You are too much. Too much. You are too loud. Stop talking. Oh, you are too much. Too much. During my childhood, well into present day, I’ve been told by mainly straight-identifying white people that “I am too much.” I was even reminded this past week through a radio interview with Broadway star Andrew Rannells where he spoke of his memoir titled Too Much is Not Enough. I tend to agree with Andrew, too much is not enough. The “too much” phrase is generally said in a joking manner or tone, meant to be light-hearted or a thinly veiled attack at homosexual tropes that make the speaker uncomfortable. Who am I too much for? Usually, from what I have found after decades of being told I was too much, it seems it is more a reflection on the person saying those words. For a lot of gay men, with my experience included, we are too much for them. For us, the concept of more is more is a radical act of finding out where we might belong in a straight society. And as we age, we stop trying so hard to fit in because we never did fit: we are queer, we are different, we are unique, and we are forced to embrace that difference. Understanding that we might always be the other and the outsider, we often find companions in other minority experiences. James Baldwin, a pioneering writer and public intellectual who was black and gay, noticed how race played into this lack of capacity of understanding in one of his last interviews in the 80s:

“There is a capacity in black people for experience, simply. And that capacity makes other things possible. It dictates the depth of one’s acceptance of other people. The capacity for experience is what burns out fear. Because the homophobia we’re talking about really is a kind of fear.” James Baldwin, 1987

These ideas brought me to a piece I have loved for years by Jess, titled Narkissos. A collage of drawings of many stories in one object. The name of the piece is taken from the Ancient Greek, Narcissus, a hunter. He was beautiful. He rejected all romantic advances, eventually falling in love with his own reflection in a pool of water, staring at it for the remainder of his life. And then after he died, daffodils grew up out of the pool of water, my grandmother’s favorite flower. The name may be familiar to you as it is the foundation of the word, narcism, a fixation with oneself. Funny enough, I think I might have fallen into trance staring at this drawing every time it was on view at SFMOMA. I have stared and tracked and traced my eyes back and forth always finding another Easter egg hiding for me. This artwork definitely has a capacity for more. His work gives the viewer room to move in and craft their own stories. This piece is too much in the best way possible confronting a heteronormative society with its own myths. In Narkissos, Jess combines multiple stories, myths, and personal experience into one dominate narrative. This is the antidote to straight society in America. He is in the great lineage of gay male artists questioning our own entrapment of our quest to be young, to be truly be loved, through our fitness regimes, our skin care routines, and deep love of the next new trend. We are constantly trying to save ourselves while being rejected by our own society. If we aren’t buying a house or having a baby, what are we even doing? 

I love this collage. It is not an understatement, it is not dramatic, or an embellishment, I love every inch of it, every line, every oddity, and every shape brings me joy. The line of fifteen years of exactitude. So unabashedly gay. So perfectly Jess. 

Zoom into Narkissos here. (SFMOMA Pride was a Riot! Kino Now Films for June.

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