“I feel like we’ve reclaimed that word, faggot. It feels really good to say.”
CockyBoys model Sean Ford is proving time and time again that he is set to be one of the biggest breakout stars of the industry. He just ended 2019 with an interview for VMAN Magazine and now he has an actual interview with Interview Magazine. Ford sat down with Peter McGough for this piece and the two discussed violence in the media, if his family knows about his career, and reclaiming the word ‘faggot.’
Catch some of our favorite quotes from Ford’s Interview interview and read the full chat with the CockyBoys star over at InterviewMagazine.com.
MCGOUGH: What’s the importance of making work that highlights queer love? How do you see yourself as a spokesman? I feel like you have a different attitude towards it. Tell me more about that.
FORD: I believe that queer love shouldn’t only exist in the narrow scope of porn. I’ve been trying to push it onto others, working with fashion designers who also appreciate sexuality and don’t try to hide from it. I think, in that regard, pushing the idea and image of gay love and intimacy as more of a public sphere and not so much as the disposable thing that porn tends to construe it as.
MCGOUGH: Now it’s queer cinema, queer politics and all that. I think that what you’re doing here is you’re experimenting with what they would call nudies, porno, or dirty pictures, and you’re trying to bring it into, “No, this is queer love.” It’s really a straight world. Even our government, they’re trying to take away LGBT rights. So I think it’s interesting what you’re doing here. You’re promoting intimacy and love between two men.
FORD: Because some people don’t get to experience it. Some people living in small towns and in the middle of the country, if this is the first time that they’ve seen this or at least seen it in this way, I think it can change their perspective on their own lives and their own possibilities. Perhaps give them some kind of hope that when what they figure out what they want in life—sexually or romantically—it isn’t shameful.
MCGOUGH: …Violence is so shocking to me. I mean, I think it has gotten out of hand in cinema. You see all these guns on posters, all of these pictures of women holding guns, men holding guns, and then you have gun violence all over America. They are promoting violence. Why not promote intimacy, love, and pleasure?
FORD: Violence has become so much more normalized than eroticism. I think it’s for actually quite an intentional, sinister reason. It’s because violence tends to push people apart for the benefit of the powerful. Love, radical love, tends to bring people together and can affect real change. I think the promotion and normalization of violence over love and eroticism has been an intentional move by the powerful to sort of drive us away from each other.
MCGOUGH: …You’re in this adult industry at such a young age. Does your family know?
FORD: Actually, my mother knows what I do and she’s very supportive. I can talk to her about it.
MCGOUGH: Why do you think she’s so supportive of you in this?
FORD: She trusts me and she thinks I’m smart, which sometimes I doubt. She also, you know, grew up part of a hippie commune in the woods of Arkansas, so I think that probably had something to do with her liberal mentality.
MCGOUGH: I remember when I was 16, I was watching Dick Cavett, who was an interviewer in the ’70s. He had Christopher Isherwood, who wrote Berlin Stories that became Cabaret. Cavett said, “Well, you’re gay.” Christopher Isherwood said, “Oh, I hate that word.” And Cavett asked him, “Well, what do you want me to call it?” He said, “Call me a queer.” In the mid-’70s, that stuck with me. I learned from an old queer, and then I thought, if he’s saying it in the ’80s, I was thinking, “Oh, why not make a painting that says queer?” Because I wanted to be called queer. Now, I see all these people saying “faggot.” I love that kind of thing—“the faggotry.”
FORD: I feel like we’ve reclaimed that word, faggot. It feels really good to say.
