertation, The University of Edinburgh, and Stirling, K., and Dutheil de la Rochère, H.M. eds (2010) After Satan: Essays in Honour of Neil Forsyth Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne. For an authoritative account of more recent occult art synthesis see Partridge, C. (2004) The Re-Enchantment of the West Volume 1: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture, T & T Clark International, London, and New York, with popular music variations analysed in Spracklen, K (2017) ‘Sex, Drugs, Satan and Rock and Roll: Re-thinking Dark Leisure, from Theoretical Framework to an Exploration of Pop-rock-metal Music Norms’ Annals of Leisure Research, 21 (4) pp. 407–423.
- 4.
Though Situationist’s tend to steal the limelight, another school of psychogeographic thought developed soon after from The Clark School (Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts) coalescing around Kevin Lynch’s cognitive map** approaches. Lynch proposed that the ‘image of a city is consisted of numerous other individual images … its “imageability” can be further ‘classified into paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks’ (Lynch, 1960: 46) spaces that imprint ocular cognitive nodes that play ‘a significant role in the public image of the city’ (Daniilidis, 2016:420). Less lofty than its Parisian counterpart, cognitive map** tended to overlook systems of social control and politics of resistance, and furthermore, fosters an ocular-centric understanding of the city ill-attuned to embrace haptic knowledge or embodied interactions with urban space that we aim towards. See Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City, Massachusetts, London: MIT Press Cambridge.
- 5.
See MOCA interview on YouTube search: Nan Goldin—The Ballad of Sexual Dependency—MOCA U—MOCAtv.
- 6.
We should here note that ‘Naked Lunch’ was written prior to Burroughs experimentation with the Cut-Up, see Baxter (2022b), Land (2005).
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Baxter, P.&.S. (2023). Subcutaneous Stories from the Deviant City: Chemsex Congregations, Urban Explorations, and Occult Inclinations in the Art of Manchester Penetrated. In: Lamond, I.R., Garland, R. (eds) Deviant Leisure and Events of Deviance. Leisure Studies in a Global Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17793-4_13
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