Exfantasy is the fractured memory of the desires born of or imposed upon girlhood—fem-origination, prepubescence, pre-teens, pre-adult, and pre-queer days—a million “coming of ages” floating by. It is about magic and adventure, and corruption. It is a story of “a girl” who … had many stories about “a girl” who … and now she can’t remember if she was told those stories or made them up herself. She/they/some are sitting in a bed, sitting in a space between two stories: one a story that we told ourselves once that we can’t really remember, and the other a story that we were once told.

Exfantasy is many stories. One of those stories is trying to twist your body up to fit into a mold inside a story that was never made for it; another story is smashing that mold to build a whole new story around your body as it is. From the outside the bed is the escape we may have wanted or been told to want. From the inside it is the safety of a fantasy everlasting. It is the way in which what is marketed to the young becomes what the young desire, and what the young desire becomes the holy grail of marketing. It is about the fantasies we project onto our younger selves, in comparison to what we might have learned to fantasize. Exfantasy is an attempt to celebrate a mechanism of survival that I wish I could remember. Exfantasy is a failed attempt to rebuild the safety of fantasy when it is already too late. 

Special thanks to Creamsicle, Fumu Tsofirin, Error, Holmvik, and Tracer for taking the time to speak to me, allowing me to photograph them and use their photos in my work. Thanks to William for making the set up fun, easy and possible.