First Two Webisodes go Live

Dear friends,

It’s been a while since my last blog posting, and, in the interim, I’ve realized that it’s pointless to keep apologizing for the long delays between posts. So I won’t. Instead, I’ll simply submit for your consideration the idea that, over the long term, a blog that’s updated every couple of months or so is just as legitimate as one that updates every day, especially if the scale of the endeavour it’s reporting about is of a sufficient magnitude that daily updates would be rendered meaningless.

Indeed, the giganticness of this decades-long Antinoan enterprise sometimes overwhelms me, and I have to continually fortify myself with the reassurance that there’s no rush to see it completed and thus it demands from me no hard deadlines. The project will advance at its own pace, and I’m quite confident it will find and build a natural and loyal audience in good time. Which means there’s no need to blog like a mad-man: I can post an entry whenever the spirit moves me, and over the long run the record of this project’s evolution will stand as authentically as ever.

That being said, October has been a momentous month in a remarkable year of personal growth and discovery. In fact, 2008 is shaping up to be one of my most prolific years yet, and this little missive is the announcement I’ve long been waiting to write.

You may or may not be aware that, elsewhere in my storytelling universe, Sir Richard Wadd started his public life as a 1-act stage play at the 2005 Toronto Fringe Festival. At the time of the play’s debut, Sir Richard was very proud of his imaginary website, and boasted about it to his live audience at every opportunity. Since then, his website has become very real indeed, and, as of October 30th, officially releases the first of his live-action webisodes, featuring content from The Sacred Antinous.

Because I’ve always seen Sir Richard as an ethical, intelligent, classy kind of guy, it was important for me that his erotica stand head and shoulders above the global flood of boring, run-of-the-mill porn. My vision for Sir Richard is that every one of his episodes uses erotica to say something interesting and provocative about what it means to be spiritually aware, intellectually engaged, and comfortably queer at the dawn of the 21st century. To this end, I realized that Sir Richard’s erotic storytelling had to be girded by another, deeper layer of tales that provided a sustainable and compelling through-line designed to keep viewers coming back for more.

This is where The Sacred Antinous comes in. Based on the true story of the Roman Emperor Hadrian and his young, Greek lover, Antinous, this particular narrative universe explores the enduring metaphor of death and resurrection through a distinctly queer lens. With it, I’m trying to define my own set of sacred texts that speak to me through metaphor about the issues I’ve grappled with over my own lifetime about what it means to be gay.

Anyway, the point of all this is to announce that Sir Richard Wadd has now turned his camera toward (a very low-rent version of) ancient Rome, and is beginning to tell the story of Antinous using characters from both worlds. There’s a very intentional blurring of boundaries in this new kind of narrative storytelling. The Internet allows me to create characters and dramatic situations that overlap and connect to each other in novel and wondrous ways. So if you’re confused about where Shawn ends and Sir Richard begins, or where Antinous morphs into an actor on a pornographic film set, that’s okay. It’s part of the experience. My hope is that viewers and readers will come to my storytelling from any entry point, and slowly be enticed to explore deeper and deeper into evermore complex layers of meaning.

Sir Richard’s first two webisodes are available here:

Now Begins a Bold Interrogation

To Suffer is to Slip Unnoticed

Of these, the first link is EXPLICIT (i.e. not work-safe), so take care not to embarrass yourself in front of unsuspecting co-workers. The second doesn’t reveal any naughty bits, but, taken together, these first two episodes let the world know that Sir Richard’s erotica is smart, funny, considerate, and driven by a vision that’s bigger than a lot of mainstream drivel.

I hope and expect that the productions will begin to showcase much of what I find so dazzling and exciting about the Internet as a storytelling medium. It gives me the freedom to play with text, poetry, letters and words in a way that I find really exciting. Viewers who are curious about what was said or written need only scroll down the webpage to find the complete text laid out for their perusal. In effect, the Internet is restoring a sense of balance to the art of storytelling: my written words and filmed images now go hand in hand as part of a complete whole.

I’m also really enjoying the prospect of playing with form and format. The Internet frees my storytelling to create episodes of any length and style, while the character of Sir Richard himself is able to evolve depending on the type of content he frames. My ultimate goal is to see Sir Richard present not only stories from the Sacred Antinous, but from other storytelling universes as well. And then, as the multiverse begins to grow, I’d like to see those stories interconnect in various ways: thematically, spiritually, and physically – through hypertext links and real-world fine arts pieces (on which, more in the coming months…)

Anyhoo, that’s the news for now. I’m currently back at the grindstone trying to hammer out my next batch of webisodes, and I’m also gearing up to plunge back into another round of writing. In the meantime, I very much hope you enjoy this latest round of work!

(This entry has been cross-posted to Sir Richard Wadd)