I heart Pato's Corpus!

"I want to Survive in the Millions"-Jamie Cortez Editors Note for Corpus 1

Let’s face it -- I am in love with Patrick ‘Pato’ Herbert. But before you think that I am about to move to California where Pato works with AIDS Project Los Angles and get gay married to him (where gays can now get married…for now), I should say that I don’t really know him beyond having heard him speak at the ART/AIDS.WORK conference in NY and at the MSM Global Forum here in Mexico city. It is his cultural work that makes me swoon.

His triumph, his eau de OHH! is a collectively created magazine for and by gay and bi men that he works on and coordinates called Corpus. Since 2003, the privately funded somewhat bilingual glossy magazine that features a published collage of both established writers and artists with emerging voices has been mixing prevention with culture and expression with awareness. The latest edition, Corpus 7 with a focus on male queer lust, love and life internationally, including images from photographer Sunil Gupta (image) and guest edited by Tony Quan from the Australia Federation of AIDS Organizations was being exclusively distributed at the MSM Global Forum earlier this week.

To get an idea of Corpus think My Space meets what AdBusters use to be, picture the spirit of the best community zines with the design of a great euro mag. It is unfussy yet professional, it is sex positive and treats HIV/AIDS as it deserves to be; a consideration, a reality, anentity, an integral part of a queer man’s thought process.

Never hitting you over the head with ideas on human rights or social justice, it instead implies it through a diversity of voices, mediums, subjects and points of view while always being considerate that literacy is as pectrum and above all else the medium is the message.

If a man who because he is either or both a racial, social, sexual minority feels under-heard, under-represented gets a copy of Corpus in his hands, not only does it communicate that he is worthy of such a well-made,rigorously created piece of cultural production, he further understands that he is desirable on his own terms by opening up the magazine and seeing someonel ike him represented.

In the session during the MSM Global Forum that Pato and Andy Quan gave on Corpus as an example of cultural production as a response to HIV there was some discussion on the term ‘cultural production’ in place of the word art. From this discussion emerged something from Quan’s mouth that I have always thought about as my own work being an artist of residence, but had never been put into words.

He said: “I choose to think about culture production not as creating a product but rather, through HIV/AIDS and our response to it we are producing a culture; a queer culture,a culture for all of us”

To see Corpus online: http://www.apla.org/publications/publications.html