Dean Sameshima

Evan: Hi Dean! So nice to meet you.
Dean: Welcome to Berlin.
It’s nice to be back. Seems fitting that you live five-minutes from Boiler…
I’ve never been.
Are you serious?
I’m not into bathhouses anymore.
But was it your thing at one point?
On my way to finding what was my thing. I definitely went to bathhouses in the 80s and 90s.
What is your thing?
Porn theaters. The spaces I go to aren’t gay specific. In gay spaces, Asian dudes get treated differently. I prefer spaces that cater to bisexual men and married men. Men who don’t identify as gay.
So your photographs in the Venice Biennale were all taken in straight porn theaters?
Mostly, yeah. The biggest one shut down in 2020, not because of Covid, but because the property was purchased. That one had like eight different theaters. It was amazing. There was a trans theater – trans and bi always get stuck together. Then a bunch of straight ones, and lesbian porn, which is also catered to straight men.
Right.
But yeah, all the portraits I took were in the straight rooms. The screens are whited out, so you can’t tell what these guys are watching.
I thought it was a sleazy Hiroshi Sugimoto gesture.
I wanted to make it ambiguous. One of my inspirations was Walker Evans’s ‘Subway portrait’ series where he hid his camera, but I wanted to photograph a community that I identified with. Evans’s photographs are very frontal, but I keep mine more anonymous. They had to be from the back. With the screens, I didn’t want sex to be the first thing recognized.
There’s this quality to a lot of your work that, like, if you know, you know. You could pick up on the tissue box, but it’s easy to miss. There’s a photograph of yours I love with two gloryholes lined up in close-up…
That was taken in a big porn theater that has since closed. It was straight, too. It was called Erdbeermund, which means “strawberry mouth”, I guess for a woman’s red lips, or something.
Do you have any favorite spots that are still around?
Yeah, but I’m not sharing. (both laugh)
Fair enough.
It’s just because, you know, this is my space. I don’t wanna be watched. I do have relationships with these people and if gays start going to these spaces, it’s just gonna become this catty bitch fest. There’s a different kind of vibe when gay people cruise. It’s almost cut-throat.

What’s the vibe of these men? In ‘Times Square Red, Times Square Blue’, Samuel Delaney writes a lot about how he loved that the New York porn theaters were a mixed-class space. No snobbery.
My copy of the book is on the shelf right behind me. That’s definitely part of it. I’ve also never seen trans women cruise anywhere else before. I used to go to Grunewald and Volkspark Hasenheide, but I’d never see them there. They do really well in these bisexual spaces. Also, a lot of the guys I meet don’t speak English. We wouldn’t have crossed paths any other way.
What else are you into?
Maybe toxic masculinity is my fetish. And gray hair.
Toxic masculinity, but from apparently friendly straight men.
Totally, open-minded straight men.
That doesn’t sound so toxic.
Maybe not. That’s probably what other people would say about it.
You moved here from LA, right?
Mhm. In 2007. I first visited in 2006 when Peres Projects just arrived. They shipped all of us to the opening of Terrence Koh’s first show here.
And you never left.
Basically. It was wild. We were throwing beer bottles at the walls at like 11 in the morning. But anyway, I came in with that party mindset, as so many of us do, and then I became sober. It’s a beautiful place with a clear head. I fucking love it.
How does it compare to LA? Do you find sex and cruising more chill here?
A thousand times better.
Back in the 90s, you started photographing empty cabins in saunas and other cruising spaces around LA. How did that start?
I got started taking photos at punk shows. Then I went to CalArts for undergrad in ’92. Lewis Baltz was a big inspiration for my first project, which was called ‘Wonderland’. That was a documentary project on the sex clubs around Silver Lake. And then I took landscape photographs of Griffith Park and Harbor City Recreational Park and tea rooms around South LA, all cruising hotspots. This was before Grindr, but online cruising was already a thing.
Did you have a sense when documenting these spaces that they were in danger of disappearing?
What really lit a fire under my ass was that the police were cracking down on these spaces, especially in Silver Lake. Technology wasn’t the threat. The cops would claim that the neighbors were complaining, or that clubs couldn’t be within a certain number of feet from a residence. So clubs had to close and reopen on a regular basis.
And the interior shots from bathhouses came later?
The beds came in ’97 after I broke up with this guy I’d been dating for a very long time. That’s when I started to go to this one bathhouse called 1350. My favorite.
Where was that?
Wilmington, between Long Beach and Gardena. All the rooms had different colored light bulbs, so by the end of the night, I’d always take a photo of the room.
Did you ever get in trouble for taking photographs?
No, not yet.
You’re discreet.
Well, the porn theater photographs are taken from my phone.

A lot of your cruising photographs come from the area where you grew up, right?
Yeah. Long Beach, Torrance, Redondo Beach. I grew up in Gardena.
What was that like?
Oh man. It was kind of amazing. Gardena was conservative, but not in a mean way. I wasn’t exposed to much. But then I went to high school in Torrance where they had a lot of punks and goths. Black Flag was around.
So you were a beach goth!
Back then Redondo Beach had a big gay community, but it doesn’t really exist anymore. I was cruising there when AIDS hit, but I’d talk to men who remembered how packed the sidewalks were at night.
I saw you made a painting of the police records of your own solicitation arrest at one of the tea rooms…
Oh yeah. That misdemeanor charge…
Fuck entrapment – sorry that happened to you. The description on the police record is so horny, it’s hard to believe the cop wasn’t into you…
It was very homoerotic. That’s one of the reasons why I thought I had to make this painting. Imagine, you know, this good-looking guy’s rubbing his crotch. And he’s like, ‘Let’s go over here to the stall.’ He’s like, ‘Lemme go look out and make sure no one’s coming.’ He summons the cops, they come running towards me.
Insane.
I was petrified. They locked me up in a jail cell, saying things like, ‘You should be doing this in West Hollywood.’ It was fucked up.
A lot of the information we have from earlier gay history is for the most part from criminal records. Which is fucked up, but it’s also an affirmation that we’ve always been here.
It’s also a reminder that this shit still exists, at least in the US. Money and energy goes to these vice squads to entrap consenting adults. In Berlin no one gives a fuck. Although not when it comes to their treatment of Palestinian protesters. But they don’t give a fuck about sex.
Did you receive any considerable fallout from the arrest?
No one knew. I went through it all alone.
Were you living at home at the time?
Yeah, but my parents didn’t know. They found out when they saw the show, and they were like, ‘Oh god. We’re so sorry you had to do this alone.’
How old were you?
I was 20, 21.
You were ballsy! I didn’t have that kind of courage at 20.
How old are you?
I’m 32. You know, I grew up in Los Feliz, not far from some of the cruising spots in your photographs.
Three. Two. Oh wow. I’m 20 years older than you! So I’m just trying to get dates straight here… When were you cruising in Los Feliz?
Oh, I wasn’t really… By the time I became aware of these spaces most had closed down. I just read John Rechy’s ‘Sexual Outlaw’ and I’m sad that I don’t recognize the Griffith Park he’s describing, because I was out in a stroller on Fern Dell.
I was probably fucking in the bushes, hiding from you and your family.
If I’d only known!
I saw Rechy on one of the popular cruising trails there in the 90s. I took this amazing photo of him posing shirtless with a dark tan. It’s one of my most prized possessions.
Iconic. Portraits are rare for you, though. You’re usually absent from your work or it seems like you’ve just left the picture. Is that because you’re viewing these spaces as a documentarian? Or are you a voyeur?
I don’t think about voyeurism. Photo projects about queer representation rarely show people who look like me in these kinds of spaces, which makes me uncomfortable. That’s something I wanted to tackle without repeating, in a way. I never wanted to put a demographic stamp on these spaces, like, ‘Dirty, old white men go here.’ You know? Even some of the photographs, if someone has a distinctive haircut, I’ll alter the hair to keep it as simple as possible.
You keep it minimal.
When I made those sauna bed pictures, I was working at MOCA, where Felix Gonzalez-Torres had a show. It was this post-minimalist moment. His billboards of the unmade bed were all over LA, and a lot of people read a monogamous pairing into that image. This was at the height of AIDS when we weren’t supposed to be having sex and promiscuity was not allowed. I wanted to give my version of what I was experiencing.
Do you think we’re more prudish nowadays?
That’s a good question. I dunno. With Instagram everyone gets to see a lot more. Before we used to have to research this stuff. Or go to the Circus of Books or wherever.

I think Circus of Books is a salad bar now… A lot of gays probably saw your work first on social media from your t-shirts with the Roland Barthes or Larry Kramer book covers on them. They circulated like a hanky code for a certain type of literary fag.
I was first introduced to Tumblr in 2010. After I got sober I stopped making work for a while, so Tumblr kept me busy. And then summer hit and I was like, ‘I need t-shirts!’ So I started making queer t-shirts that I wanted to wear and show on Tumblr. People were into them and I needed to make money, though I never did that much business.
I have a confession…
What?
Yeah, I have a tattoo of an image I found on one of your t-shirts – a sailor drawing by Cocteau. I couldn’t find the original anywhere else… It’s supposed to be the movie poster for Fassbinder’s ‘Querelle’, right?
It’s from a book called ‘The Passionate Penis’. I saw an image of Chloë Sevigny wearing a similar drawing with the movie title, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I made my own.
It’s actually a collage?
Yeah. I chopped it up.
So this is a Genet-Cocteau-Fassbinder-Sevigny-Sameshima…I’m gagged.
Thanks Tumblr.
(points) Are these new paintings? With images from your archive?
Yeah. These are from a book of erotic connect-the-dots drawings that were published starting in the 70s in Drummer magazine.
Connect-the-dots fisting!
One of the first books said, ‘You too can be an artist’… I immediately thought of Warhol and his dance step paintings. I started making these in 2005, 2006. Now I’m doing silkscreens again, after seeing a Rauschenberg show in London, which seemed really queer and horny. I’m gonna try to introduce my own photos into the works, to help me play with composition and color even more.
Do you think you’ll stay in Berlin?
For a while. My boyfriend is here, and we’ve been together for 12, 13 years.
Is he German?
He’s German, yeah. He’s married to another man. He has his separate apartments. I never thought I could be in a relationship like this.
Like in a poly situation?
I didn’t think it was gonna happen, but it’s amazing.
Does he ever go to theaters with you?
No. I go alone. I leave alone. That’s my time and space. But he’s super supportive, and I don’t think he’ll ever move from here. And besides, the food is getting so much better – Taco Bell is coming!