A former police officer is confessing to being unable to drive without his penis becoming aroused. “Is it the rumble of the road on your balls?” he wonders aloud, while another young man in the group says: “I actually think my dick is in control [of me].” A third guy, in his 30s, describes his first attempt at masturbation: “I kind of hit it from side to side and it felt nice after a while.”
If these sound like the sort of stories you don’t often hear on mainstream TV, then that’s the point. Channel 4’s one-off show Me and My Penis aims to break the taboo around the male sex organ and start a frank conversation about masculinity. In among the penis chat, we hear from a man in his 40s called Jason who breaks down sobbing while confronting his infertility. There’s a moving account from a trans man who details the fear he had of female puberty, knowing his body would soon grow breasts he didn’t want. And one former soldier opens up about losing his legs and sustaining a severe genital injury doing bomb disposal work in Afghanistan.
“Strangely,” he says, “when I was told I had lost my testicles I just, metaphorically, shrugged my shoulders. I couldn’t grieve straight away, but later on I did. Sometimes I would be in a horny mood and have nothing I could do about that.” There are horrifying accounts of schoolyard sexual abuse, as well as redemptive stories of men who have overcome such trauma to finally find their place in life.
At the heart of Me and My Penis is the artist and “sex activist” Ajamu, who is filmed taking intimate photographs of several of the documentary’s subjects. “It’s rare in the mainstream to hear men talk about their bodies and what it means to be male,” he says, when we meet at a photographic studio in London. “It’s also rare to see penises on TV. We are uncomfortable in this country talking about pleasure of the body. We still live in an erotophobic culture. Other cultures, in Asia and parts of Africa, have celebrated the penis historically, but there’s something about this country that is still kind of backwards.”
Like the men’s stories, Ajamu’s images are the sort of thing we rarely encounter. His shoots often involve juxtapositions: for the portraits in the show, Sam, an erotic performer, drapes his erect penis with flora and fauna. A young Muslim who has body confidence issues is encouraged to strike powerful poses inspired by classical Greek sculpture. Ajamu says he’s looking to create images he doesn’t get to see himself. He wants to dismantle existing narratives around race, sexuality and gender – something he’s been drawn to all his artistic career.
Born in 1960s Huddersfield to Jamaican parents, Ajamu was set for a career in the army before he was seized by a rather different calling: life as a radical black queer artist. “My practice includes photographing men, black men, and dicks,” is how he puts it.
His 1994 exhibition Black Bodyscapes focused on the black male body and fetish: lace and leather helping explore the private sexual realities of black gay men. Back then, his image Cock and Glove sparked a censorship row. “If the penis was at more than 45 degrees,” he explains, “it was considered to be pornographic. So when it was shown in London, the vice squad turned up.” Recently he was able to show that image without controversy as part of the Hayward Gallery’s Kiss My Genders exhibition.
Ajamu tells a funny story about the time he came out to his parents: building it up in his head for months, certain that they, as a black family, would react negatively. “And they weren’t like that at all,” he smiles. “I was disappointed! I blame my family for my queerness because they’ve supported what I’ve done from day one. Even the dick pictures. They come to the exhibitions, they see the work. They’re the reason why I could be so queer.”
What, I wonder, is the key to taking an artful penis image? “I don’t know,” he chuckles. “That’s why I’m still taking pictures of penises! But I do like seeing men own their penises. Given all the ideas we hear about penises being angry and violent or whatever, I’m trying to move away from that and create something more intimate and gentle. For instance, there’s a dominant narrative about length and thickness being powerful. But if you go back to Greek statues, those penises are extremely small. So I try to unpack whose penises are seen as more desirable and whose aren’t.”
Ajamu says he has seen no correlation between size and a subject’s level of confidence: “For some men with big dicks, there could be confidence issues around performing. We always have to come back to those individual men and their relationship to their penis.” His images can be thoughtful, confounding and beautiful. But how would he feel if people were using them for, ahem, other purposes? “That’s fine!” he laughs. “But the show is about trying to move the penis away from pornography.”
I can’t help wondering if the rise of the dick pic has had an impact on his work. “No – and I don’t thinka lot of those images are visually interesting. A dick pic is a dick pic.” Does it not suggest that we are becoming more comfortable with the penis, though? “I think that sending images via social media is still very different to dick images in popular culture, because the spaces dictate what is acceptable and what is not.”
The idea of space – of creating arenas in which people can be open – is central to Ajamu. In 1997, he founded the Black Pervert’s Network. “Basically, it was a sex club I ran in Brixton for black and Asian men into leather, rubber, PVC and kink.” It was the subject of Ajamu: Joyful Insurrection, a short film by Stephen Isaac-Wilson. Another film, Brixton Recreation with Ajamu by Danny Solle, explores the south London cruising spots that existed before CCTV and gentrification. “I do miss those days,” he says. “Men were creating a space for themselves.”
Me and My Penis, of course, also provides men with such a space. Susanne Curran, executive producer, says finding men willing to strip off in front of the camera was surprisingly easy – although they took their time to select a diverse group with fascinating stories. She thinks the show’s existence signifies how much the conversation has moved forward. “Even as recently as 2015,” she says, “this portrait of masculinity and the fluidity it presents wouldn’t have been possible. The men – non-binary men, trans men, everyone from policemen to performance artists – wouldn’t have been there.”
Her deep-dive research has paid off. The aforementioned trans man talks about how hormone treatment saved him, transforming his clitoris into what is “effectively a micropenis” with 50 times more nerves and sensitivity than a normal penis. “You can still orgasm, it sexually feels nice, but for me being a man is not necessarily about that area. Nobody sees that. When I walk down the road and go into the shop and buy a can of Coke, that’s the one area that doesn’t matter.”
Another one of those men – Darren, the former police officer – is having his picture taken by Ajamu when I arrive. He tells me about his life in the force: the adrenaline highs he would get after catching a paedophile in situations where they would have only seconds to make an arrest; and the depths he would plunge to after seeing dead bodies and receiving no support for his mental health.
“I have night terrors, I see dead people, I smell dead bodies,” he says, matter of factly. In the show he talks of removing body parts from roads with tweezers and the mental scars he’s endured from seeing around 100 dead bodies – something that he believes no amount of medication can touch. “I have flashbacks, I wake up in the night wet, which as a grown man isn’t fun. That’s the realism of being in the police – going to a boss and saying, ‘I’m struggling with this’, and them saying, ‘Well, if you don’t like it, you know where the door is.’”
Ajamu has convinced Darren to cover his feet with a dead octopus to represent the mental shackles holding him. “It had been sitting in ice,” says Darren. “But by the time 3pm came around, it was absolutely stinking.” He finds the shoot a liberating experience. Also liberating is his new line of work as part of the Lions Barber Collective, a mental health charity that trains and educates men’s hairdressers to recognise distress in their clientele: “Basically, we want them to ask questions, listen to the answers with empathy and without judgment – and help. There are so many people saying, ‘It’s good to talk.’ But actually, where does a man go to talk?”
Ajamu likens this barbershop project to his own work. “Again, it’s about creating space for men to come together and talk about who they are, to not feel embarrassed or guilt-tripped. That applies whether it’s the barbershop, the film or the cruising ground.”
• Me and My Penis is on Channel 4 on 31 August.
