#derek mccormack

"COINCIDENCE” coin by micah lexier (+) & derek mccormack

‘New Pagan Paintings’ - opens April 1  at Cooper Cole [West Gallery] 

Little Gods Again (2023) oil on canvas, 9 x 6”

double-side coin by micah lexier (+) & derek mccormack

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Margiela says. “I give you
 the future of fashion—faggotry!”

Spirit.
 Spirit. Spirit.
 Spirits step from the spirit cabinet. They’re models. They walk like models. They walk like they can’t walk.
They have white hoods over their heads. 
The models stalk around the salon as the characters
 stare at them. They carry cards. The cards bear numbers.
The numbers correspond to the looks that the models 
are wearing.

It’s Margiela—The cards are blank.


I was looking at your … interview? conversation? with Joey Comeau from a few years back, and there’s a part where you said, “I dream of being evil.” The Eartha Kitt thing. “I want to be wicked / I want to tell lies.” Often the good guys in your books are these bumbling saps, and all of the most glamorous and charismatic characters are, you know, vampires or monsters. What is the appeal of evil to you?

The appeal is … I hate talking about childhood, because I can’t separate my childhood from my current psyche. I was more grown-up when I was a child than I am now. That’s a complicated question. The easy answer is, “Oh, I got beaten up a lot.” And by “a lot” I mean a lot. Like, I could not go to school sometimes. I was harassed to such a point in junior high that teachers and the principal, their only plan was, they let me out of school 15 minutes early so I could get a running start. So certainly that was part of it, to be able to have revenge. That said, I think that’s too easy, because I never really had those simple revenge fantasies. In fact, my revenge fantasy in high school was always that I would get beaten to a point where I was almost dead, and get carried through the halls, and that the cute boys I loved would feel bad for me. It was like a martyrdom that turned me on.

And going back even further, even before I was bullied I knew that I was a little faggot, and there was something wrong and to keep it secret. I guess I was bullied when I was younger, because I would get called a faggot at a very young age, or get shouted at, or get called that by a teacher. And my answer was always: “Yes.” So we were at an impasse. I was never one to say, “Yes, so what, it’s normal.” I was always one to say, “Yeah, it’s the most abnormal thing in the world. And that makes me better than you.” I guess it was a little revenge thing. I never stood for my rights and said, “No, I should be treated like this,” which I think would’ve been healthy. Instead I was like, “You’re right, I’m sick and I’m wrong and I’m going to be the wrongest thing that there can be.” My impulse was always to push that, so that involved writing, it involved finding the evillest things I could find. The Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire. Fashion for sure was part of it. Music.

It also turned into being very wary of the gay world, because it never occurred to me as a young person to be part of a community where everyone felt like freaks, because if you’re in a community then you can’t be a freak. There has to be one freak, or maybe two freaks. Otherwise you’re not a freak. And it felt necessary to preserve that freakishness. It’s also physical—I remember the first few times I jerked off, I thought, This is too … nothing. So I would try it with cutting myself or stabbing myself or something, which might’ve come from the Marquis de Sade. That was before I was really sick. But when I got cancer everyone was like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe it, this is the best moment of your life.” And in a way they were right, because I’d been waiting for it my whole life, something that big and awful, if not trying to induce it in myself.