**REESE COOPER** vest, talent’s own tank, and **KAPITAL** shorts
From impersonating an alien inside a UFO during the pandemic, to creating thought-provoking queer films, Jordan Firstman—actor, writer, and director—has had a meteoric year at a time when many have seen work dry up, downsized, or postponed. Bright, funny, and intuitive, Firstman leverages the timeless axiom—and perhaps most valued antidote for the moment—to bring his projects to life: comedy. In so doing, he provides a breath of fresh air during a time of chaos and uncertainty, which explains the virality of his _Impressions_ series on social media, and a wealth of recent profiles from major magazines.
We did a photoshoot with Firstman, and then had the privilege to chat about life during the pandemic, his latest projects, and what it’s like to create queer content that enables us to not only learn about Firstman himself, but also to immerse in the ever-diversifying community as a whole.
**How has your headspace been like during the pandemic?**
What a huge question! I will say it is completely varied. I started the pandemic in a certain type of headspace. I went through a lot of life changes right before the pandemic and I was ready for this to be my year of just being out in the world and playing with boys, dancing with them, and possibly doing drugs with them. And then that was taken away from me and everyone else at the same time. So I think that sent me into a different type of headspace and I turned that into creative energy and the rest is history.
**RICKY KING** shirt and talent’s own necklace.
**Tell me about the _impressions_ series on Instagram. How did it originate and what is it like getting attention from celebrities such as Ariana Grande and Jennifer Aniston?**
It was definitely surprising at first. Everyday was like this circus or rollercoaster and I’d wake up and be like, ‘What is going to happen on the internet today that is going to shock me to my core?' I was having a lot of fun and that energy is not sustainable, so after two months of it, I got really tired. I was like, ‘Wow, there is so much energy being pushed at me right now, and now I just want to sleep, but feel this responsibility to keep making things. You find so much when you push through the exhaustion or the discomfort. Some of my favorite impressions I’ve done have been on weeks where I’m like, ‘I fucking hate this like I don’t want to do this anymore.’ Then you find something and you’re like ‘Oh wait, I like this again, this is still expressing myself in some way.’
**Is there anything you think about the quarantine experience that has made the _Impressions_ series more comical to people, or more successful?**
In the first two months, it was the first time in most people's lives that the entire world was experiencing the same thing. It is the first global event that I’ve had in my lifetime where I’m like, everyone is here right now and we’re all like what the fuck. I think the universal aspect of what was happening made everyone have this sense of both freaking out and being calm at the same time because we’re all dealing with it. Like you can’t freak out about your job or not having a boyfriend because everyone is dealing with their own version of our sense of control being taken away from us, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
**CHARLES JEFFREY LOVERBOY** jacket and **VALENTINO** shirt.
**Has the quarantine experience changed your relationship with creating and how you interact with media at all?**
Totally. I can’t even remember a world where our entire lives were not spent on our phones. I feel like this time has permanently changed us and social media is changed forever. It keeps going in waves. At the beginning of the pandemic I was like, ‘Okay, this is how we’re going to be now’ and every person is on Instagram Live all the time. You would just log onto Instagram and there would be like 40 bubbles of everyone you know, just publicly speaking about the pandemic and about the same things. And then we got bored of that, it changed to something else, and then it continued to keep evolving, but it feels like the part of us that is on our phones is here to stay for the foreseeable future. I do hope once the pandemic is over we’ll have this revolution where we’ll be like, ‘We’re all taking a break from social media for six months, we’re just going to be out in the world and eat a lot of food in public, and have sex with each other.’
**What do you miss most about the 'normal world'?**
I have mixed feelings. Something I’ve learned—an observation I have now because of the pandemic—is the worst thing you can do as an artist is interact with any other human being. No one is there to tell me what to eat, like I make every decision for myself now, and there’s no one swaying me in any other direction, so it’s forced me to get to know my own point of view and I think that’s why I’ve been able to succeed and really come into my point of view, because there is no one there telling me that my opinions are wrong. That's something that I have liked about it. The other side of that is truly being with people is the other best thing you can do as an artist. I think that there's so much value to being in the world and going through an actual life experience. I’m pretty good at living life and being out in the world, so I think that this pandemic was helpful for me to learn I can be myself and entertain myself and think for myself and vaguely take care of myself—that one was hard.
**DIOR MEN** jacket, **NOON GOONS** shirt, **BODE** shorts, and talent’s own socks.
**What’s something about yourself that most people don’t know?**
My father was my little league coach and wanted me to be good at baseball, more than I could ever have been. He made me the pitcher when I was not equipped to do that job, and at the games, my entire team would chant “Take him out! Take him out!” and then my dad who was the coach would yell at the team and defend me, even though he had made the wrong decision having me pitch.
**When do you feel the most invincible?**
The gayest answer ever, but when I'm creating, When I’m writing a script or filming something or sometimes just creating a video for Instagram. When I live inside the world of art, the outside world doesn’t exist and I can just be god, be the god of my own experience, and my art.
**KAPITAL** Vest and **VALENTINO** Shirt.
**Do you think the creative industry is intersecting with our current realities at all? Such as with the Black Lives Matter movement, COVID, isolation…**
I think audiences are being built on social media and the sheer number of the people listening and getting their information, everything is so accessible. White people such as myself are learning so much, and I think we’re being pushed into situations we were uncomfortable with before, and now, we have to face them in an amazing way. Also in terms of social media, I think the movement introduced so many white people to amazing Black creators and Black voices that we are now all following and getting this information from. I think that has been the gift of social media, broadening people's horizons and who they follow and the type of content they take in and really diversifying their feed. Knowing they have the power to consume what they choose. Actively choosing more diverse people to engage with and learn from.
**How was it like to direct, write, and act in your short film _Men Don’t Whisper_? What’s it like to intersect with multiple aspects of creating a film?**
To me, it's such a natural flow. When I’m writing I'm also directing because I see how everything should be in my head, so it feels like the most natural thing to then direct it. I know the tone and the voice of it because I wrote it. It’s about the flow between all of the aspects of the art, because at the end of the day people aren’t like the director, the actor, the writer, it’s the film. I think having control over everything just for me, solidifies the vision and makes it into something that is a full, cohesive piece.
**RICKY KING** top.
**Let’s transition to some of your film work. A lot of your short film, _Call Your Father,_ is comedic and light, but there are undertones of a deeper message. What were you trying to explore with this film?**
I think that film is about a lot of things. I wrote it when I was 23 years old. I was solely dating 50-year-old men with sad eyes, so I wanted to explore that side of myself, but I also wanted to explore it from the point of view of the older person and talk about the queer generational divide. Millennials now have access to information about things but lack empathy towards them. We can engage with AIDS and we can talk about AIDS, but it’s coming from such an analytical place because we didn’t experience it. I wanted the film, for my generation watching it, to make them aware, especially young queer people, that we don’t understand what happened. I know that we think we do, but we could never feel the actual pain that was had at that time. I wrote it as a kind of a love letter to that generation, even though in the film the character that I play is kind of hard on that generation. To me, I was striving to show empathy for different generations of gay men and give attention to both of their traumas and understand that queer people are in pain and processing that in very different ways.
**Tell me about the queer cinema scene in your experience and what your part in that has looked like over the years?**
It basically introduced me to the film world. The first short I made went to a lot of film festivals and that made me be like, ‘Yeah, this is what I love and this is what I want to do.’ It’s evolved since then and I definitely have a dedication to telling queer stories and telling complicated queer stories. I think that’s been, honestly, really difficult to get those stories made. I think there’s been this sense that there are so few queer stories being told, so when someone wants to put money into a queer story they want it to be palatable for the audience, either about the queer struggle or liberation and nothing in between. What my goal is in the gay work that I do is to illuminate so many aspects of not being queer that are not all positive towards us. There's so much work that queer people need to do as a community, there's so much inviting and so many problems. I think if the general public was more knowledgeable about the specificity of who we are as people, flaws and all, they would be more empathetic towards gay people in general. Reducing it to just struggle and liberation actually doesn’t humanize queer people. IT keeps them the other and separate.
**REESE COOPER** vest, talent’s own tank, and **ZARA** hat.
**In your film, _The Disgustings,_ viewers love to hate the characters. What is it like to create and then act out a character such as the one you play in the film?**
I was so young when I made that and it was the first film I ever made. I was just observing the life around me when I was hanging around at gay bars. I was like, ‘God, there are so many bitches—what is that about?’ I wrote it and did the same thing I was talking about. At the end of the film, I try to humanize these people—through the whole film we know they are bitches, but we don’t know that they are sad bitches. I wanted to show that these people are sad and they exist in this world, and hopefully, keep it funny, but also to have that edge of there's so much pain in people that live this way, and how sad it is to live a life that is only about talking shit and bringing others down. I made that eight years ago and I feel like I’m just learning the lesson that I gave in that film. I have had a big year of realizing how toxic talking shit is and how toxic negativity is and how easy it is to bond with others over negativity. I’ve had to systematically go through my life and remove the negative thoughts. I want there to be truthful thoughts and negativity is part of truth, but it’s so easy to get stuck in the spiral of bringing others down. It’s interesting that I was talking about that at 21 and it took me a lot longer to learn the lessons that I was giving myself then.
Photographed by [Grant Spanier](http://whothefuckisgrantspanier.com/)
Styled by Christopher Horan
Written by Eloisa de Farias
Photo Assistant Madeline Spanier
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