XEVI MUNTANÉ

I had been watching him at East Village gay bars for about a year, I was intrigued but intimitdated. I had mistakenly thought the mysterious, handsome stranger could make a good boyfriend. At a fancy magazine launch party, a mutual friend introduced us. I was thrilled. From afar I had assumed Xevi was a Chelsea boy—it was his unifrom: a tank top, gym shorts and high tops combined with his perfect, zero-body-fat body. After closer inspection I realized that he was in a territory all of his own. The visual clue that set him apart was how he groomed his hair; it was spiked on top with long thick sideburns and above his upper lip was a thin golden mustache. This combination suited the proportion of his face so well that I almost didn't realize how unique it was. Xevi is Spanish, which explained his chavvy style. His look was crafted in Barcelona. In our conversation that night, he was shy and soft spoken, the only thing he told me was that he was a photographer.

At the party we didn’t exchange numbers. Luckily, Xevi tracked me down. The next day he called me at work. The following Friday we were on a date, it wasn't dinner and a movie. Xevi preferred to meet at The Cock at 11:30. Together, we both got extremely drunk, stayed until last call and decide to go back to his apartment. In the cab, we discovered we were both submissive. For Xevi this ended the date; he didn't want to waste a night with a fellow bottom. I somehow convinced him that we could make it work and he agreed to take me home to Coney Island. The cab ride took forty minutes.

Xevi lived in a neighborhood of working-class Russian families. He must have been an alien to them. His apartment was not what I expected. He had the whole place to himself but the decor looked as if he were squatting at a grandmother’s suburban home. We immediately took off our clothes down to our underwear and got into his bed. There was no kissing or groping — Xevi laid on his stomach waiting for me to be aggressive, I wasn't. He was right, we had zero sexual chemistry. We sat there, each waiting for the other to take the lead, until we both fell asleep.

In the morning, I wanted to leave as soon as I woke up but I was too hungover. Xevi put on a creepy Spanish film about snuffing — this group of guys that got off on killing people and recording it on video. He wasn't trying to scare me off; he genuinely wanted to share what he thought was a great movie. After it ended I asked if I could see his pictures to try to get some sense of who he was. His work was fashion photography. He showed me images of all these familiar people elegantly shot. There was a monotone red image of Hedi Slimane, a bunch of hyper-pop images of Kylie Minogue and funny pictures of Sophie Dahl. It was clear Xevi was a serious photographer.

The next time we met up he told me that his Coney Island apartment was depressing him and having seen it firsthand I understood why. I had an extra room available at my place and three weeks later Xevi and I were roommates. He set up his living space like a teenage girl, decorating it with stuffed animals, a giant pillow in the shape of a cell phone, pictures of naked boys, a giant 80's-style neon-lit poster of Marilyn Monroe and thousands of fashion magazines. Boxes of his phototographs were stacked floor to ceiling. The floor was covered with piles of CDs of every Spanish and English pop star. In the corner a makeshift library was installed and filled with a surprisingly literary collection of books.

Xevi’s favorite books —

Love in the Time of Cholera
The Hours
To Kill a Mockingbird
Strange Pilgrims
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Xevi’s bed was lofted, leaving space for a perfect sex den underneath. He furnished this with a shag rug and a giant TV with a VCR to watch porn. Condoms, drug paraphernalia, and adult magazines were scattered everywhere.

He was a perfect roommate; clean, thoughtful and happy. His presence genuinely added a nice feeling to the house. He made clear from the beginning that he lived as a loner. He always stayed in his room and made no mess in the shared spaces. Xevi's life was pared down to just three main activities: working out, shooting pictures and having sex. This streamlined agenda allowed for maximal success in every category. Weekdays were about the intense hustling it takes to keep editorial jobs coming in. For someone as shy as Xevi, he was surprisingly talented at pulling in assignments. In work mode Xevi was extremely focused and nothing distracted him. You would never find Xevi going out to dinner with friends or going to a party outside of work-related obligations. He had no interest in this kind of socializing. Days of photo re-touching and shooting were followed by long, slow-paced workouts.

Back at home, Xevi prepared himself the same meal every night, consisting of an obscenely tasteless combination of tuna eaten directly out of the can and boiled egg noodles with no sauce. The meal was created partly to compliment his work-out, partly to accommodate a tight budget, but mostly because eating for him was not about pleasure, it was purely about sustenance.

Xevi was not seduced by any of the fancy consumer culture that so many New Yorkers care so much about. Work for him was not a means to a better lifestyle. He couldn’t have cared less about owning fancier clothes and living in a nicer apartment. In fact, I think if Xevi made more money his life would probably change very little from the way he is living today. He's focused on photography because he loves adding his own images to pop culture.

I asked Xevi how he wanted to set his work apart from that of other photographers. He hates talking about stuff like this. There is something specific he's after but it's a struggle for him to put that into words. After thinking about it a while, he explained that he was looking for a way to condense and simplify images, like a perfect pop song. He cited Eyes Wide Shut as a major inspiration "Stanley Kubrick had no interest in reality" Xevi said, "there’s this kind of a caricature that is not too funny or far from reality but just not real." To me Xevi’s work looked like the result of a collaboration between David LaChapelle and Robert Mapplethorpe, pop baroque stlying with isolated scultural looking figures. It’s funny that he shoots fashion, because it seems so far from his personality to care about fancy clothes.