Story of Agitprop - Mars

Hey Guys!

I wanted to give you a bit of behind the scenes about this whole project and share with you some of my personal story images from my first incarnation of Agitprop. So to start with, I guess we should talk about was Agitprop came from, and my world at that time. I began this journey in 2013 and I was really working hard to strategize a way to be visible but still do something of quality with my work, and I wanted to find out how people were achieving that and what their motivations were. This all came as I started to work more with management companies in my career and I was honestly completely naive, I thought that people were doing super well in positions of media because they were producing quality. It is obviously not the case and I later found out that it was a game of the quickest route to a coin - as silly as that was, it was my first experience of seeing how bigger issues and products are sold to us throughout false media for the same of a cheap turnaround. Propaganda was my first thought of a name to call my project, but I knew there were a lot of businesses and publications using this term already. I was also asked to do a coffee table book by the photographer that I collaborated with on a lot of my early makeup work so there was this amalgamation of ideas all coming to me at once.

I began to start working on some further shoots for other publications and noticing how the editors would piece together elements into a project that wasn’t this big machine, but you could make it raw, insightful and interesting. What I was also very concerned about at the time, was the need that everything LGBT was entirely focused on sex. There was very much an effort to push the visibility of PrEP onto gay people and not through the mainstream but through our own media. As a protective medication for HIV. I was contacted quite some time ago by a documentary maker who was crowdfunding a film project called Passing the Torch which shared more insight into the story of HIV within the LGBT community and there has been such a wealth of knowledge lost, through the premature deaths of many of our people for no better reason than complete bigotry and as soon as this movement started, it sent up warning lights to me. There is so much that I was horrified by from the (tenuous but terrifyingly believable) claims of gay targeted Hep B vaccines, toxified with HIV that were administrated through New York and California, causing the epidemic of the 70s and then the complete disapproval of needed medicine.

For anyone out there who doesn’t know what PrEP is, it’s a combination of the medication someone with HIV would take, which suppresses the viral load and allows the individual to live a symptom free life + not be transferrable in a lot of cases, so we have that as the basis of the medication. Then we have a mixture of a form of Hep B vaccine mixed with PEP to create PrEP. I dunno about you guys but that to me it’s just a bit to close to what we should know as common warning signs in our community. That doesn’t even go into the fact that there is also a very concerning trial when they were using this medication on women in high-risk SubSaharan African countries, with a placebo. That means they gave vulnerable people a drug with a promise of it preventing infection, and they gave others a false drug that did nothing. Totally unethical - and when gay porn stars are being used to advertise this product to gay people, and none of my straight friends know of its existence, I find it astounding. More new transmissions of HIV occur in straight people, within the UK, if this drug was a preventative everyone should be informed of its existence and advertised it. There is a stigma still conflating HIV with LGBT people that causes the rest not to vote for equal rights in adoption, we cannot give blood. This is something that is underlined in the prejudice that has overshadowed our communities and it is the epitome of propaganda.

Also going on during this time, I was invited, as well as some other prominent gay influencers and people of color to front the NHS campaign for STI protection, like some sort of advert for the disease. On their UK websites they’ll clearly tell you that as of 2012 the highest rate of new transmissions of this disease is in straight people but there is not only a gay box, a trans box but a people of color box advertising exactly what they want you to think is the highest risk type of person and it is bullshit. So as you can imagine this was all a signal that let me really develop what I wanted my position to be as an adult on this. I am angry. But I am not a fool. Everything that I was learning at this point in time was how our lives are restricted by prejudice, where those thoughts came from and how we can change them.

This was the real genesis of my project and the creation of Agitprop, but it was more so a case of coming of age. I no longer wanted to promote ideas that would ultimately do damage to people like me, even if it would help my career. I truly think that there has been an active movement by reckless individuals in our community to promote themselves at the cost of the wider community and it’s totally wrong. An example of this is the consistent need to create visibility campaigns - that are on social media which do not reach a wider audience at all. They actually take the money they’ve campaigned for and spent it to show people on Instagram images of non binary people and expect this to reach any of the people who have never heard of a non binary person. How foolish can you be? Noone would ever find this type of article! They reach only people who are invested or can profit from a debate about our existence. It doesnt tell tone, it tells wording and interaction and shows you only to the people who make money from creating videos about you, or the people who have no other career than to talk about our community. So I’m sorry, that’s not smart.

I also don’t think it’s smart that people can go out there and tell people, what not to say. When did you ever do what someone told you to do in an aggressive tone, watch a child. Tell a child not to do something and watch the baby do it. It’s not rocket science. Why not teach people to be compassionate and actually get the result you want? I’m sorry to be completely frank but how dare people be so selfish to do this thing at the expense of the whole. The whole conversation that’s been taken from our kitchen tables into the mainstream has been handled with disregard and is ineffective, which can be seen abundantly by the rise in hate crimes and the industry that’s been formed for people who can use their social media to make an income from dehumanizing people.

This never should have happened.

So hear my rage, because I have a lot that I wanted to cover and I thought that presenting what I did at the time, makeup and imagery, to tell these stories and opinions would be a powerful way of getting to people the information that’s missing. So I started to create images of me as a boy for the first time, with hidden messages. Not just about LGBT issues but about animal rights, the way we eat animal produce and think it’s fine even though it’s full of hormones and toxic compounds. That we don’t care where our bottles go after we’ve had our sodas full of carcinogens. I had a full range of images that I thought would be a fabulous and very JH signature. So I put together all of this work - and life happened.

I’ve really put a lot of this into my other blogs in beauty so definitely check out the one out where I spoke about Jecca cos I covered a bit more about life, but everything transforms and I think that a better way to communicate my ideas would be to show them and be them without explaining them.

I decided to create Agitprop as something bigger than a book, a full, living publication that could change, adapt, receive other points of views, create images, beauty, and food, wellness and health. It’s all the same thing, it’s about creating joy in life and making changes that are smart, for the better. So here we go. This is a part I and I wanted to create a. showcase of some of my Mars images, this is the sign of masculinity and each of these images have a lot of coded messages in. Check them out and let me know what you think in the comments below.

Definitely submit your stories via email, write your opinions and be safe to say whatever you want, your opinion is valued. Let’s exchange info. Love.