In Conversation With Patrick Whitaker and Keir Malem: Re-awakening leather craft, the British Way

Interview: Alina Ferraro / ally_ferraro
Guilherme Ferrari / gferrari____

Intro and Copywriting: Matthew Burgos / matthewburgos

What Patrick Whitaker and Keir Malem explored with and exposed to French Fries Magazine echoes the ethics that run deep into their cornerstones: hand-and custom-made leather clothing made for the body to wear and for individuals to display as works of art; pieces and layers of leather fashioned to be worn for countless times; the right to acknowledgment for every ounce of creativity and craftsmanship they pour into their work; and how British pop artist Allen Jones became a long-time collaborator and well of inspiration for the London-based duo.

From the degree show at Central Saint Martins and the custom leather suits and armors for movies such as Wonder Woman to their collaborations with Christian Louboutin, and Givenchy with Alexander McQueen, Patrick and Keir have always articulated prowess in sexuality, fluidity in gender, boldness in beliefs, and sustainability in clothing. In this interview, such doctrines remain alive and amplified.

Photography Kilian O'Sullivan

Patrick Whitaker and Keir Malem: Hello! How are you doing?

French Fries Magazine: We’re doing well. How are you? How’s London?

Patrick: Well, we're in Kent at the moment, which is outside London, but everything’s okay. I think it's supposed to be sunny later. We’ve had some nice weather, but it hasn’t been so good in the past few days. Are you both in France?

FFM: No, we’re in Milan.

Patrick: Oh my, I thought you were in Paris!

FFM: I think Paris may have some resemblance with Milan - some similarities with their identity. And speaking of that, we fell in love with your work and its strong identity! How are you able to do such amazing work?

Patrick: Thank you very much! We haven’t done social media for so long, but nine out of ten, just to say, people reach out to us to comment on how what we make looks beautifully made. When people share this with us, I always say that this is the cornerstone of what we do and that it should look quite good because we’ve been doing this for the past thirty-three years.

FFM: You met Keir while at Central Saint Martins, right?

Patrick: Yes. I met Keir when I was in my second year there, and he helped me with my degree show. The rest is sort of history, as they say. Even in the degree show, we had some formed leather pieces, and quite a lot of what we do also occurred in my degree show. In a way, this show helped grow that signature. 

FFM: Regarding this, I wanted to talk about how things have changed and are changing in fashion. There’s been a lot of consumerism, e-boutiques, and e-commerce nowadays. How did it used to be? 

Patrick: It was quite different. I think what’s happened is that with e-commerce and social media, it’s been beneficial for independent artists and people like ourselves through exposure because in the old days, if you did a collection or a show, you put it out there. If you didn’t get the press the next day…

Keir: Which would just be pictures in a newspaper or print form.

Patrick: Exactly.

Keir: You might get some small pictures in Vogue for this season, for example. There was no fashion TV. At this age, though, you’re here to make your mark.

Patrick: I remember we had a TV show back in the day in the UK called The Clothes Show, and it was influential and quite important because it ran at the time when fashion was quite big. I think it went from about 1985 or 1988 up until 2000, and it was on the BBC on a Sunday evening, if I remember correctly, and everybody watched it. It got high ratings, and before the Internet, being featured there was a big deal. We were fortunate to be featured there twice. Once, they did a piece on us - I think around 1989 - about ‘labels to watch’ of some sort, and when we did the Givenchy Haute Couture with Alexander McQueen in 1997, they interviewed us for that as well. 

Keir: I think if you look at old television - like in the 80s or 90s - you’ll see that almost  everyone looked the same and generally followed fashion. Now with the Internet: people can find subgroups they aspire to belong in, and not be like everyone else. Designers don’t lead the way anymore; people are free to choose how they want to dress. There’s less social conformity as a whole. 

Patrick: I think it's good to describe them as tribes, and I think if you're into dressing up in a certain way or a certain look, you can find other people doing that quite readily on the Internet, and you get support from that. 

Keir: And also the High Street caters to a broader taste than it ever has. I think as a fifty-six year old, I don't ever remember a time where I had so much choice in what to wear, I don't think there's ever been a time where fashion has been quite so varied and interesting.

Isolating with Self Conflict
Photography Patrick Whitaker and Keir Malem Styling Lily Bling

Patrick: It's just changed a lot, and I think certainly for people like us it's definitely been probably for the better. I think people also realize that there's some integrity here that people don't necessarily propose one thing in one season, then something wholly different in the next. In our case, we never followed the dictates of the seasons. We used to produce collections regularly and show them at trade events in Paris and sold mostly to the US, in Los Angeles and New York, and a little bit in London.

Back in those days, entertainers would actually buy clothes for the stage without expecting to get them for free and that's something that's changed.

Keir: If a band did a tour or something, they'd need clothes, so their stylists would come to you and commission different looks for the show. Yeah, that still goes on a bit, but they don't expect to pay for the outfits.

FFM: I can imagine that it takes a very long time and it is laborious, for sure. 

Patrick: We set ourselves high standards for what we want to make, there's no such thing as perfection, and it's a fantasy chasing it, but I think we do fall into the category of being somewhat perfectionist and OCD, I’m probably more so than Keir! It isn't always beneficial. It's not something that I necessarily aspire to, or that I would encourage others to do, but... 

Keir: I think you have to go with your personality, and if that's the way you are, then you have to just go with it. 

FFM: You’re connected to Allen Jones’ work, right? Can you tell us how this happened? 

Keir:  We've been working with Allen for about 25 years.

Patrick: There was an interesting photographer called Bob Carlos Clarke who sadly died a few years ago, but he was like a British sort of a Helmut Newton type –sexually charged-fashion photographer. He was a great edgy photographer, and did a certain amount of fashion and advertising work, and had photographed our pieces on several occasions. 

I’ll tell you the background to this: the famous sculpture Allen originally made in the early 70s, the chair and the table, was extremely ahead of the curve. He also made plastic a bustier and breastplate and was the first person to do that. Issey Miyake made something similar in the 80s followed by Mugler, but Allen had done it first.

Allen had these leather pieces made to-go on the sculptures by a guy called John Sutcliffe, who had a magazine called AtomAge. This magazine was a very strange British, 60s - 70s kinky magazine for people who were into S&M or rubber or leather for dress up. It’s been reproduced as a book, and you can see them online. They're amazing things, and the photographic content is very compelling because it's actually ‘normal’ people at home who are doing this; they've obviously quite relatively well-off middle class people to afford this extraordinary gear in the 60s and 70s.

So you've got these extraordinary domestic environments with sort of like rose wallpaper - and God knows what - and then they're wearing gas masks and rubber suits. Anyway, John Sutcliffe was also a fabulous rubber and leather engineer in the 60s; in fact he made the costumes Diana Rigg wore, the iconic leather cat suits in The Avengers, which was a TV series - not the Marvel one!

Anyway, Allen got this guy to make the leather stuff for the sculptures in the early 70s, because he was a renowned expert in London and, well, the world really. And then when  Allen wanted to complete the addition of these sculptures twenty or twenty-five years later, he needed to find someone new as John Sutcliffe had died back in ’87.

Allen mentioned this to Bob Carlos Clarke, and he suggested us, so that's how we got to meet Allen. In that process of meeting Allen, we actually said to him that we just completed this chair we'd made ourselves. That's kind of a strange sculptural chair that you can see on our Instagram. We showed it to Allen, took it to his house in the country, and explained to him that we thought it was possible to do a completely leather covered full figure for him, and he said that was an interesting idea and so he got us to do it. Then, it was also shown at the Royal Academy Summer Show, which was quite a big deal and it was actually shown in a room next to a Degas Ballerina figure, which was wonderful to see. Gary Hume the British artist then bought the sculpture from Allen, and so that was the start of it.

Photography Allen Jones

We’ve created this body of work with Allen, and we've learned more from working with him than anyone because the process is relatively intimate and personal and he's definitely been the most inspiring. There is part of the process where we draw the lines on the sculpture, and he will come and look at the drawing of the lines on the sculpture and would just move them very subtly.

Allen’s method of working is also comparable with ours. He's deliberate, meticulous, and quite crafted. On some of Allen's paintings, there are big, gestural blobs of paint, but the way he does it is meticulous. They may just think they look like they're random, but they're not. I've seen him do them. Everything is worked out in advance. 

We learned so much just about the perfecting of the line and the breaks on the body, and I think the important influence Allen had on us was actually on our use of color on the body. We’ve returned in a way to making our own pieces because we broadly did ten years of our own collections, then ten years of collaborations with other people, then almost ten years of movie work, and then we came back to doing our own thing again and finally did the social media thing for the first time and got on Instagram, which has been amazing because we have picked-up some nice collaborations like with Louboutin. Anyway, it’s wonderful to work with Allen, and we have a sculpture on the go for him at the moment.

Now there is an issue with leather to a certain degree with the rise of veganism, and we’ve also courted some controversy with the trans community because of the Phallus Belts that we made - the ones that look like penises. We've had a lot of followers and support from female to male transsexuals, which we’re really happy about. We did a shoot with Jazzelle AKA uglyworldwide on Instagram for Vogue Italia and one trans person was upset because I think they thought it was a little glib and a little easy. 

Keir: Only one person!

Patrick: There was only one person, admittedly, and that's actually against a lot of other people being very supportive. It's a bit like having straight actors playing gay roles in movies, a sort of woke agenda. I think people somehow think that you can only do something like that if you're a trans yourself.

Keir: We were trying to celebrate it anyway.

Patrick: Yes, and we've undertaken this project which is the transmorphic armor video where there are these two sets of armor and they change the sex of the bodies. It's on Instagram and what we're exploring with this is in fact just the sexed body. It's not like about whether you're trans or this and that. We just want to explore this visual language in an idealized form, and that's something we're possibly also guilty of. 

When working with Christian Louboutin he has tried to break skin tones into sort of eight or twelve shades, and it’s interesting that it started a whole debate around that. I said well, if you want to make the sculpture, we'd need to do this with the scanning process, then we'd adapt it and sculpt it. And then, of course, it became a question of who would be cast to do it. Since some of the skin tones represent black skin and some represent white, do you choose for a black person or a white person?

Photography Patrick Whitaker and Keir Malem

FFM: I wanted to ask you this, but I thought maybe it wouldn’t be an appropriate question. While I was going through this part just now, I noticed the skin tone, and I thought I don't know if they're going to go light on that.

Patrick: No, I think your question is an interesting one, so please ask us anything you want. None of the things that we've done have been massively controversial. It's just that there's always quite a lot of comments on the Louboutin pieces. The vast majority were very positive, but some were saying ‘oh, it's all perfect bodies.’ The best decision that we made - and I'm so glad we did - was not to put a head on the sculpture because at some point, I think Christian was quite interested in having a head, and I thought what the head was going to be like if we were showing different skin types, and we didn't have the opportunity to scan endless people. I think probably it would have been quite interesting if there had been a figure that was maybe a little fuller, especially in that modern fuller curvy way.

Keir: But we did scan a sixty-six year old woman. 

Patrick: Yes and Christian suggested Arielle Dombasle. She's a genuinely older woman with an incredible body, and it was wonderful to at least to celebrate this not being a twenty-two year old supermodel.

Keir: She's also got amazing legs, and at the end of the day, Christian Louboutin is trying to sell shoes, so he had to choose someone with amazing legs. 

FFM: Right and have you thought about going into different sizes of body? Would you like to do this? 

Patrick: We've done it a lot with movies. Wonder Woman was the biggest show we ever did, and it probably will always be the biggest. They actually reused a lot of our creations for the second film, but we weren't involved with it directly. We made around 200 costumes over a year with the help of a team of about twenty people to do it. We had an extraordinary time with that and made armour for women of all shapes and sizes.

Our process involves making our own sculpture to actually form leather over like a shoe last, and  we are quite often asked to make things for pop people like Cardi B and Nicki Minaj, and obviously, they're big names. They're interesting, but the stylists unfortunately...I mean, there's this crazy thing where they just seem to think you can make stuff in about a week and get it to Los Angeles! Like they just think we can cheat with the press of a button? It is only the two of us. It was like that before COVID, and it's even worse now.

We would love to actually have more interns and get more help, but obviously it's become quite a lot more difficult recently and also generally with our processes everything is quite individual, we don't do a lot of repeat things which make it harder to involve others.

FFM: For sure! I read that one of you cuts and the other one sews.

Naomi as Diana
Photography Pierre et Gilles McQueen x WM for Givenchy

Patrick: I'm the sewing one. We also dye all the leather ourselves. It just comes into us in this base color which is almost like a skin color, and then all the metallic finishes and the dying process are done by us, so it is saddening how often famous experienced stylists  seem to have so little clue about what it takes to make anything. It's quite upsetting actually, obviously it's not always the case, but it's remarkable how often you see these people end up wearing not-so-good quality outfits. We have told these stylists that the reason they are not getting pop artists to look as good as they want them to is because they are just not giving enough time and they end up making something out of stretch material. However, it’s lovely to see how people are more aware and interested in the process, in general, now.

Keir: And I think there's more materials available. Also, before people didn't have an outlet. What's the point in making something if you've got nowhere to wear it, so you know, given an occasion to wear something, then you're more likely to try it. Even when we were starting out, there was nothing like Halloween dressing up for adults; it was just something for kids. Now, you have a whole adult dressing up with cosplay for example, and there are more occasions to wear what you want. 

FFM: I also see what you're saying about the Internet and the changes it has brought, and I think sexuality is one of them - how not just fashion is changing, but sexuality is as well, and I think it's mainly because of the Internet culture. It's a revolution going on at the moment with people maybe becoming more open sexually as well, people like yourself for example. You are expressing that through fashion, which is amazing!

Keir: I think the Internet has enabled access to people who think similarly to yourself. When I was growing up gay in a provincial town, I never thought there was anyone else like me, and the only sexual references I had were a history book with a picture of some naked Greek wrestlers and a fashion catalog with mens’ underwear in it that I could look at. 

Patrick: Image-wise, yes, there was very little! We met when we were 21, and we’re now 56. Obviously, we’ve had gay experiences before we were twenty-one, but that was illegal-we had sex illegally in our lifetimes in this country! We're naturally 100% supportive of the LGBQT rights, and we think the trans agenda is important, but we’d love for people to keep in mind how recent and hard fought these gains are in the freer parts of Europe.

There’s been a small number of very vocal people out there who are pushing hard - and whilst we’re not against what they're doing - they might risk alienating quite a broad section of the middle class. I think we have to be careful about how the agenda is getting pushed because we’re horrified by what's happening in Hungary and Poland, for example, where there's a huge rise to the Right. Viktor Orbán has just passed a new law very similar the one that Margaret Thatcher brought in called Clause 28 in the late 80s which bans the promotion of homosexuality in schools or anything that's encouraging or seen as promoting homosexuality. 

The queer agenda has to be pushed, especially for the trans community, however people also have to realize that it is quite mind-bending for some older people to even get a grip of non-binary position, for now, because people need to understand it and explore it. They need time to work it out. Yes, it must happen, but we think we need to be careful right now about pushing things too hard because what's happening is we're seeing a lot of cancel culture now off the side of it, which is not good because it's stopping the actual conversation/debate. It’s great to keep pushing the agenda, but it’d be better if we also kept an eye on what we've achieved so far.

Photography Ram Shergill

Keir: Then with the question of sexuality and fashion, I think what the Internet has done has allowed young people to become more confident in their sexuality and to embrace it more fully- then the clothing follows, so people are becoming more confident wearing more sexually alluring clothing. If you live in a small community and you wear sexy clothing, you might risk being stigmatized for being overtly sexual, and I think that has changed with social media, making it easier for young people to embrace their sexuality.

Patrick: It's great to be young and celebrate having your body when you're young, and you should do it! You should absolutely do it. It doesn't matter whether you are thin or fat or you've got a skin condition or whatever.

FFM: It’s that confidence, right?

Patrick: Yes. This body positivity movement is important. Nobody is perfect. We can speak from some real experience on this as we've been up close and personal with many Hollywood celebrities, and we have pictures of many of them that they wouldn't want the world to see where they don't look quite so great, and that just echo the fact that no one's perfect. On any level, we shouldn't necessarily strive for body perfection. We should definitely be striving to be as much as we can to be happy and healthy.

Keir: Young people face a lot of pressure not only to be happy, but to look perfect.

Patrick: Yes and have a house, to be rich, and the list goes on and on…

Keir: …also to have a career and maybe a family of five children, but no one is superhuman, and some of these may just be unreachable and unattainable. You should celebrate being ordinary and maybe the life you have now.

FFM: It’ll be interesting to look into that as well. I think right now in fashion, being normal and ordinary is cool more than ever. I came across Rose Marina in the UK who is promoting this as well. They did a project in people’s houses where the residents were wearing fetish clothes, and they found it funny how everybody’s furniture was from IKEA. In a way, that’s promoting ordinariness, which has entered the fashion scene too. What’s great about fashion too is that once you feel its power, it makes you feel confident regardless of how elegant or ordinary your clothes and ensemble are.

Patrick: It’s amazing how some clothes, brands, and fashion have so much to say. It's a mistake to think that people who dress up a lot are vain and that they do it entirely for themselves, they are also doing it for other people. In a way, it's about the reaction - the kind of stimulation, excitement, or visual interest and we should be grateful for it.

Keir: I think it's a very ancient tribal mindset to want to dress up, party, and celebrate. I think every culture has a history of having a festival or a special date where everyone tries  to look their best, and celebrate what it's like to be human.

Whitaker Malem X Louboutin

FFM: It's part of who we are, definitely. 

Keir: Also with the lockdown, I feel that we’ve had a different approach to clothing. I think people have realized not only the importance of clothing, but also its value. There have always been people who have got used to just throwing away or passing on things once they’re tired of them, but hopefully now people are going to hold onto their clothing more and for longer, and I think we're going to see more sustainable clothing.

Patrick: It’s also been surprising to note how people are actually buying things to wear at home just to photograph themselves for social media. It's amazing how that's actually become such a big thing and that yes, we're all understanding a lot more about consuming in general. 

FFM: This is the change that we should consider eliminating: the superficiality of  impulsive choices. Designers tend to have something to say and have a strong creative identity, and somebody wearing your brand, for instance, would resemble them wearing your whole history and craftsmanship.

Patrick: Right. The thing about what we make is that very few people wear them and we tend to attract pop artists and the likes. Our market gravitates towards performers and people who have an excuse to wear it. 

Keir: We haven’t deliberately tried to make commercial clothing. 

Patrick: I’ve just thought of a design for a WM T-shirt recently, and I thought for the first time that it was a viable idea to have a commercial commodity representing what we do. It’s a good challenge for us, and it would be quite nice to have an opportunity to make something that was affordable and might sell more than one or two pieces - or none mostly!

If you saw the Doja Cat image recently released for her new album by David LaChapelle, it’s our Labia Bustier from 2019, we were very keen to make a piece which could also be displayed on a stand, so that you can have it as a free standing sculpture in your boudoir or living-space, and you could admire it when you're not wearing it. This also pushes the pieces more towards the Fine Arts and Crafts world, which is where they probably best live because they’re all unique. All our pieces are entirely unique and kind of invented for that realm.

The stylist Brett Nelson picked up on the piece, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. He wanted to make a matching headdress made as well, so we sent over Pantone references for the leather colours that we had used, and he tried to match them and have something made in LA. The whole image was constructed around our piece, which is a fabulous compliment. Obviously, they're never going to quite say that directly, but that is the truth; we love the resulting photo.

That's the best we can get out of doing this, and that's why when we get asked for these loans now we have to be extremely and very strict and specific that we do get credited because a lot of them don't want to do it, and that’s a problem for us.

Keir: Because of all of our movie work, people have said ‘lots of people in the world have seen your work, but nobody knows who you are.’

Patrick: If you think about the Halle Berry knife belt for the James Bond movie - that was certainly the most reproduced image of anyone that year - of her coming out the sea, it was almost everywhere, so lots of people have seen it, but most people didn’t know we were behind it.

At the end of the day, they're getting a piece that's worth quite a lot of money. We take the risk of sending it to Los Angeles, not knowing if we're even going to get it back since they don’t necessarily want to pay the insurance, shipping, or have it all done properly. I get emails where this person wants us to drop off the pieces in a location on a specific day, so they can include our work in a massive pile of collections they’re going to choose from, and they may or may not use it. Then, they’re not promising credit, so we’re thinking what’s in it for us?

You’re getting a unique piece that’s probably worth £6,000 or more, and half of the time, it isn’t even for sale and then you’re not promising a credit or at least a hashtag? It’s quite shocking. We’re not going to name names, but we do think it’s a little mean-spirited. It’s important to say then that we absolutely reserve the right not to play that game and to not do that.

It’s amazing how often stylists are guilty of this, and the pop stars too. Nine times out of ten, you can see some amazing images of these big names in the pop industry wearing extraordinary pieces of clothing, and the only credited people are the stylists or the person who did their fucking nails. The people who made these amazing clothes aren’t.

FFM: You have to fight for this!

Patrick: Yes! We are  fighting for this. I remember I had an argument with this pop star about a year ago - and who I won’t be naming because I actually like her and would love to work with her again. We lent a piece to her for a shoot, and I emailed her management to say that we were happy to do the loan, but we had to be credited in social media for it. Everything went through and the picture appeared, but she didn’t tag us and I called her out in the comment section on Instagram asking if she’d mind tagging us. She didn’t like that I did that, and I ended up speaking with her management. In the end, it never got corrected, her argument being that due to COVID, her ability to perform got slayed, so she couldn’t do any gigs. Apparently her Instagram was now so ‘monetized’ that she was only allowed to tag her big brand sponsors.

Related to this, we made some things for Cher many years ago and she wanted a third off because that was what Gucci had been giving her, and so we just said no - you’re not going to get a third off because we’re not Gucci; there are two of us, and we make and sell these by ourselves, and you can afford them! She did pay for them and later sold the pieces at auction, naturally for a profit!

We understand that if you’ve got a big brand, you have a budget to give celebrity’s shoes, garments, or whatever. However, people have to realize that we’re not a brand or actively promoting ourselves as such.

Photography David Lachapelle Styling Brett Nelson

FFM: You’re very artistic and should be appreciated. While people may see association with Louboutin and other brands, I feel that people should associate you with and value your creativity that’s far from superficial. 

Keir: You’ve been incredibly complimentary, thank you so much.

Patrick: That’s true, thank you so much. Thinking about that credibility in terms of superficiality, there’s some truth in that. I think people now want the credibility of the craft process over the association.

Keir: It’s becoming more and more difficult for Couture to set itself apart from the rest of the industry.

Patrick: In the early 70s, ready-to-wear clothing was better made than couture because the point of couture at its purest had always been the hand finishing of it. The story was always that a couture hem would look lumpier than ready-to-wear since it was hand-sewn, and that’s true. The essence of haute couture is that it’s so handmade that it’s slightly lumpier, and ready-to-wear in general is more about the bespoke personal process where it’s made-to-measure and can have it altered. 

We can see on some level that we’re artists, yet what we do is applied art. We’ve made images and sold one or two of these prints. It’s called Transmorphic Super-People. It's a lenticular photo image and shows a naked man and woman whose lower halves flip over as you pass by it. They have stitched seams running over their skin, and this is definitely art.

However, we let others decide on how they refer to us. We’re nervous about calling ourselves artists, but it’s for others to judge. People always love to see stitching on leather because that involves skill and it’s a sort of a hallmark of quality, and indeed it is since you can’t fake it.

This takes us back to our movie work where it’s interesting to note that when we’re making the superhero costumes something tricky happens because, believe me, generally none of them look quite as good in person as they do on the posters or in the films. They’ve generally had quite a lot of post-work done on them. The better we can get it to look in camera, the better it is for the effects team since it’s expensive to get the post-work done, even though the costs of special effects have come down in theory.

Keir always says that movie costumes are workwear in everyday use, kind of like a firefighter, soldier, or policeman, and the likes. Stunt work, when characters fly or break through the ceiling, trashes costumes, so they have to be of high quality and long-lasting, and multiples will need to be made.

FFM: These are such great stories, thank you so much!

Patrick: Thank you, and it’s nice to have your appreciation of what we do because it can still be quite challenging to make what we do even after more than 30 years! 

Keir: Yes, we reached a point in our lives about five or six years ago where we thought that putting such effort into making each piece that we would have to try and say something with them. Thank you so much for appreciating that.

Patrick: And the other situation is that we don’t sell anywhere; if people want to buy what we make, they just get in touch with us. We’ve got quite a few artists and designer friends who are a bit older than us and they have so much of their own work around them. We’re mindful that we’ll have to live with what we make, but we don’t have a lot of space. We’ve also been very interested and intrigued in this dialogue about the sexed body and non-binary, and we believe it’s the future. 

Keir: The modern twenty-first century.

Patrick: As a footnote, we just had this TV show called It’s a Sin, and it made a breakthrough over here because it’s a drama about the AIDS crisis in the 80s. We know a lot of young people through Instagram, some close friends who have reached out to us to say “Oh my god, I didn’t realize it was like that for you!” They all realized how, during the AIDS pandemic, the gay community was getting blamed for it, and it was brought down to this debate of how gay sex was immoral. Religious people and those who were against the gay agenda got massive platforms on television and in the print industry, stating that we shouldn’t have had sex anyway. Our younger friends were shocked because they suddenly realized how recent it was that this was seen as okay.

We think it’s important for the younger queer generation appreciate this because back in the day, we couldn’t do what we can now. Any gains that we have now are recent and we should protect them in order to advance the queer agenda as a whole.

FFM: And we’ll be right there to support this. We’ll keep on fighting!

Patrick: That’s right and thank you so much again! Well, enjoy your summer there in Milan!