John Deeriere is Hard at Work
The photographer, model and muse lives in a fantasy world of his own creation.
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Hello Dear Reader,
Welcome to a new GAYLETTER. Today we dive into the work of John Deeriere. The artist is both creator and subject, model and muse.
The inspired worlds he dreams up are as dreamy as the artist himself. From a naked cowboy to a bare bottomed angel, the artist creates fantasy like no other.
Please enjoy a peak into his work.
And if you would like to see more of his work, become a paid-subscriber to see some saucy homemade images he shared just with us, along with all the other perks that membership offers.
-Tom and Abi
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN DEERIERE
If you stumble upon John Deeriere on social media, you may be greeted by a thirst trap. “The pinups I create as John Deeriere exist somewhere between fantasy and reality, aspirational and actual,” says Blake Jacobsen, who’s behind the persona.
The 27-year-old graduate student at UCLA is now reflecting on his rural American upbringing while living in Florida, Ohio, and Georgia.
He loves a lonely, pastoral fantasy — rural life with a queer twist — wearing a camo jockstrap on a tractor, taking ass pics on the farm, or rolling naked in a barn of hay. By perfecting the unabashedly sexy and coy selfie, he has attracted many followers on social media. While his Instagram bio reads, “call me an artist because I draw attention,” he says he also wants to elicit attention to, “educate people about class warfare, sex work, and rural queer experience.”
Jacobsen markets all of his sex work under the John Deeriere persona. He has private cam clients and also sells explicit content on his website. “Having a separate identity to promote sex work is not unprecedented,” he points out. “People who perform sex work have historically adopted aliases and stage names to maintain their privacy and to protect themselves from stigma and discrimination. It’s yet another example of having to navigate my queer identity within a heteronormative sex-negative society.”
Since phone sex hotlines in the late ’70s, socially-distant sex work has grown alongside the Internet, and now it is the new normal for some, providing homosexual and pansexual sex work where it once may not have been accessible.
John Deeriere indulges his audience, to create an outlet and to envision a world in which being queer out in the country is not only possible, but desirable and satisfying.
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