What Would Virginia Woolf Think?

The Calamity of Masculinity 2008 by Colin Ginks, private collection

In 1928 Woolf imagined a young English man called Orlando born during the reign of Elizabeth I, who refused to grow old and thus engaged in various derring-do adventures across the centuries. Orlando toyed with sex and gender. He had an affair with a Russian princess, while still a man, and finally, as a woman, married a sea captain.

Buck was an American woman born in 1972. The future seemed glittery, and made of styrofoam. Men like this walked the future earth.



Buck Rogers in the 25th century liked taking off his shirt for the older man in leather.



Our Buck for many years was unhappy. She was a model, and a bleach blonde, but she drowned her sorrows in substance abuse.

Then it dawned on Buck that she should turn herself inside out. She wanted to be the bionic man. She could rebuild herself. And then she could have a job for life, as an adult fimmaker. She could own her own company, and be the dominatrix of her own destiny.

But Buck kept her femaleness, down there, for inside there is the soul, and a little golden key to the next life.

One day in 2008, Buck, now striding the streets of the earth and winning awards at the AVN awards like a colossus, bumps into Virginia Woolf on 5th Avenue in New York. HE compliments Woolf, and asks if that is her porn name. Woolf doesn't like this brave new world, and even throws up a little bit in her mouth at the sight of him.

Schwarzwald, The Movie You Can Dance To, a production of the Saint At Large,
My dayjob, NYC,  2005-2009.