It’s easy to focus on the sensational aspects of the Perfume Genius video for their 2013 single “Hood.” There are a lot of them. Foremost, the banning of the advertising clip for the video by YouTube made news outlets from Pitchfork to the Huffington Post. While the subsequent outrage and charges of institutional homophobia failed to get it reinstated, the publicity amplified the video’s reach. Then there’s the semi-nude appearance of beefy Hungarian porn star (and chemist!) Arpad Miklos, who would commit suicide in New York City soon after the video’s release.
“Hood” landed in my life at a time when I, too, felt unrecognizable to myself. I came to this song during one of the most challenging periods of my life: a winter when I was having daily panic attacks, which persisted for months. It was the beginning of what would be a long and dark Central European winter, a place where the sun seemed to fall faster and more definitively than in my former home of Brooklyn. When the sun goes down on a Budapest winter, you feel less certain it will rise again, as though it simply called it quits. Because I’d stopped socializing and going out, for the most part, I used media as a window to the world, and videos like “Hood” became reflections to locate myself within.
Perfume Genius, and the emotional forensics Mike Hadreas brings to their music, became part of my survival mechanism. Alongside red wine, Xanax, and no shortage of music, “Hood” and “Dark Parts”—both directed by Winston H. Case—offered immediate emotional payoffs but also layers of meaning that revealed themselves over time, like the echoes of other queer artists who used vulnerability as a form of defiance.
“Hood” may seem like a simple expression, but it comes with quite complex footnotes. Hadreas was too young to be a part of the ACT UP movement that fought against discrimination and for the acceleration of AIDS treatments, and was also integral to the downtown art scene in New York, enlivening the work of artists like David Wojnarowicz, who lived and died in that reality. Hadreas’s songs are more personal, though that doesn’t make them less of a political statement.
Wojnarowicz, a former street hustler and heroin user, with no formal art education, used art as a lifeline, and despite actively working outside the prevailing establishment, did achieve recognition in his lifetime, and was included in a Whitney Biennial. His 1989 photograph Untitled (Falling Buffaloes), later featured in the ‘Buffalo version’ of U2’s “One” video, remains one of the most devastating visual metaphors for the AIDS crisis. Like those buffalo, so many artists of that era, from Keith Haring to Robert Mapplethorpe, were forced off a cliff by neglect, stigma, and political indifference. Long before “Hood” was banned, Wojnarowicz faced censorship and attempts to defund his shows by politicians at the highest levels of the US government, fighting many of these attacks while succumbing to the ravages of AIDS.
The concept of Eros has always embraced both love and death. In Untitled (Falling Buffalos), the death, from having nowhere else to turn, would be echoed in the suicide of Arpad Miklos, who took his own life in a Manhattan apartment just one year after “Hood” was released. It would have been little consolation to me to know that during that winter, as I was hiding from the darkness that provoked my panic attacks, Miklos was apparently suffering much worse and finding fewer places for recourse, living on the fringes of a foreign city.
There are a few things we will never know about Miklos. One is why he killed himself. He stated in his suicide note that he wouldn’t give people the satisfaction (is there any satisfaction to be gathered with that information?); and also why, when he took a second name, he chose one more Hungarian than his original name of Kozma Péter, when historically film creatives have hidden their foreign origins, from Michael Curtiz (born Manó Kaminer) to Harry Houdini (born Erik Weisz).
Like many Hungarian actors, including Bela Lugosi, he came to the States to make his dreams come true, all without speaking a word of English (it was easier in porn; Lugosi had to memorize and phonetically repeat script lines he didn’t understand). In New York, Miklos achieved iconic status in the gay porn industry, where he was also sought after as an escort. Like Lugosi, he’ll be remembered for a bloodsucking role, his in the cult porn romp “The Vampire of Budapest.”
In “Hood,” Miklos plays a Svengali to Mike Hadreas’s doll-like plaything. But as in most relationships, the actual power dynamic can only be known by the participants. What comes off the screen is an intimacy so electric it crackles. Miklos dresses Hadreas up as though he were a toy left out for his pleasure, undresses and redresses him for a photo shoot conducted by an unseen photographer. It’s important to remember there are three people in this relationship, the photographer acting as a stand-in for the viewer. Would it be as erotic for the couple if they were not being watched, if they were not being recorded?
But the real memetic desire comes from the lyrics of the song itself, so vulnerable, addressing a lover in a warning, “You will never call me baby/If you knew me true;” the audience listening in on the confession. Music is, of course, created twice: once by the composer and again in the ear of the listener. Music, like literature, is personal that way.
On a side note, I played the video for Hood for a war-correspondent/writer I was translating when we were in Kyiv, Ukraine, hanging out on 2013 Maidan Square in the days before government snipers fired into the mostly peaceful protest. My colleague was taken by Hood, and it became the soundtrack song to our weekend witnessing history, a time when the urgency of the event lifted me from my own personal pain. We probably weren’t Hadreas’s target audience, but such is the power of music.
I had originally wanted to write about Perfume Genius’s video for “Dark Parts,” which, in its Kill List-esque dark and enigmatic storyline, best expressed my own feelings at the time, excavating persona trauma and dragging it into the light. But something about “Hood” was easier to return to. Maybe because, no matter how bleak its delivery, it carries within it the quiet insistence that life continues.
To close, I’ll say there’s something heroic in “Hood’s” mere existence. The song is about fear of exposure, but gaining power from embracing that fear. The content itself actually loses its power if viewed as salacious. What it is, is tender, intimate, and quietly erotic. Do power dynamics and queer relationships still shock in a post-Call Me by Your Name world? Given our current political climate, maybe don’t answer that.
I discuss Perfume Genius and David Wojnarowicz in more depth in my memoir, Dare and You Win My Heart, which my agent, Madison Smartt Bell, is currently seeking a publisher for.
Matt Henderson Ellis 