A Truly Free Form of Sex

A few years ago I was drunk off the dreaminess of a night spent dancing at Berghain while I wandered the streets. This was just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world, and right as my queerness was beginning to blossom. I saw Juliana Huxtable pass by in the distance, her blonde hair swaying like angel wings— and that was my welcome to Berlin. 

As a multidisciplinary artist navigating the art and film world, I’ve always admired Juliana for her ability to disrupt our constructions of fixed identity, gender, and sexuality, all while serving cunt. I still have an unrolled poster of her “Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm)” self-portrait in my room. The piece features Juliana rendered green and alien against a sublime blue environment. Most recently I got my hands on a copy of Juliana’s experimental work “Mucus in My Pineal Gland” from my beloved friends Saint and Sage’s bookshelf. In a gig economy world, where there is frequently so little distinction between who you are and what you do, Juliana fights fiercely to remain fluid and playful. 

Juliana splits her time between Berlin and New York City. Most recently, she’s been spotted around Manhattan and Brooklyn performing with “Tongue In The Mind,” her band with artists Jealous Orgasm and Via App. When we spoke over Zoom in early summer, over four years after that night she passed by me in Berlin, I began by asking her about five favorite words; any seasoned writer’s worst nightmare. She let me know it was impossible to name five. She just loves words too much. Juliana’s good at a lot of things. She DJ’s, performs, paints, sings, photographs, makes films…I may have missed some things. But Juliana’s first love will always be writing. She cut her teeth in the third space of blogging and Tumblr, and her writing retains that luminous sense of awe and psychedelia.

This interview was a space to kiki about everything, from furry porn to the pitfalls of online dating, which has rendered us indistinguishable from our Google search results. Mostly, it was an attempt to imagine a truly free form of sex. 

Photography by Charlie Engman

What roles do pleasure and play have in your work?

Recently they have come up a lot. For a really long time I centered research. Art to me is a manifestation of a lot of things, chief amongst them are research and understanding more about the world, history, how power functions, our politics, our desires, and social perceptions. 

When I approach those questions, my instinct is to read and learn more. The beginning of my work really leaned into that. But in the past few years, I've really centered play and pleasure in the actual process of making art. 

Can you talk more about what that looks like for you? Centering that in the process. 

It means trusting myself. In the past I’ve been driven by concepts, ideas, and research. But in this show I did in 2022, the process changed where I asked myself what brings me a sense of pleasure and play. What do I want to embody? What makes me excited? Oftentimes, the images I had a hard time approaching artistically are images that are about pleasure. I think humor was really the main entry point for my first three or four shows. But now, pleasure, beauty, and the pursuit of beauty are in the work itself. 

I like making really insane colorful images. I love technology. I love printing. I love the way that I can use a stylus and a pad and draw digitally and then print that out and paint on top of it. I trust at this point that I'm a hyper engaged person, and I'm  heady enough to the point where there’s no show that's going to be just the production of images without meaning behind them.

How was it working on your EP with “Tongue In The Mind”? Tell me more about your process behind writing lyrics.

It’s always evolving. One of our songs, “Pretty Canary” really came out in kind of a flow. 

I wanted to write a song called “Free Sex” because I had gotten out of a conventionally gendered relationship with my ex who had such an edgy, transactional, [and] objectifying relationship to women. I had to work through a lot of my own feelings around being a super sex-positive, slut-forward feminist. Watching a man take so much pleasure and delight in bastardizing and exploiting the pleasure I found in my own freedom really made me question my own politics for a while.

Ultimately, I was able to come back around and realize that I don't have to question any of those things. What's questionable is his relationship to me and women as a whole. So I wanted to write a song that was about the pursuit of a truly free form of sex.  

As someone who's always made work that references technology and the internet, how's it been seeing the rise of dating apps?

I've always been a very sexually curious person, and so I feel like I've been involved in just about every form of online sex culture. When I was younger, I was on AdultFriendFinder and alt.com. I dated a dom that I found on FetLife. I worked as a Dominatrix for a short period of time and was on Backpage. I was a cam girl for a while. 

I remember being really bummed when the FOSTA-SESTA laws were passed and they shut down the Craigslist Casual Encounters. They shut down so many websites. A lot of those spaces were really formative for someone like me, who, for a lot of my life, felt like a sexual freak and was super genderqueer. They ended just at the time that dating apps really started to pick up. At first it was this crazy new technology and [it] was really fun. My sluttier friends and I were all running through the apps and there would be times where we’d be at a bar going through people we’d hooked up and realize that all of us had fucked the same guy. 

Eventually it began to feel like the panopticon. As someone who ascended super quickly within a certain cultural milieu, all of a sudden I had a lot of visibility and people started recognizing me on the apps. I started to panic because I felt like the joy and spontaneity that I found in having a playful and open sexual-romantic life was suddenly robbed from me. It felt like because things were online, I was now inseparable from my Google search results or my Instagram feed. 

Eventually, I got overwhelmed with New York and left for Berlin. One of the things that I liked about Berlin was that there was so much public space—third spaces and the commons. I could just be in the park for hours or sit in a coffee shop. No one's bothering me, no one's shaking me down. I learned it was fun for me to be in a place where I didn't need to be online, where I could just meet people in person.

I discovered Feeld when someone said there was an app for people who don't want to be on the other apps. 'Hell.  No one that I know is lit on those apps. We actually tried to get Feeld to sponsor a party in Berlin, but it was when I think the office was in central Europe somewhere. They had a tiny office and no money. I remember thinking “Feeld is more fun because it's not like apps that can just be for sex on the go. It also isn’t just a dating app, it’s more mixy.” But now, I prefer to just meet people in person. 

Photography by Tyler Kai Jones

Do you feel like it's still possible to meet people in real life, especially people who aren't familiar with your work? 

I definitely try and hold on to the possibility of that, but New York is very plugged in. London is also like that. They’re work cities. The gig economy has produced a culture in which you are what you do, and you're always searching for another gig. It makes sense that online dating apps would be more of a thing here. 

When I'm in New York, I'm on the apps more because it's harder to meet people. I went through a period where I was only going on dates with people I met in person and that got really edgy. But I definitely feel like there are cities like Berlin where people are more unplugged. 

I'm not trying to romanticize Berlin. Sometimes they can be kind of technological Luddites over there. Berlin is a place where people will boast about having a flip phone. In New York, I’ll be out and a guy will come up and start hitting on me, then he'll literally pull his Instagram out. 

It’s all LinkedIn type vibes.

It’s crazy, people are deadass like: “What's your Insta and what's your Snap?” 

What’s your dream date?

My dream date would be that somebody else spontaneously leads me down a rabbit hole of increasingly fab events, locations, and things to do. I love to be outside. I love parks. I love nature, but I also love going to bars. I love going to the bookstore. I would love a date in which I'm with someone and we don't have to [make a] plan. I feel like because there’s a lot of organizing and making decisions in my day to day life, I have a fantasy that someone else plans a whole bunch of crazy bullshit. 

That sounds fun. How does being an artist prepare you for all the performance and presentation of dating?

I feel like sometimes it makes certain things that are just part of dating annoying. When I'm on a date, I don't want to talk about myself in a CV kind of way. I don't want to talk about what I do.

You don't want to talk about your art?

I don't want to talk about art. I don't want to talk about my career. I don't wanna talk about any of that shit. I wanna get to know someone's sense of humor. I wanna crack jokes. I wanna have a conversation about things that are interesting to a person like, what makes up your life outside of what you do. I think a lot of dating is “Where are you from? What do you do? How long have you done the thing?”

It can feel like an interview. 

But maybe that's also just finding a person who's interesting because most interesting people don't want to have those conversations. 

Sometimes people ask me out to the museum. It's like, girl, I don't want to go to a museum on a date. I think when you work in what's considered to be the leisure economy, it can be particularly weird. I feel like because I work in art and nightlife, those things are not novel, fresh, fun, [or] exciting to me. 

I had this experience twice where I was talking to these guys—actually, I met one of them on Feeld—,and I suggested going to the Philharmonic. He said that it was cool but a big commitment and wanted to meet up at Berghain instead. The person I’m seeing in London invited me out to a graveyard for our first date. 

Was it one of those really nice ones with trees and shrubs? 

It was a really nice graveyard. That was an amazing date and it was super novel, and ultimately, [provided] a context in which we were relating to each other and talking and hanging out. I want to get to know someone and that was such an amazing day.

Photography by Tyler Kai Jones

What do you look for in a match?

I do think we all have some intuition. I think that sometimes you just know it's gonna hit, in the sense that some of my best lovers I've had in my life that I've met online, when I saw their profile, I just knew. 

It's funny—he might read this, but—I met this guy in Melbourne and the second I saw his profile, I knew, and he said the same thing about me. We’ve had a wonderfully flexible relationship. He's been a lover and a friend at various times depending on if he's single or I'm single.

I'm not gonna extract everything about you as a person from your profile, but I think how you present yourself to the world says a lot about what you want from your relationships. And for me, I need you to be arty, playful, cheeky, seductive, cute, esoteric, mysterious, a little gothic, you know what I mean? But I've never had a full blown monogamous relationship from a dating app. I've never ended up at the, it's just me and you doing the thing. Although I’m seeing someone now, but it's way more like a 21st-century open poly thing.

Is this your first time in a poly situation?

Yeah, in a polycule. Technically, I’m a sister wife.  

Sister wife? How is that?

I think it's a funny term, but I just mean in the sense that I'm seeing someone who's also seeing another woman. I like it, I think it's cute. After my last relationship, I really needed to reorient and understand my relationship to attachment. What's my relationship to partnership?

I really value my independence. And so it's really nice to be with someone where I’m not the single signifier or the single source of how he satiates his desires, curiosities, and romantic inclinations. But I feel totally loved and cared for. 

It’s a really weird and new situation for me. But I really love it and we don't live in the same city which I like. I know some people hate long-distance [relationships]. But I’ve always loved long-distance.

I've never been able to do it.

I travel a lot so I have a lot of volition in terms of where I spend my time. But then also, I love my freedom. I love my freedom and independence, and I don't even mean just sexual freedom. I’m at my happiest and most vibrant when I have a lot of space and independence, and so long-distance relationships have always been great for me, because when I'm with someone, I'm fully with someone. I'm the type of person who can be apart from someone for a month or two and it doesn't change how I feel about them. I’ve had to learn my intervals.

I'm not a codependent person anymore and I really enjoy that. I can entertain myself for hours. There’s so many books I wanna read, so many outfits I wanna try out, so many meals that I wanna cook. I don’t believe in disappearing into relationships, which I would argue the majority of people do. I did that and I hated the impact that it had on my friendships. I love my friends and I love spending time with myself, so anyone that I'm going to date needs to be able to become a part of that ecosystem.

Don't people call that relationship anarchy?

I hate all the terminology attached to the relationship stuff. That's why I say sister wife. But I feel like people relate to the terms as identity categories and the discourse, as well as [the] aesthetic and cultural representation of what being polyamorous is, and that is so not my vibe.

Right now, I'm seeing someone who's also seeing someone, I will probably also see someone else at some point, but it feels good. I feel cared for, I feel loved, I love him. It's like we give each other energy. It doesn't have this Smeagol…my precious, need, need, need, the fear that if I leave you, someone else will love you more. All the practical reasons that people normally approach romance with, in all likelihood I'm gonna end up doing with my friends. 

My parents had a horrible psychotic marriage and got divorced early on. My dad is an interesting person, but should never date anyone. Both of my parents are fiercely independent, very free people. As the child of both of them, it's psychotic to me that they got married. I’ve absorbed a lot of their personalities and desires, and I'm not going to do the thing where I just get married or do the conventional thing. I don’t have this socially incubated fear of being alone. 

Do you have any dating advice for people?

I'm not gonna give general advice. I feel like all advice is conditional. Some advice that I wish I had had, specifically, is that if someone early on in the relationship snaps and you see a nasty, crazy, angry thing come out, there's no apology in the world for me [that can solve that]. There are people around trying to transform their lives. It can really be a lot better than that. 

I'm a wanderer. I travel a lot. There's so many people that are stressed out by my lifestyle. I love making friends in strange parts of the world or what someone considers strange. Everywhere is strange to someone. I think as a woman, as a Black woman, as a trans woman, you’re supposed to be thirsty for love. There's this attitude that men especially, but people in general, can have of being surprised that I don’t want to be in their cage. They're so surprised, they say: “I have this really pretty cage over here. You don't want to be in the cage? You're supposed to want the cage more than anyone else.” And no, I don't want the cage. Don't degrade yourself and belittle yourself and make yourself smaller for someone who is terrified of the very things that attract them to you.

But if you find yourself drawn to freedom, curiosity, wandering, and wonder, and you start having that feeling in a relationship that someone is strangling or snuffing out your light, run away. That would be my advice.