Behind the Scenes with Apartamento contributing editor Michael Bullock

I’m Michael Bullock. I’m a writer and editor, and I’ve been contributing to Apartamento since it started.

Since issue #2. 

The first contribution was Chris Bollen, when he was editor of Interview magazine. He lived in the most amazing house. It was like a little cottage in the West Village in the back of an apartment building. 

Actually, he has the most amazing life as a writer. He writes murder mysteries about specific places and he moves to them to understand them. I find how he constructed his life really incredible. 

Like if he does a murder mystery about Egypt, he’ll go to Egypt and live there for two months. I think he’s doing one in Venice now. He’s written six of them, and I think the more he writes, the more of a following he develops. He’s our Agatha Christie. 

Apartamento came for me at a time when I had been working on Butt magazine for a long time, and I was almost bored of doing interviews for them. I thought it would be more interesting to talk to gay people and queer people about their lives in a context that was more inclusive. 

When I was introduced to Apartamento, I thought about how I had always wanted an interior design magazine that wasn’t based on money—it was such a radical proposition. It’s not that it totally excludes people with money, because people with money can also have a very interesting vision about how they want to live that’s exciting in a particular weird, perverse, or specific way. I realised though that money wasn’t the foundation. Money is usually the foundation upon which all design journalism is built, so to make that not the cornerstone was something I really cared about.

It’s been exciting over the years how Apartamento has developed a reputation for being this chic publication that has a more polite audience who want to be in the know about edgy things, and then they pick it up and read about Peter Berlin.

I remember some of the comments being so horrified that like, ‘Why do I have to learn about this?’ To me that’s exciting, that kind of crossover. So much of journalism and Instagram is people staying within their own bubble, so it’s so nice when there’s ideas that cross-pollinate across different types of people.

I always think the last one’s the best one, but this last one with Jerry ‘the Marble Faun’ is really special because he’s of historical significance. He’s part of history as a member of the famous documentary Grey Gardens (1975), and he’s also still alive. He was in that movie as a teenager, and he’s a practicing artist. 

From watching the movie, you don’t realise that he is a gay kid trying to find his way, and his whole story after Grey Gardens is absolutely insane. He’s such a lovable person that was dealt a really difficult hand in life and made really a spectacular life out of it. He’s such an inspiration, and he’s also so fun. I think the combination of that level of significance and underexposure is radical—it’s very rare that you get that type of story. I really quite like that article.

Yeah, you’re like, ‘Fuck, that’s a life, man!’ 

He was so young, and most people would have been like, ‘These two women are insane and they live in the most disgusting way’. Instead, he was like, ‘These two women are my new family’.

Peter Berlin was really special because after the interview I told him, ‘It’s really a shame that young people or anyone that cares about art or gay culture can’t see your contribution to history in one place’. He said, ‘Well, everyone says this, but no one brings me a book deal’. So I brought him back a book deal and we made that book. 

We made the book right before Covid, but just now a really significant young gallery called Mariposa has started working with him. They told me yesterday that they’re pitching him to Art Basel for the special projects booth next winter. 

Yeah, so I thought that story was amazing. Also doing Justin Bond for… 

Yeah, issue #5.

At that moment, before everyone was having this conversation about trans people, to see a trans person in an interior design magazine was really radical. And she’s such an important figure in New York City. She ended up winning the MacArthur Genius Award, and she’s the muse of the House of Dior. Her career was already amazing then, but she wasn’t a global star like she is now. 

Honestly, it’s really special the amount of Apartamento subjects that have become a part of my life like Kembra, TABBOO!, Victor Barragán, and even Agosto Machado. Agosto’s interview was really important because he showed me on his cabinet the sign that said, ‘This is where my last will and testament is’. He was really proud of the fact that he had already paid for his cremation, and it wasn’t going to burden anyone else. 

He died this spring, and he died with his piece in the Whitney Biennial. It was really nice to be part of this last moment of his life where he was completely celebrated. I think Apartamento covered him before that took off, so it was a significant story for him—I’m really proud of that. I’m going to speak at a tribute to him next weekend.

At La MaMa, the place he performed his whole life—where you picked me up today!

I think it’s a voyeuristic interior design magazine, but that uses the house to tell the life story. It gives a lot of examples of what a life could be, and I think that’s why I’ve kept doing it for this amount of time. It’s really exciting to be curious about people: how they live, what decisions they make, and how they craft a life. It’s also kind of like the National Geographic of interiors at this point. It does this service that no one else does really well—it kind of feels like a classic.

I hope that the magazine can continue to do the same thing continuously because, as I said, I think it does something that no other publication does and that a large audience has come to depend on. The sincerity with which it covers people is a rare thing—that’s something that really only an independent magazine can do, because there’s so much politics around how to do a more mainstream story.

It would be nice if Apartamento had a streaming channel and could make more documentaries, but I don’t know how you scale up and keep integrity. Being bigger is also not…it just makes your life more difficult.

We’re taught under capitalism that scaling up is the ultimate thing that you can do—it’s the goal and you should keep aiming for it. I think maybe that’s a lie. Doing one thing well and enjoying it is so much better than reaching a huge scale and doing a lot of things poorly. 

Its strength is also its weakness in that there’s too many stories. It’s so dense with information, but that’s also a signature that I wouldn’t change. Maybe within the dense profiles of homes there could be a few more breaks just to lighten it up, have a little more organization. Sometimes you do want cute, simple things that are easily digestible, just for the rhythm.

Apartamento kind of turned me into a filmmaker, which is one of the biggest gifts I’ve got from working with you guys. TABBOO! is an artist who was formerly a kind of famous ‘80s drag queen, and he started to be taken seriously as a painter within the last five years—even though he had always painted. His apartment is so spectacular, and he’s lived there since 1978. It’s like a carnival in there; it’s full of puppets and glitter.

I met Michael Cukr at TABBOO!’s house, and we got along super well. We collaborated really well immediately on that film, and after that we did a Victor Barragán film which also turned out great. TABBOO! was so happy with his film; he uses it to explain who he is when people ask. 

Then Michael and I just kept going. We became really good friends and collaborators, and we ended up making a six-part series on environmentalism for MoMA and we also made a film for Pin-up for the Smithsonian Triennial on experimental queer communes in different regions of the country. Apartamento really sparked my documentary film career.

The Kembra interview turned out amazing too because she is kind of a misunderstood icon. Her band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, is so iconic in the way it looks: they’re body-painted women with giant wigs, they’re naked, they’re punk rock, and everyone knows them in New York. 

But people maybe don’t understand what a serious artist she is—the conviction it takes to do this long term—and all the other work that she makes, all the drawings, all of her philosophy. I think the Apartamento interview was able to unpack her life in a way that helped people really understand who she is and why she does what she does. It seems she was really happy with it because her first monograph just came out a few weeks ago, and they republished the Apartamento interview in it. 

She’s come to be someone in my life that I really admire and kind of look up to. You wouldn’t maybe assume this from looking at the work but she’s a really nurturing person, almost motherly. I love Kembra—I’m super happy for her. It would be amazing, having had that feature all those years ago, to revisit Kembra and delve so much deeper through film.

I’ve been here for like 25 years, and I can’t figure out where else to go. I do love it here—it’s layers upon layers upon layers of life and knowing so many circles of people, doing so many wild things. It is overwhelming to have stayed here for this amount of time, but it’s never boring. 

Having worked in media and lived in New York for this long, the hardest part of my life is being over-invited to things and actually genuinely wanting to go and be supportive of people and literally not having the amount of time to do all of it and work. New York is still exciting to me. It’s still inspiring to me. And it’s still beautiful.