From Christ to Ket (and back again): Geoffrey Mak’s Mean Boys

“I wish I said yes to the man at the club, who asked if he and his friends could take turns fucking me.” Geoffrey Mak is referring to a scene in his debut Mean Boys: A Personal History (out on 30 April 2024 by Bloomsbury), a collection of personal essays that follow his life of sex and drugs – and his descent into madness.

In 2011, when he was 23, Geoffrey uprooted himself from Diamond Bar, a small town in eastern Los Angeles County, and the Christianity of his preacher father – and moved to New York, then Berlin. He was still a virgin and modelled his new life on what he’d read: Edmund White’s autobiographical trilogy, Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, James Baldwin, Gary Indiana and Dennis Cooper. He aspired to be a writer himself and originally wrote fiction. “I had this image of the writer going to the city and being totally promiscuous and debaucherous,” he tells me on Zoom from his New York apartment. “I wanted to live that life.” He gave blowjobs at the Chelsea Piers and got lost in dark rooms and saunas. But his experiences were unfulfilling; at his first orgy at a New York penthouse, he was more impressed with the view than the sex. “It was complicated on a practical level,” he laughs, remembering that he couldn’t tell who he should bottom for.

Geoffrey loved the Spectrum, the storied club night in New York, but thought the Spectrum Reunion in 2022 was a disaster. “But I met Wolfgang Tillmans that night.” Wolfgang makes an appearance in Mean Boys, but it is Anne Imhof who is the book’s central art figure, and who takes a haunting quality. Faust, her German pavilion exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2017, was a catalyst for Geoffrey. “I actually cried,” he remembers, “the alienation and frustration of the characters resonated with the profound pain I was in at the time.” He was partying too much, often thought of suicide and was lonely. A sexual assault left him unable to write about himself or to write fiction. “I couldn’t find a way to write about my life pretending like it never happened.”  Imhof’s dancers represented nightlife, youth, beauty and fashion, all the things he had aspired to – and attained – but that now seemed empty, “just screaming as if they were about to die.” He went celibate for years.

In Berlin, he reinvented himself as an art critic. Passed out from ketamine, I dreamed of becoming famous, he writes. He did ketamine at the Whitney Museum’s ‘Dreamlands’ exhibition and enjoyed Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun – and at the KW Institute but doesn’t remember the exhibition. It’s a recurring element in our interview. Everything is an echo of a distant past. “Parties are like dreams,” he says, “they’re intense when you have them and then you forget them immediately.” In a memorable scene straight out of Spring Breakers, he narrates Vetements model Marc Elsner’s birthday party, where he and his friends snorted coke, put on balaclavas and sang along to Britney’s Everytime. Then he found himself breaking down, crying in the club on a Monday morning. Parties always end and people realise they’ve stayed too long. Geoffrey was one of them. He was institutionalised shortly after turning 30.

The milieu he became a part of was superficial, making everyone expendable and commodifying everything, even experience itself. He opts not to name names but is clear in his intent: this culture is sick and he has had enough of the relentless social status chasing and petty obsessions. He even wages war on William Blake. The road to excess, he writes, doesn’t lead to wisdom, it leads to nothing.

Throughout Mean Boys, he undergoes various transformations. When we speak, more have occurred. He’s now back in New York. “I have since reconverted to Christianity,” he tells me, explaining his is a Christianity grounded in the body, not spirit, heaven and hell. “In my early 20s, I became an atheist. I said to myself, ‘fuck religion, I think I can have sex now.’”

For Geoffrey, being an art critic “is almost a calling to pay as close attention as you possibly can to an object. It taught me how to love, because I associate love with this really intense quality of attention.” It’s the sort of love he has since found in writer Drew Zeiba, his first-ever relationship.

Drew helped edit the manuscript. Geoffrey’s journey, personally and artistically, was one towards love. “I never thought I was the main character of my life,” he tells me of his 20s – but now he’s assured, safe. “New York is home.”

Mean Boys has given him agency and catharsis all in one. When I ask him if he’ll write fiction again, he cracks a smile. “I would love to.”