♥BENTS: SUPERCILIOUSNESS

BUTT: Young filmmaker Loo Zihan’s first film Solos was a frank portrayal of a gay affair between a teacher and a young student, played by Zihan himself. Unsurprisingly the film was immediately banned in Singapore upon its release in 2007 due to ‘explicit content’. Zihan and I have become friends over the years and when he recently emailed me to say he was coming to New York for a working vacation, I figured he meant writing, or directing, or working on a film in some other capacity. I was more than a little surprised when I found out that the work that brought Zihan here was a week-long stint of go-go dancing at the city’s only Asian gay bar called The Web, an underground club on 57th Street that I’d always heard about but never went to. Every night Zihan, who now lives in Chicago and studies art and film-making, dressed up in inventive costumes that most go-go boys no longer put the effort into – Olympic swimmer garb one night, Shibari Japanese rope bondage another, and a full on leather-man look with nipple clamps the next. It didn’t take me long to realize that more than likely, this experience would be more than just an easy way for Zihan to make money. It’s probably going to end up being his next film…