Brooks I told you recently that in the last couple of years, you’d gotten a lot better as a painter.

Ehrenfried You did.

Brooks But part two of my comment was that you had no need to—or frankly any right to—get better because you were already an outstanding painter.

Ehrenfried You did. Thank you.

Brooks I mean it. You have a show coming up, don’t you?

Ehrenfried Yes, at the end of February at Auxier Kline in New York. This is my fourth solo show with them, if I'm including online exhibitions.

Brooks You’ve been working with them for a while.

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks Your last solo with Auxier Kline was in 2024.

Ehrenfried Yes, it was that show of all paintings of my husband Campbell, which I titled Nine and a Half. At that point that was the duration that we had been together, but we also, well, Campbell liked that title because it is also a measurement that is rather evocative for other reasons.

Brooks It certainly is. {laughs}

Ehrenfried Yes. {laughs} People were like…oh, Nine and a Half… and we were like yeah, it's a long time to be together…and they were like uh-huh, a long time. {laughs}

Brooks I won’t ask too many specific questions about this subject. {laughs}

Ehrenfried The next show is called Eleven and a Half. {laughs} No, this has been my task for today, trying to title the show, and I have a possibility, but it feels very first thought, worst thought. Also, all the shows that I've had at Auxier Kline have been titled by Campbell, and I haven't been able to have him come into the studio and look at all the work in one view to wave his magic titling wand.

Brooks So it isn’t that he has retired from titling?

Ehrenfried No. {laughs}

Brooks Tell me about the new work.

Ehrenfried They're all trompe l’oeil collage paintings, and then I think there will be a few monotypes from an art residency I did here last spring and summer. There may also be a print or two from the edition that I made during that residency.

Brooks By here you mean Oklahoma City?

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks How long have you been living there?

Ehrenfried We're almost halfway through our third year. We moved here in August 2023.

Brooks From Brooklyn.

Ehrenfried In a whirlwind.

Brooks In a whirlwind?

Ehrenfried Yes, I mean it just all happened very quickly, we like didn't even really think too much about it because Campbell was offered a job here.

Brooks At Oklahoma City University, as a Professor of Musicology.

Ehrenfried Yes. He was offered the job in the beginning of July and they told him the job is yours; we want you here by August 14th or August 15th. So we basically had like seventy-two hours to decide if he was actually going to take this job.

Brooks Wow, a whirlwind indeed.

Ehrenfried I think initially we were hesitant because it was so quick and we thought it was too crazy, but after the first forty-eight hours we were both like fuck it, let’s do it. We knew that because of his work, our days in the city were numbered, barring some sort of strange miracle. Certainly Oklahoma was not a place on our radar.

Brooks And now you've been there almost three years.

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks And you have a beautiful studio, which I have visited a couple of times on my drives between Los Angeles and Kentucky.

Ehrenfried Yeah, which I'm constantly reminded of by people who live here. Everyone says that this particular studio, this particular storefront is a really coveted spot.

Brooks It's a great spot!

Ehrenfried Yeah, and people say don't ever relinquish it unless you're leaving the city. There's nothing better available here.

Brooks Can you describe it for people who haven’t visited you?

Ehrenfried It is like a storefront; I'd say it's about five hundred and fifteen or so square feet. Because it's a storefront, the front wall of the studio is all windows that face north…or maybe it faces south. I'm terrible with directions. {laughs} I rent this studio from a ceramic studio who owns this building, and the two ladies who run the ceramic studio are the second and third generation owners of The House of Clay, and they've been around for like seventy-five years, so they're this Oklahoma City institution, and they are lovely. It's a wonderful place to make paintings in and to be in. It’s more space than I ever would have been able to have living in New York, and I think for that reason alone, it's been just really productive, really good for the paintings. It's also just been good for my mental health to have more space because, as I tell people, the last six or seven months that I was in Brooklyn, it felt like every like five or six weeks I would have some sort of meltdown about my studio in Gowanus, which was like ten by twelve feet.

Brooks I visited that studio, too. It was small.

Ehrenfried Yes, yes, teeny tiny. I would have a meltdown in there like every five or six weeks because I would get overwhelmed that it was too cramped, nothing was organized, and I wouldn’t know where anything is. Campbell would come to the studio and together we would tear the entire place apart and put it back together, and then I would feel better for a little while, and then would have another meltdown and have to do it all over again. And thankfully here in Oklahoma City, because there's just more space, more ways to store things, more space for tables, more space for just all the different parts of the process that makes the paintings, and I get more done. Thinking back on Brooklyn I remember how totally smooshed I felt in there.

Brooks It was small, but people also get used to what they have, and artists in New York make a lot out of what they have available to them.

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks Your husband Campbell is a Virginian, and you’re from New Jersey, and then you were both New Yorkers. You never imagined yourselves living in Oklahoma City, yet there you are. What kind of community have you found?

Ehrenfried We certainly have made good friends while we've been here. There's a community of artists here, and the people that I know are lovely. It's a very different kind of community of artists here compared to New York or LA or, I don't know, probably any large city that has a university with a big BFA program that does fine arts and design, because that creates a community of artists who are interested in exhibitions and who are interested in other artists and what other people are doing in their studios. Here, I think, what I've found is that peoples’ objectives for their work—where they want it to go, what kind of work they want to make—is just really different.  I don’t think there are a lot of people here who are engaged in the same kinds of ideas that I am engaged with in my studio. Ultimately, that’s fine most of the time. I'm happy to be a hermit, and people have to find me a little by accident, as it sometimes happens here.

Brooks I understand that, as someone who lived for many years in Louisville, which is smaller, I guess, than Oklahoma City? I think Louisville is definitely more connected to the general contemporary art scene, though.

Ehrenfried It is. I think having a museum like the Speed in Louisville really helps. I would say that's the thing about Oklahoma City that really affects the art community here. There's not really an ecosystem of artists, collectors, people who write about art, people who are not collectors but who are involved in the inner workings of an arts institution at any level. There is no art museum here that is involved in cultivating that ecosystem, and that’s my big criticism for Oklahoma City. Whoever is at the helm of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art needs to get off their duff and do the difficult work of getting the people who live here interested in something outside of what they're already looking at or thinking about.

Brooks There are real downsides to living in a place that feels disconnected from what is happening more widely in the contemporary art world. Isolation can also be great for working in that you can really focus on your work.

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks And you, as an individual artist, can also make an impact on the scene as it already exists.

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks But I understand that there is a disconnect relating to exhibiting and even the kinds of conversations you want to be having. But, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you have work up now at a museum in Oklahoma?

Ehrenfried Yes, I have work right now in this exhibition called Art Now at the Oklahoma Contemporary Art Center. They do an iteration of Art Now every two years; I guess it’s like the Oklahoma biennial. It's a new two person curatorial team in this case and they’ve selected artists from across the state that they feel are either representative of Oklahoma or doing something interesting as an artist living in Oklahoma.

Brooks Cool.

Ehrenfried I got placed into that because, kind of serendipitously, I became friendly with the director of exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center, and she sort of threw my name into this big pool and encouraged the curators to pay me a visit.

Brooks As much as you can tell, how has your work been received?

Ehrenfried Every time I've visited, the docents and the people behind the front desk tell me how much they've enjoyed spending time with my paintings. It's a very packed show; I think it's twenty-six artists in total, and there are a lot of very large installations, many of which are great and very ambitious. When the show opened, I initially felt a little like oh, I just make dinky little paintings. But it has felt kind of full circle to be in this current iteration because when we first moved here, the previous iteration had just opened. I remember going to see that— having just gone through the grueling two weeks of trying to find studio space here—and having very low expectations, but I was heartened by it because it was a good show. It looked like a museum show, the work was contemporary, it was well made, and it covered a lot of ground. I left encouraged that there are people in this state making good art.

Brooks Wonderful.

Ehrenfried In this current iteration, even though I still feel in many ways like an outsider in Oklahoma, it feels full circle for me to be included. I’m appreciative and grateful for that.

Brooks Your experience is also a great example of what is possible for an artist living in a place like Oklahoma City; you came from Brooklyn, and here you are two years later, and you're in the main show.

Ehrenfried Yes.

Brooks In a place like Louisville or Oklahoma City, in a couple of years or a couple of maneuvers, you can become involved in things, which is exciting.

Ehrenfried Yeah, it's a smaller place, and the “hierarchies” are shorter and so they’re more accessible. It's easy to meet by accident the person who is close to the top, and maybe they don't have the same airs about themselves that a person with that similar title in New York might have. And it’s not because people in New York are inherently snobbish, but people are busy, and they only have so much bandwidth.

Brooks Yeah, it's very unlikely that, for example, someone would move to New York and then in two years be in the Whitney Biennial. It could happen and I'm sure it has happened, but it's also much less likely.

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks Your work often has some overtly Queer elements to it. How has that been received in a conservative place like Oklahoma?

Ehrenfried I think on the whole, it has been received well. I haven't really had any problems with it, or at least I haven't experienced any obvious backlash. I guess when it comes to the times that I've exhibited work in Oklahoma, there is this attentiveness on the part of curators, but also on the part of myself, that is attuned to the differences here. In some ways I want to be sensitive to it. But I think—at least within the studio—I've felt myself be a little bit more brazen about Queer stuff when I do put it in the work. I think because it is difficult to ignore living here that, on the whole, the state politics in Oklahoma are very, very unfriendly and bad to Queer people, to people of color, to transgender people, even to just Democrats in general {laughs}, to people who don't love Christ. The political situation in Oklahoma is a little bit unique to the rest of the country because it is so conservative, but it also has very large tribal presence. That is an important part of the state’s politics, and it’s really ingrained in peoples’ lives here. At least in Oklahoma City—and I think it's probably more in other parts of the state—it feels like every 6th license plate is not registered to Oklahoma, but is registered to The Chickasaw Nation or the Choctaw or Cherokee or other tribes

Brooks I see.

Ehrenfried It's a strange political situation. Going back to my own work, regarding the gay stuff…

Brooks Yes, let’s get to the gay stuff. {laughs}

Ehrenfried Yes. {laughs} One of the most significant way the politics of this place have affected me is that Oklahoma was one of the first states to institute this age verification pornography ban, and one of the ways that I sometimes source imagery for collages that are the basis for my paintings is porn. I literally cannot look at it now. I would have to basically surrender my personal information to access pornography that isn't on Twitter or BlueSky. This restriction feels negligible some days, and sometimes it feels bigger. I wonder exactly how edgy it is to be making paintings that include explicit pornography in the state of Oklahoma and with any luck, I will never know exactly what exactly the risks of doing that are.

Brooks Right.

Ehrenfried On the whole, people are friendly and they like the paintings. There is a pretty established gay community in Oklahoma City that has a fair amount of history here, oddly enough. But I'm sure it's similar to Louisville, in that it's a very different kind of Queer community from New York or Los Angeles or Chicago, or even Dallas. People here have a very a different expression of their Queerness compared to what I’m used to. Thankfully, I have never experienced any problems here but, you know, never say never. I could step out my door after this call, and who knows what could happen.

Brooks I understand all of that very well. Louisville, where I lived on and off for twenty-two years, also has quite a large Queer population. But how it is comprised and how it is expressed is very different than it is in New York or L.A. To be honest, that's one of the reasons I moved here. I decided I wanted to be in a place where there were more people like me and where my Queerness wasn't necessarily something that that set me apart.

Ehrenfried Right.

Brooks There's power, absolutely, in being part of a small but mighty minority in places like Louisville and Oklahoma City, but there's also something powerful about being in the majority. Well, I am sure we aren’t in the majority even in L.A., though sometimes it feels like it, depending on what neighborhood you’re in. {laughs} I never thought this feeling of “majority” was something I wanted, but I had a taste of it a couple of years ago and decided, oh I'm kind of ready for this feeling.

Ehrenfried Totally. There are days where I miss that quality and then other days where I really don’t because…I don't know…these days every gay person I know is so insufferable. {laughs} I mean, I'm glad I don't have to interface with any of them. {laughs}

Brooks {laughs} That can certainly be true. {laughs} You’re finding ways to show work and not necessarily push the envelope but direct the conversation in a direction you want.

Ehrenfried Right.

Brooks I never want my work to be ghettoized. Yes, my work is Queer, just as your work is, and that’s a fundamental aspect of the work, but it's not the only aspect of my work, and I think sometimes in a place like Louisville or Oklahoma City, or any number of smaller cities, artists run the risk of being put into narrow categories. He just makes gay paintings, that’s all there is to it. And the truth is that there is so much more to it.

Ehrenfried The vast majority of the time it feels, for me, like less of a variable in the work that I can have or not have, but more like a control in each painting experiment. It is a part of my perspective as a painter. It feels futile to, or it would feel redundant to sit down and be like I'm gonna make a queer painting today.

Brooks Right. It's just part of your perspective because it's part of your life.

Ehrenfried It feels ingrained in all of my logic in this way that I can barely have any perspective on because it's just how I think. Maybe someone—maybe my dad, in his way—would be able to pull apart exactly what the non-normative and logical connections are in the work, if I really sat down and explained the paintings to him.

Brooks  Your dad because he knows you because he knows you well or for another reason?

Ehrenfried Because he knows me well, but he is also someone who will immediately tell me if what I'm explaining to him is not making any sense to him, and he will be able to tell me what part of it isn't registering… and probably the part that's not registering is like the gay guy part of it. {laughs}

Brooks But could he ever understand the gay guy part of it though?

Ehrenfried I don't know, maybe not.

Brooks I think this is an interesting query. We’re getting at something here. What we are talking about, what we are coming up against, is opposition to, or resistence to, our otherness. You are making your work; yes, it has a Queer aspect to it, but you're making that work not because you’re consciously saying oh, I'm going to make Queer work. This is simply your life, this is your experience, this is your perspective. For someone like your dad, who isn’t Queer—which is the case for the vast majority of people—that aspect of the work is always going to feel foreign.

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks But it's not our job to lessen ourselves, or to move back the line, so to speak, so that they're more comfortable. It's their job to accept that some people's perspectives are different than their own. That’s pretty basic.

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks I don’t mean to single out your dad or say that he’s antagonistically not understanding the work, but I think oftentimes this resistance that Queer artists come up against is simply opposition to our nature and a denial of our experiences. We get complaints about penises in works, but I don’t think anyone ever said to Monet, in a derogaroty way, oh my God, not another water lily. What is it with you and the fucking water lilies?

EhrenfriedRight.

Brooks They may not like the work, but they simply accept that this is something that is part of his world, without judgment, whereas there are often judgments, specific judgments, made about us.

Ehrenfried Yeah. I've been thinking about this a little…I don't know where I am going…but it feels like a missile. {laughs}

Brooks Go ahead. {laughs}

Ehrenfried Not to call out my community, but I sometimes feel like the thing that feels most quintessential for me in this Queer perspective in painting, or any art form really, is like not that the inherent Queerness in the work emerges from some imagistic quality in the artwork, but rather it’s like a misalignment in perspective, or it’s something that someone does materially that's really slippery.

Brooks Of course, that’s a great point. It isn't just about the images that you're using or pulling from. And it’s also true that one’s work is good or interesting simply because the work is Queer. I welcome criticisms, we all should. But it matters where they’re coming from. I just object to a criticism that originates from a place of opposition to or fear of Queerness.

Ehrenfried Yeah, or even I’m imagining this image of someone looking at a painting of a man and them being like oh, it's too weird. {laughs}

Brooks Well, they might! {laughs}

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks Maybe the viewer is E.T. or something. {laughs}

Ehrenfried Or maybe it’s E.T. looking at—oh, what’s her name—she’s with Canada and makes the paintings of E.T.

Brooks Katherine Bernhardt.

Ehrenfried I would love to know what E.T. thought of her paintings, or like Doron’s {Langberg} work. {laughs}

Brooks I hope one day we have a chance to find out if he ever comes back. You know, I can hardly talk about him without crying. I consider him to be my first friend. E.T. was the first movie I ever saw, and I was very young, maybe four or five,  and I was obsessed with him. I knew that I liked him, but I'd sort of forgotten my intense love and then about twenty years ago I happened to watch the movie. I was living in London and it was on television. I completely lost it. Sobbed uncontrollably.

Ehrenfried It’s intense.

Brooks It's so intense. It's so intense and he's so wonderful and people are so terrible and that was true then and it's still true.

Ehrenfried I should find a time to rewatch E.T. This has been my polemic, the last year and a half, that like I’m feeling like actually some art is very evil because it manipulates you in a way that is totally divorced from time or lived experience. I'm not saying that E.T. is one of these films; certainly, at least in my memory, it is well constructed art that is not manipulative. The first thing that comes to mind, because it's on everyone's mind, Wicked. It’s actually like very evil. {laughs}

Brooks I have seen it on stage in London, but I haven’t seen the film.

Ehrenfried I haven’t either. {laughs}

Brooks What? {laughs}

Ehrenfried I know the music and I think the music is like actually evil. There’s something about it that makes me think Plato was right: art is evil, it's bad, we shouldn't do it. {laughs} A year ago, I went to a tuba recital, given by one of Campbell's colleagues, the tuba instructor, who is wonderful. At the conclusion of her recital, she played an arrangement of Defying Gravity for tuba and piano, and listening to the tuba—it’s like voice of Elphaba—I like felt myself tearing up.  I have no emotional attachment to this musical or this music, but hearing it on the fucking tuba, I could feel the tears coming and I was like, this is so crazy, that this music would have this power. And I thought that this is not actually a good thing, this is evil, that I can hear this music on the fucking tuba, and there something can punch a deep part of my psyche, apropos of nothing, and can like make me cry.  That is weird and crazy.

Brooks But isn’t that the power of art, pure and simple? I’m always amazed when that sort of thing happens. How wonderful it is that the sounds that come from this very peculiar invented construction, even from the tuba, have the power to move you. To me, that is a kind of a miracle. But I understand what you are saying. It is one of the reasons I have largely avoided theater, and more specifically musicals, over the last fifteen or so years because that always happens to me. I suppose I have felt manipulated,   though I'm not sure if that's the correct way to look at it. Perhaps the fact that I am moved to tears is simply a testimony to the successfulness of their work.

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks Last summer, I went to see the L.A. Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. I wanted to see Dudamel, but he wasn’t conducting, it was Leonard Slatkin, who was wonderful. Holst’s The Planets was the main draw, but Violinist Martin Chalifour also performed Vaughan Williams' A Lark Ascending and I cried real tears. I let myself, but I also thought oh my God, this is why I can't go out in public to experience these things. Am I so weak or are my emotions so close to the surface? There is something about music that is  particularly transformative for me.

Ehrenfried There's stuff like Wicked where I think it's really evil, or where it feels unfair in some way, and then there's other music where it feels more earned. One of the last operas that we saw when we were in New York was this Francis Poulenc opera Dialogue of the Carmelites, which is about this order of nuns during the French Revolution who basically refused to renounce Christ, and so they were all guillotined. It’s a terrible tragedy, only enhanced by the ending in which all of the nuns are singing this final song and one by one they disappear, walking off stage, being led off stage to be guillotined, and you hear the sound of the guillotine, and with each pass of the guillotine, one voice is subtracted.

Brooks Wow.

Ehrenfried I’m getting chills describing it right now. The voices lessening. You can't help but like cry about it. It guts you, and you have to endure it, through all of these women. I suppose that Plato would think that us watching that is also evil because most likely we are not nuns who were guillotined for refusing to renounce our love of Christ. {laughs}

Brooks Is that based on a true story?

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks So is that for you the difference, or one of the differences, between something like Wicked that you think is manipulative and something real that has earned its gravitas? You’re not Catholic, so you don't have a pro-Catholic bias. {laughs}

Ehrenfried I don't know, it might just be as simple as contradictions within my my own taste. I'm trying to think like where else this feeling of unearnedness occurs for me. The first thing that comes to mind is that Netflix show Heartstopper. When I watched it, I had a very strong reaction to it. It put me into this terrible depression for a whole week.

Brooks Because…?

Ehrenfried Because even though it was so adorable, I think the function of it, the purpose of it, was to make me sad.

Brooks I haven't seen it.

Ehrenfried It's cute. After the first time I watched it, I made Campbell rewatch it with me, and he was like yeah, that's adorable. But he also pointed out that these are all teenagers in high school and why is no one watching pornography? I thought that’s actually a very astute observation and it pulled me completely out of this spiral that I was in, and I realized that this is not real, and it's not worth this sort of backwards reaction I’m having to this happy story.

Brooks Why did it make you sad?

Ehrenfried I don't know. I’ve talked to a few other gay people about this, too. The show is about like a high school freshman or sophomore—I can't remember how old he's supposed to be—and we go through the trials and tribulations of being an out gay teenager who has a crush on a hot bisexual rugby player. And then in the end he wins over the hot bisexual rugby player because he’s like, so weird and cute, and by all accounts, everything is happy…and this is in no way a reflection of any experience that I had as a 15 year old.

Brooks Me either.

Ehrenfried And instead of being able to sublimate watching this show into feeling happiness that maybe this sort of thing is possible for gay teenagers now…instead, I was distraught that there was this whole narrative that was totally irretrievable for me.

Brooks God, I understand that.

Ehrenfried But, I was only to then be reminded, almost immediately, looking at my husband, that when we met, he was twenty and I was twenty-two. I didn't feel like a baby at the time, but in retrospect, we were basically children, so, actually I did have what should count as lasting, still ongoing teenage romance.

Brooks You had your own version of Heartstopper.

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks I have, especially as I've gotten older, avoided all things like that, with gay teenagers in love. When I was that age, it was so different and while there were some beautiful moments, it was mostly so lonely. You know, in high school, I had a year long flirtation with a boy who played on the football and soccer teams, and that culminated in some kissing and a little bit more, but it then evaporated into never talk to me again. When I think about that time, I just think of being so lonely. I find it impossible to watch things like Heartstopper because they make me lament what I never had and never will. It just makes me want to ask, damn, why didn't this happen for me?

Ehrenfried Yeah, though I sometimes feel like such a grump. {laughs}

Brooks Yes, I get that. {laughs} Many younger people seem to love those shows because they feel represented, because it reflects their experiences. And good for them.

Ehrenfried Yeah, or are they like this is so cringe.Why does anyone care about this? Of course, someone who is not fifteen in the year 2026 making a television show about being fifteen is going to reflect on what it was like to be fifteen but with the added benefit of a smartphone.

Brooks Well, smartphones completely change everything.

Ehrenfried Most notably, as Campbell pointed out, one has access to pornography all the time.

Brooks That’s true.

Ehrenfried It's part of why I feel like such a grump when people sort of wax poetic about how moving it is to have certain kinds of representation en masse in film and television. On the one hand, I very much appreciate it..on the other, I'm also like—and I understand that representations in pornography are very different than representations of a gay person on television—but let's not pretend that all of us at the age of fourteen were starved for images of beautiful, naked men.

Brooks Speak for yourself! I was fourteen in 1992, and there was no internet, so I certainly was starved for that. {laughs}

Ehrenfried Fair enough!

Brooks We had the underwear section in the J.C. Penney catalog.{laughs}

Ehrenfried I understand. {laughs} I guess, more broadly, I'm always cautious of representation as a salve for things. The places where I find the most exciting kind of Queer narratives in film or television are not necessarily recent stuff, but older movies, places where Queerness is all innuendo. That kind of negation or talking around something feels, if not more representative, then just more useful as a strategy. But maybe that's just me as a painter who wants to try to avoid everything.

Brooks I feel like we’re talking around Heated Rivalry, which everyone is watching.

Ehrenfried I'm really trying not to because I don't feel like I can talk about it with any authority because I haven't even watched it.

Brooks I haven't watched it either, so perhaps we ought not to presume. But I think Heated Rivalry is a good example of me avoiding something that seems like it might even be specifically made for me.

Ehrenfried I'm going to watch it in April, because I know that there's going to be a long weekend in that Campbell is out of town for a colloquium. I know that he doesn't want to watch it, despite us actually really liking the showrunner, because we are big fans of Letterkenny and Shoresy.

Brooks Yeah?

Ehrenfried I think in part, we are big fans of Letterkenny and Shoresy, because these two shows approach…I don't mean to make a pun… but they approach Queerness from behind…

Brooks I love approaching Queerness from behind. {laughs}

Ehrenfried {laughs} Sure, I do it every day. {laughs} At its heart, Letterkenny is a show about the fragility and performance of different types of men, it’s about what should be a contradiction in terms of friendship between men. One of the two showrunners, this guy who's at the helm of Heated Rivalry, is a gay guy, and then the other, Jared Keeso, who stars in Letterkenny, is a straight guy, and both are posturing all the time. It's very dry, it's very quick, it's really funny. All these, different types of small town hicks in Canada are just trying to avoid being too gay, but it also asks the question is it possible for a man to be vulnerable with his friends who are also men without being gay? I think the show answers yes, but the show addresses homophobia in ways that are really funny and, I think, feel true to the experience of many gay men where homophobia is this experience that is totally pervasive; to a certain extent, it’s in everything, at least when dealing with other men who are and aren’t gay. Like it's always present, it’s always part of this ongoing negotiation, but it's not always in the form of explicit violence or people threatening you or calling you slurs, but it's this implicit thing and sometimes you feel very aware of it, and other times it's just like background noise and you do your day, live your life.

Brooks Right.

Ehrenfried All that's to say, I will watch Heated Rivalry at some point. I think the thing right now that interests me most about it is how exactly does this show address homophobia and the pervasiveness for heterosexual men— or men who assume that they are heterosexual—that is this broken record of don't be gay, don't be gay, don't be gay, don't be gay. Does this show tackle that, or does it ignore it completely? Outside of the minds of the lead characters, is everyone else in the show like yay gay, do gay, be gay, sports and gay! {laughs} I speak with no authority because I haven't watched the show. I've seen a gazillion memes, so I feel like I know everything about the show and these two people without having watched any of it. I do think that is going to be part of the frustration when I do eventually watch it, that I'll feel like I have already seen it in the way that, like, sometimes a movie trailer and one hundred and eighty seconds gives you the entire film start to finish and you're like well…

Brooks On New Year’s Day I went to the Los Feliz 3 to see a 35mm showing of Kubrick’s The Killing, which is a great film with Sterling Hayden, and which I had seen before. I happened to also look up the trailer on YouTube which I highly recommend not watching because it gives the whole film away! It’s crazy what it shows.

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks You and I will have to do a Part Two conversation in April after you have seen have seen Heated Rivalry.

Ehrenfried Yeah.

Brooks I wanted to ask a little bit about what you've been writing.

Ehrenfried Oh.

Brooks You said you've written 60,000 words.

Ehrenfried Brandon Taylor was in Florence over the summer teaching and was complaining on Instagram about how it is so hot in Florence, that there is like a special kind of heat in Florence specifically, that it is so abrasive and totally obliterating in ways that he had never experienced anywhere else. I wrote to him and I said that I share this experience because I studied in Florence my junior year of college, and I remember for that first month and a half, it was unbelievable how hot it was, how intense the sun is in that city. It was so crazy, and the experience of that sun was so intense and unbearable and I was forced to deal with it and accept that I was also a gay guy, and whatever sort of guilt or shame or embarrassment that I had been living with until going to Italy became too much to handle on top of the heat. So early in that semester, it wasn’t that I marched out and announced to all these strangers that I didn't know guess what, everyone I'm gay, rather it just resolved in some way that I realized I couldn’t be in denial. It was like, too exhausting on top of everything else in that fucking city, which I did enjoy very much and loved. I told Brandon this in so many words, and he was like king, where's the autofiction? Put it down. I thought about that for like three days, and then Campbell was out of town for like two weeks, and so during the evenings, I didn't really have anything to do, and so I sat down and started writing and then basically haven't stopped.

Brooks Wonderful. Thank you, Brandon.

Ehrenfried Yes, thank you. What I have been writing is part auto fiction about that semester abroad, and why I picked Florence in the first place. I went to Florence when I was thirteen, after my bar mitzvah. Rather than have, a big blowout party, which I didn't want, my family and I went to Italy for two weeks. We started in Florence, and on one of those first nights in Florence, walking back to the hotel from dinner, I saw two men kissing on the street, and it was the it was the first time that I ever saw two men kiss in public, and this is seared into my memory, but not as a moment of profound relief like, oh my God, I'm healed, it’s real, it's great, oh, gay people! It was more like terror, some of the most intense embarrassment that I had ever experienced. It was totally horrifying to see this happen in front of me, in front of my family, I think in part because I felt proximity to it, at the age of twelve. Part of my motivation for going back to Florence in college was this superstitious reasoning, thinking about it in a sort of mystical way that isn’t normal for me. I thought I could, in some way, confirm this event of the men kissing as real or make some sort of peace with it. I thought maybe I could be done with it and just make paintings and not feel like I had this spectre of homosexuality  looming over me any longer, and instead I could just be this hyper-focused artist. I wanted to know how could I devise a way of working that had so many layers of obfuscation so that I could sublimate all of this guilt and loathing into a really productive painting practice that would sustain me in my life. I don't think it seemed tenable at the age of twenty but it seemed lik an option that was like conducive to not having to face reality. {laugh} Ultimately it was an uneventful semester. I like didn't have a big gay romance, but it was, I think, the beginning of synthesizing a lot of things together about this entanglement of my personal desires and expression in painting. The work I was making then was very different from what I'm doing now. And what I’m writing…it goes back and forth between this story that is mostly true, but it’s not nonfiction, so there are parts that I have extended or altered, or there are certain people who were in the program whom I've removed or combined with other people for the purposes of this narrative that I'm trying to weave. But it's also a lot of reflection from my place as the person sitting at the table recording the events but with hindsight. I’m finding the process fascinating.

Brooks I can't wait to maybe read it.

Ehrenfried I have no idea if it's any good. I’ll send you something of it.

Brooks Please.

Ehrenfried I think I'm almost done with this first pass, and then I don't know. The nice thing about writing it was that it really motivated me to order all of these books about the history of Florence. As I was sifting back through my memories of the city in the short time that I was there, I realized that I didn’t have a handle on what was going on culturally and politically in the city’s medieval or Renaissance history. I think even Florentines would admit that that is the most significant period of the city's history, it's why it's famous. When I was there, I really went out of my way to not learn about Florence, {laughs} as if I was there to be this passive observer of what most people would consider to be the best and most interesting parts of the city. Even though I had, and include in the writing, a few profound moments that I did have with artworks in the city, none of that motivated me in and way to have any curiosity about the city or its history.

Brooks Interesting.

Ehrenfried In my mind, that is very much attributed to being deeply in the closet, as if you are like invested in constantly litigating your own shame that you have no capacity for curiosity about anything else in the outside world. In reflecting on it, in my mind I realized of course I didn't give a shit about what's in the Uffizi. I know if I went back now, I would be totally enthralled; I wouldn't be able to get enough. It's been really nice to have this sort of silly excuse read about this place that is important to me—but for not the reasons that it's important—and learn about Brunelleschi and Ucello and all of these great geniuses…even though they were probably all terrible, shitty people who smelled awful. But they were geniuses, and as I was reading about them, I found myself continually moved by this closeness that all of these artists had between painting and their other artistic pursuits, that in their minds, their work was so closely linked to science and engineering and physics and architecture and the cosmos. All of these people were so smart and they were so unbelievably well-trained and at very young ages, they made so many profound connections between visual art and math and science, and I read about them and then I have to step outside and go get a coffee to remind myself like, it is OK that like none of us are like once in a generation geniuses like fucking Donatello was or whatever. {laughs} It's been funny to get this history lesson, not in reverse, but way after the fact which is, I appreciate, not in a way that makes me regretful, like Heartstopper does. Learning about this now doesn’t make me sad that this person who I was at twenty didn't have the wherewithal to want to take all of that in. If I had, it probably would have made me a really good artist much faster and would have clarified a lot of things about the work I was making and the processes that I was trying to figure out and understand and decode. If only I had had the curiosity and wanted the challenge of trying to understand what it was like for a 15th or 16th century painter or architect in Florence, which, as I've learned, had this totally crazy and tumultuous history. So many historians agree that it's a miracle that the city still exists at all because it was—for so many years, hundreds of years—just like totally mismanaged. The city was always falling apart, and at least that's my one solid memory of Florence when I was there, that the city was in disrepair and has insufficient funds to take care of itself. It’s totally married to preservation, to not changing anything.

Brooks That's Italy, isn't it?

Ehrenfried  Yeah, it's the whole peninsula. I don't live in Italy, so I like don't feel like I know enough to assert that well, Florence is different. I’m sure any Florentine would tell you that it is different than the rest of the peninsula, but who knows? I'm sure Arezzo has similar problems and a similar attitude about it.

Brooks I haven't been to Florence since 2001. It has been a long time.

Ehrenfried I haven't been back to Italy since that semester. I think I would now make much more of seventy-two hours in Florence than I made of five months when I was there at twenty.Oddly enough, writing all this, I think about how like if I had started that program not feeling so miserable with so much like self-loathing, I probably would have been able to learn Italian in a way that actually stuck with me. I've forgotten all of the Italian that I learned. By the end of the semester, I knew enough to, get around, to be self- sufficient in a restaurant, and I guess I spoke well enough that, or the most part, people didn't just talk to me in English when I started speaking in Italian. But this is something that might have been. Instead, I’ve been writing about how Florence's oppressive sunshine made me into a gay guy.

Brooks Thank goodness.

Ehrenfried Yes.

Other Swans Conversation No. Thirteen

Hank Ehrenfried (b. 1992, New Jersey) holds a BFA in painting from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA and an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He is based in Oklahoma City, OK