Chinese-American author Geoffrey Mak’s debut book, Mean Boys, out now via Bloomsbury, is a collection of essays in which Mak recalls his life through his experiences with sex and sexual abuse, drugs, partying, fashion and the corporate world. Through these stories, Mak pulls the book into something greater as it veers into a broader exploration and commentary on society, culture, style and how the world evolved over the past two decades through the eyes, actions and attitudes of male figures in positions of influence. It is a powerful, poignant, often touching and sometimes painful text – but one that is impossible to put down. At the end of it all, Mak brings it all home by leaving what has been in the past – but looking at how it is is shaping the present and future.
Read an excerpt from the book below, courtesy of Bloomsbury.
When Ben and I started going to Berghain, it felt like a rite of passage into some hermetic gay cult. Everything was discreet and fetishistic. We went every weekend, all summer. Our weekly party routine started on Friday, with a “warm- up” party, and then some bigger gay parties on Saturday at outer venues, such as Griessmuehle or ://about blank. At sunrise, we’d get back to our place and take a nap. Then on Sunday afternoon, we’d put on music and drink cheap wine while trying out different outfits in front of our hallway mirror. Our looks alternated from punk to health goth: combat boots, black vintage tees, and knee-high football socks. I remember Ben had these torn up Docs, which he had to pin together with a row of safety pins, like a tiny aluminum spine, that all came apart throughout the course of the night. Another time, I wore two oversize belts I bought at the market, clipped together with safety pins and cross-looped around my shoulders and back like a DIY harness. I had an elaborate system for where I stashed my drugs and how I recognized my bags when, at some late point in the night, speed or coke or K would all look like clumps of fungible white sugar.
We mostly went to Berghain on Sunday afternoons. Once we got in, we’d go out and tour the garden, find some people we knew, and then go off to the bathroom to split lines parceled out on our iPhones. Coke and ketamine we called “Calvin Klein,” and ketamine with MDMA, “Kate Moss.” We snorted both with rolled up euros, or tiny steel straws, which people either were or weren’t weird about sharing with strangers. From the downstairs bathroom, we’d walk upstairs to Berghain’s main hall, before which stood a massive white statue of Dionysus, a stand-in for bodily hedonism in dialectic with the technological severity of the club’s mechanistic aesthetic in neoclassical drag. Inside the main hall, there were no windows to the outside, yet the high, glass panels that divided the dance floor from the bar lent the space the autocratic aura of a cathedral.
The crowd was filled with a curated cast of recognizable characters: shirtless leather gays, models from the Eastern Bloc set, cybergoths, new wave porn stars, speed freaks from the hardcore scene, and art world intellectuals. Ben and I usually lost one another in the crowd, found other friends, moved between “upstairs” and “downstairs,” or drifted into lines for the bathroom stalls to share drugs, buy drugs, or take a shit because E gave you the runs. It wasn’t uncommon to run into somebody I knew from New York who was in town for the weekend: DJs doing the European festival circuit or artists stopping by in the city before exhibiting at Basel. This is how I got most of my social news — six-month recaps in the garden, sharing a bottle of Club-Mate between us in concrete cubicles beneath the trees.
All throughout the building hummed the 4/4 beat associated with techno, looped in perpetuity: one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. This music is often identified by a rhythmic system from 120 to 140 BPM, into which changes and revolutions are gradually introduced by a modification of individual components in exquisite relation to each other. At Berghain, a closing techno set can run up to fifteen hours. To some of the techno DJs I know, a set that lasts one hour is considered “light”; two hours, “enough to work with”; four hours, “standard”; and eight to fourteen hours, merely “a challenge” and curiously not “unreasonable.” It’s perhaps by this logic that techno makes people “lose their minds” at the rave, in the sense that the phrase is also used to mean maniacal. After spending upward of twenty hours in a single club, a combination of sustained sleep deprivation, drugs, and exhaustion from having not eaten contributes to a sophisticated delirium. In a meditative state, the conscious mind becomes vacant to receive the unknown. It is possible to fall into multiple states of consciousness at once, like sleepwalking through a lucid dream. Only after the repeated breakdown and exhaustion of one’s restrictive faculties — what might be considered bodily system failure — can the secret life of one’s mind be permitted to flourish, completely uninhibited, at ten in the morning, when you are beyond dehydrated, skin slicked smooth by the salt of your sweat.
“When gratification is deferred to such an attenuated state, the anticipation becomes palpable. Tension hovers like a forecast of thunder. Static seems to gather in the air, crackling and fizzing with expectation.”
Toward Klubnacht’s final stretch, when Sunday begins to vibrate into Monday, people socialize in the lounge or go out and get food before coming back. Others take more drugs, burn out fast, leave. The gays, losing interest in the dance floor, go to fuck in the darkrooms, where monotonous music is preferred, allowing sexual rhythms to ride their course, uninterrupted by sudden gyrations or beat drops in the music. In fact, the kind of techno played during these hours, from one to four, resembles an intensely slow simmer, refined to an almost perverse level, like the way sex happens in these places over drawn-out periods of time, with shared partners moving in and out of the orgy’s physical configurations.
Amid the right wing’s push for book bans, there are more LGBTQ+ titles to read than ever.
When gratification is deferred to such an attenuated state, the anticipation becomes palpable. Tension hovers like a forecast of thunder. Static seems to gather in the air, crackling and fizzing with expectation. At some point in the early morning, after four but before six, the promised moment that only the club’s most serious regulars know to expect arrives. The dance floor has thinned out. New entrances to the club have closed. Then, music blasts like a gunshot, blitzing across the cheering and whistling crowd. Heads gather to the dance floor from all corners of the club, as if getting dragged into a whirlpool. The percussion comes suddenly and majestically, like a bolt, not from outside but from within the speakers, sizzling and electrifying along the wires and bursting onto the dance floor. With the lights spasmodically flashing across the building, you’d think it was Beyoncé at the Super Bowl. The building declares its soul in these moments, the way a machine achieves formal ecstasy when used at maximum capacity. Rhythm propels your body. Between the ground and the ceiling, it seems, is the universe contained, and it is moving. Lights bend off lacquered skin in a million tiny laser beams as we move in unison to the same beat. In the music, desire and gratification become one, both terrifying and propulsive. Joy cuts like rain. I often experienced this as a release, but into what, I couldn’t determine. It wasn’t us in control, and it wasn’t exactly the DJ, but it was something that everyone undeniably felt and knew like an instant ravening. Our insatiable hunger for it matched the inexhaustibility of its pleasure, and that’s exactly what it was, pleasure, abundant and overflowing. To know this kind of pleasure is to know the body at its maximum capacity. There isn’t any faith required; it is absolute presence.
