Condoms
Condom-obsessed Londoner Nick Merdasi has spent the last few years flipping stories of his most raw, amusing and occasionally uncomfortable hookups into cheeky gay comic strips. This week, he unleashed his latest book, ‘Condoms’ at a packed bar in London, and shared a sneak peak with us below.
Are these comic strips your diary?
I’ve kept a diary in my notes app for years which is basically just my sex life. It’s much more messy and meandering than the comics. What interests me so much with sex is that there’s this thing that is happening in the present, but at the same time your mind can wander to completely random places. I try to capture both.
Would someone be less inclined to hook up with you if they knew their most intimate moments would make it into one of your strips?
If anything, I’ve had the opposite reaction. A few regular partners ask me multiple times when they’ll feature in my comics. I find that funny because the chances of me writing about you are incredibly small, statistically. Given the number of people I have sex with, you’re more likely to get an STI from me than a comic strip.
So…what’s with the whole condom obsession?
I’ve collected them for years, but around the time I started making this comic I was asking everyone I had sex with if I could see their condoms (unused), to see if they had any that I could take for my collection. It wasn’t just about condoms as objects. I liked that it led to conversations about condomless sex, PrEP, HIV, STIs, or how gay sex has changed.
Was that the starting point of your latest book?
I was also thinking about my own contradictions. We were coming out of the pandemic and I was hard core on the hand sanitiser and wearing masks, but the same time I was having lots of condomless sex and constantly getting STIs. I found the contrast funny: collecting condoms but not using them, worried about covid but flippant about gonorrhoea.
