Joining
Hearts Pool Party
by Mikkel Hyldebrandt
The volunteer organization Joining Hearts is amping up for their primary fundraiser – and the Atlanta social event of the summer! – the pool party at Piedmont Park. The Joining Hearts main event, themed Under the Sea, may be the highlight, but it is also part of a successful fundraising season conducted by Joining Hearts. David spoke to the President of Joining Hearts, Jerry Henderson, about the many fundraising initiatives of 2024 and, of course, about the main pool party event in Piedmont Park.
First, tell us about your engagement with Joining Hearts. How long have you been involved, and how long have you been President?
My journey with Joining Hearts spans 11 years and as President for the past eight years.
Please tell us about the mission of Joining Hearts and how funds raised directly impact the community. Joining Hearts’ mission is to raise awareness and funds to support the prevention, care, and house assistance to those impacted by HIV/AIDS in Atlanta.
Joining Hearts is evolving to make the most impact and support the specific needs of HIV/AIDS in Atlanta at this moment in time. Funds will be allocated based on an assessment of need and impact where beneficiaries have submitted proposals outlining required funding, intended use, and expected impact. In 2023, we donated $186,000 to local beneficiaries such as Status: home, AID Atlanta, Trans Housing Coalition, and Lost and Found Youth, to name a few, and a lifetime give of $3.1M since 1987.
The board is directly responsible for
putting on this event. Can you tell us about this year’s board?
Our board of directors has and must evolve in the way we think and work to be better agents for the community in which we serve. This year, I have challenged them to operate efficiently and effectively by being present in the community. They have accepted the challenge, and this by far by interacting with us, that we are the change we want to see in our community.
The main event, the Under the Sea pool party, is coming up, but you have already had a busy fundraising season. Please tell us about the many events you have hosted.
So far this year, we have hosted two of our signature events: Love on the Rocks and Change of Seasons, along with various beer and margarita busts.
Now, let’s turn to the pool party. Each year, you throw a bigger and better party. What does the board of Joining Hearts have in store for us this year? Kicking off the festivities is the Joining Hearts Weekend™ Opening Event on Friday, July 26th, 2024, at the Heretic, featuring the one and only DJ Jace M from Miami! Let’s dance the night away as we ignite the weekend in style!
The Joining Hearts Weekend™ Main Event, Under the Sea, Saturday, July 27th, 2024, featuring DJ Dan Slater spinning tunes straight from Australia; it’s going to be an aquatic adventure like no other at the Piedmont Park Greystone Pool House.
As the sun sets on a weekend filled with
love and laughter, join us for the Official Joining Hearts Weekend™ Closing Event on Sunday, July 28th, at FUTURE. It’s the perfect way to wrap up an unforgettable weekend and show our unwavering support for a cause close to our hearts.
What are some good tips for having the best pool party possible?
Hands down, the VIP experience is the way to go as you will experience and get a free JH signature fan, early access that includes a full bar featuring complimentary premium cocktails (thank you, Titos!), wine, expanded delicious food options from Epting Events and Zaxby’s, and VIP restrooms.
What do you have in store for the rest of the year?
We have future signature events on the calendar: Patron and Sponsor Party, Fall Back in Love, and the Atlanta Speedo Run. The 2023 Atlanta Speedo Run was our inaugural event last year, which was a success, and will return even bigger this year.
Looking ahead, Joining Hearts will work hard to expand its footprint by being the leading organization in its support of engaging and supporting marginalized groups that are sometimes overlooked. We must continue evolving to make our organization more inclusive in everything we do.
Lastly, how do people get last-minute tickets and updates?
This event always sells out. I can’t tell you the countless times we receive ticket inquiries, which is why we send constant reminders to buy early. Once we sell out, the only way to attend is to sign up to become a Patron with exclusive VIP access to all our events. They have the comfort of knowing that they don’t have to worry about not attending this or any events. To learn more about becoming a Patron and its benefits, visit joininghearts.org/support.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Visit joininghearts.org/support to donate today and continue to support us and our greater impact, as we have done for the past 36 years, in our 37th year.
Joining Hearts Opening Party Under the Sea GLOW
The Heretic Friday, July 26, 10 pm – 3 am
Joining Hearts
Main Event Pool Part – Under the Sea Piedmont Park Aquatic Center Saturday, July 27, 6 -11 pm (VIP 5-11 pm)
Closing Party
Future, Sunday, July 28, 9 pm – 3 am
For last-minute tickets or to become a patron, visit joininghearts.org.
How Machine Dazzle Is Transforming Our Collective Garbage Into Queer Joy
By Chris Azzopardi
Photos: Gregory Kramer, Neil Kagerer, Andrew Cohen, Christopher Ankney-Ouroboro
The dildo sitting upright on the tabletop next to me looks like if it attacked me, I wouldn’t stand a chance. I don’t necessarily feel like I have to keep an eye on it, but I also can’t help it — it’s just that big. Later, when it’s not looking me in the eye, it appears smaller and less aggressive, even artfully elegant; that’s because this time, that phallus is inside a giant coiled vessel hanging from the ceiling of the evolving installation, in its first phase of three, at the Irving Stenn Jr. Family Gallery inside the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) — a university museum, bless them, is the home to this dildo.
But when I initially come face to head with it, it’s still in Machine Dazzle’s modest-sized studio, just casually hanging out. It’s the end of February when I meet with the New York-based artist internationally lauded for his special ability to maximize his resources for conceptual purposes, turning the most random objects into stunningly wearable sculptures — “more is more,” he told Artnet News in 2020.
As he sits in his studio among an assortment of everyday household items he’s picked out of trash recovered from the Huron River and waste management facilities in Michigan, it’s impossible to imagine how plastic Tide detergent containers and all these multi-colored dildos, many printed on a 3D printer at U-M, will be incorporated into his ambitious project, titled “Ouroboros,” described in press materials as “a maximalist wonderland inspired by the ancient symbol of a snake consuming its own tail.”
“What do you think that black thing is?” Machine says to me in his studio in February, pointing to something other than the dildo. He’s motioning to the opposite side of the room, where I try but fail to identify the distorted and reshaped black plastic — once flimsy flower pots, he tells me. Some of this trash Machine has handpicked straight from local bodies of water and recycling and garbage bins; some of it has come from dorms and residences on this very campus. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter,” he says. “It came from fossil fuels.”
The plastic pieces on the floor, walls and tables in his studio haven’t coalesced just yet except inside the expansive universe of Machine’s mind, where there really seems to be no such thing as “less.”
It’s anyone’s guess at this point exactly how he will work all of this stuff into his first major museum commission and debut exhibition in the Midwest, a project that began with site visits in October 2022 and made its museum debut in March.
Like us, Ouroboros was always intended to change and grow over time, through three phases, the last occurring during Pride Month in June. So, how exactly will all of this be assembled into something meaningful when more trash and phalluses enter the vessel?
Calling it a “symbolic odyssey,” the museum answers this question over the course of six months, through Aug. 25, the last day to see Ouroboros up close and personal. On the day of our interview, just a couple of weeks before the initial installation, Machine is, of course, making very specific considerations as to how he sees it coming together. He shares his surprisingly relatable vision with me before the big base structure even enters the 1,200-square-foot Irving Stenn space, explaining how Ouroboros, if you’re looking at it with a degree of existential dread, which he can’t help but do given our sit-
down is on the day of the presidential primaries when conservative-wielded queerphobia continues to run rampant, is really a physical representation of a renewal process that reshapes some kind of current state. What a coffee container can be. What a Kirkland olive oil bottle might be morphed into. What our country could become. And the part we play in all of this — “the past, present and future of waste,” he says.
“I mean, this is plastic,” he continues. “And so if you are a human and you’re alive, you’re participating in this never-ending cycle; it’s inevitable. I was just inspired by the objects. I started melting them or cutting them up or doing something, transforming them. And so this is kind of what I had interest in achieving. Once it’s in the sculpture, it’s like I have to make all of the objects and then I have to put them all together. It’s a whole process.”
The past is the plastic and the present is Ouroboros itself; the future is also Ouroboros as well as the 3D technology that Machine uses to print dildos or various containers, like one for antifreeze, that will enter the vessel. “We’re still in a very rough digital age,” he says. “This is kind of like the Atari or Coleco of what will happen in 20 years. Things are going to be so lifelike, you’re not going to be able to tell the difference. Even though we’re doing this now, it’s almost like I’m considering it like the future. And I really wanted to make it obviously sexual as if the garbage is reproducing itself, which is kind of what it’s doing already.”
If you think of the trash as humankind, which Machine does (“The garbage is us,” he says), then you could think of Ouroboros as a pioneering pursuit that broadens horizons to the uncharted realms of possibility. “Humankind is forever changing the earth’s surface and everything about it: the air, the water, the soil, our bodies; it’s just a never-ending cycle.” At 51, Machine has gone through enough of his own life cycles to be at least somewhat pessimistic about the future — these possibilities could get ugly — but he also isn’t going to stop people from turning their own trash, what they can control, into treasure. Including himself. Ouroboros, after all, is his version of changing what he can.
“We are never going to be on the same page,” he says. “I’m just being realistic. We can dream and we can hope. Fine. It’s not exactly a waste of time because if that makes you feel better, good. But when you think about it, if people aren’t all on the same page, we’re never going to work together, and problems are just going to get worse. Things are not going to get better. They’re going to get worse.”
Existential dread aside, it also just boils down to Machine’s prolonged need for escapism: “I love transforming objects into things,” he says. As a kid, Machine transformed his own dislike for other young people into self-
produced isolation. Born Matthew Flower in 1972 in rural Pennsylvania, he transformed his name too, at least for the stage. Before moving to New York City in the late 1990s and joining the group The Dazzle Dancers as a drag performer and costume designer, he always had a fascination for objects, going all the way back to his formative years growing up in Texas. At 6, he felt “not like the other boys,” and preferred looking for rocks and leaves by himself versus engaging with his peers. Teachers encouraged him to play with other students, “but they would annoy the fuck out of me,” Machine says.
“I grew up in pretty conservative places, and my parents were fairly conservative and from a very small town, and they didn’t know what to do with me,” he recalls. “They were dealing with their own homophobia. But they knew. My father admitted to me after my mother died, ‘I knew you were gay since you were 2 years old.’ But I think he was probably afraid to encourage it based on maybe his own homophobia, just not wanting to deal with what.”
Possibilities began to emerge for Machine on family visits to a whole generation’s ultimate hangout: the mall. Growing up, there wasn’t a community of TikTok creators to help him on his path to selfdiscovery. No computers, even. And definitely no cell phones.
“Here we are at JCPenney, here we are at Sears, and I was aware of fashion,” he says. “I had instincts that I couldn’t act on because we didn’t have the money, and my parents were not comfortable buying certain things for me. Of course, I was going to school with kids where their parents were doing that for them. And I would always just be like, ‘Wow, that’s what I want to do. I want to do my hair like that, or I would love to wear that.’”
Weeks after Machine tells me about his suppressed past, I’m watching him, someone who finally did do his hair “like that” (and then some), onstage during the opening day of Ouroboros, as he speaks at the Michigan Theater for his Penny Stamps Speaker Series talk. In delightful socks that feature the Whoppers candy logo, a glittery headdress resembling that of a Vegas showgirl and a silverpainted dress made from a tarp (he’s downright gleeful about the trip to Michaels he took to complete his look), his manifestation of self is as spectacularly alive and defiant as what I see during the unveiling of the installation inside the Irving Stenn Jr. Family Gallery just hours later.
“I definitely have a lot of suppressed anger,” he tells me in his studio, without needing to justify it — just look around at the current state of the world. “And what I’m trying to do is transform it into queer joy. That manifests in costume, music and sculpture. I’m turning it into something else because there’s nothing I can really do about it. I can vote. But I’m only one person.”
During the public viewing of the first phase of Ouroboros in March, the UMMA deputy director of public experience and learning, Jim Leija, gave opening remarks that reflected on just how long the idea of bringing Machine’s work to the museum had been percolating. Back in 2016, Leija said, he met Machine across campus in the basement of the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre, where Machine was making what Leija described as “a human-sized macrame bikini type thing,” an experience he, as an onlooker, said was “wild, wonderful and joyful.” That garment was being made for performing artist Taylor Mac’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated “A 24-Decade History Of Popular Music,” which recently found a streaming home at HBO, where you can see Machine’s visionary costume work, made again from found objects and acquired materials, that meticulously interprets the time period from 1776 to 2016 in ways that are nothing short of fabulous. His “24-Decade” costumes represented pivotal moments in American and world history: the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love and the first man on the moon. “My work with Taylor is by far my most significant work that I’ve ever done,” Machine tells me.
For Leija, he couldn’t forget that week in 2016, which led up to the “24-Decade” performance and then to Ouroboros. “For me personally, I never forgot that week of watching Machine work and his incredible spirit, creativity and craftsmanship, and his amazing, mischievous sense of humor,” Leija said in his remarks. “I had always hoped that we would work together again, and being able to do this project together has truly been such a special privilege and a dream come true. To be in Machine’s universe is to be in a universe governed by endless possibilities, where ‘more is more’ is the law of the land, and where larger than life is just the right size.” Looking at Machine that night, he added, “You inspire us all to be bigger, better versions of ourselves, and see the fabulous in everything.”
Ouroboros will likely be the most stunning trash receptacle at a museum you’ve ever set your eyes on, where old junk is radiantly revived as if to say, during this precarious election year when so much is at stake for the queer community, we are capable of transformational beauty. Somehow, seeing everyday garbage that very well could’ve been mine morphed into sculpture is weirdly reassuring in a way that is life-affirming; it tells me that nearly everything we are looking at now, be it the instant coffee container on Machine’s studio floor or the bans on gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth that seem never-ending in our modern era, is ephemeral. The effects on kids and climate change may be horrifying in this moment and in the future too, but even political and social change has similar malleable properties as a Sprite bottle that now looks like a gorgeous piece of blown glass. With Ouroboros, there’s hope in all of Machine’s dazzle — that the past may be the past, but something old can always be made into something new.
Chris Azzopardi is the Editorial Director of Pride Source Media Group and Q Syndicate, the national LGBTQ+ wire service. He has interviewed a multitude of superstars, including Cher, Meryl Streep, Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, GQ and Billboard. Reach him via Twitter @ chrisazzopardi.
QUEER
Kristen Stewart to star in Sally Ride biopic
Kristen Stewart is the kind of movie star who can turn chameleon character actor anytime she chooses. She’s played real-life people as unalike as Princess Diana, Jean Seberg and Joan Jett, and next she’ll take on the role of pioneering astronaut Sally Ride in “The Challenger” for her first TV series starring role. From screenwriter and show runner Maggie Cohn (“Narcos: Mexico”), it’s the story of the first American woman — and first queer person — to fly on the space shuttle in 1983. Tragedy struck the Challenger three years later, though, when it exploded on its ascent, and Ride became part of the presidential commission to investigate the disaster, eventually identifying the structural flaws of the craft, earning her legacy as a real American hero. Kyra Sedgwick’s production company is behind the project, and it looks like it will eventually wind up at Amazon. In the world of famous-person biopics, Stewart’s turning into not only the go-to choice, but the rare actor who can get her chosen projects the green light needed to build lasting art.
Kate Winslet reteams with Todd Haynes for ‘Trust’
The last time Kate Winslet and acclaimed “May December” filmmaker Todd Haynes worked together, they brought 2011’s expansive, stunning, longform “Mildred Pierce” to HBO. Now they’ll collaborate again on “Trust,” a limited series based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2023 novel from Hernan Diaz. Set in the 1920s, a man builds a huge fortune on Wall Street and loses his wife in the process. Years later, he finds himself desperate to maintain the secrets he’s accumulated in the face of a biographer out to reveal them all. Seemingly tailor-made for Haynes’ brand of storytelling, the narrative weaves together various competing perspectives and versions of the truth. So far, Winslet is the only cast member attached (she’s also a producer) but Haynes’ projects always attract top-tier talent. More news to come on this one.
By Romeo San Vicente
Queer casting call: Colman Domingo, Kate
McKinnon and Murray Bartlett
We love it when queer performers are cast as heterosexuals, and that seems to be what’s happening with recent roll assignments for Colman Domingo, Kate McKinnon and Murray Bartlett. Domingo — Oscar-nominated for “Rustin” — has taken a part in the upcoming limited series remake of the 1981 comedy film “The Four Seasons,” about straight couples who vacation together. The original starred Carol Burnett and Alan Alda. This one has Tina Fey and Steve Carell. Will Domingo be part of a queer or less-than-queer couple? No one’s talking yet. Meanwhile Kate McKinnon has joined Andy Samberg, Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch for “The Roses,” a reimagining of the 1989 black comedy “The War of The Roses,” another one about battling straight lovers. And Emmy winner Murray Bartlett (“White Lotus”) will play husband to Amy Adams in “At The Sea,” a new drama from Kornel Mundruczó and Kata Wéber (“Pieces of a Woman”). All three projects are currently in production, with no release dates yet. Anticipation!
Broadway beckons Dolly, Netflix courts Kylie Who never slows down? Dolly Parton, that’s who. Not content to disrupt the boxed cake mix industry and reintroduce vintage banana flavor to American palates, she’s finally taking her turn on Broadway by producing her own biomusical, for which she’ll write songs and co-write the book. It’s coming in 2026, it’s called “Hello, I’m Dolly” (clever…) and will star someone who can simultaneously remind you of and make you forget its creator. Who that will be is currently a mystery. Stay tuned. And while you’re waiting, word is that Netflix is getting into business with global pop princess Kylie Minogue for a documentary about her life. No real details on this one yet, but it seems that the queer fan favorite, after decades of cult status in the United States, is poised to become more recognizable than ever before. Longtime fans are already hyperventilating.
Romeo San Vicente can’t get you out of his head.
Photos: Photos: KathClick
CLINICAL
Clinical HIV care in a supportive, confidential, and gender affirming environment. Available at three Centers located in Duluth, Decatur, and Marietta.
A Lott To Love
Studio 54 Elsewhere Brunch MORE | LARGER | ONLINE
Photos by: Russ Bowen-Youngblood
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Photos by: Russ Bowen-Youngblood
Photos by: Russ Bowen-Youngblood
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I’m sorry, I can’t today – I’m busy watching the season finale of the United States.
Please don’t ask me anything dumb in this eat. Not having it.
It was the best of times (brat summer), it was the worst of times (the fall of democracy).
Isnʼt it time we get another submersible with billionaires trapped inside of it? We deserve it.
Booing the ight attendant as they do the life vest demo.
There a no gay people in A Quiet Place because y’all never shut up!
No soda this summer for me. Only drinking water, kids, and liquor.
Are cigare es really bad for you or is that another lie we’ve been told by the system?
