What if John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe stole a time-traveling DeLorean and teleported to the future to get married?

That’s the burning question answered in Once Upon a Dream, filmmaker J. B. Ghuman Jr.’s new art project. The photo series casts Jason Sellards (a.k.a. Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters) as Kennedy and NYC nightlife legend Amanda Lepore as Monroe.

Shot on location at the Skylark Hotel in Palm Springs (Mr. President and Sugar Kane’s rumored hookup spot) and at the base of the 26-foot-tall Forever Marilyn statue, Once Upon a Dream turns the twosome’s private tragedy into public fantasy: glitter pops, magical lighting crackles, and Marilyn shoots the paparazzi with a gray plastic gun that looks suspiciously like the one I used to play Nintendo’s Duck Hunt.

For Lepore, who says Monroe is an inspiration, it was important to bring joy to the story. “She recreated herself, which most transsexuals can identify with,” Lepore told me. “Marilyn was unhappy being Marilyn, but I’m happy like this. I feel like ‘Marilyn’s Revenge.’”

Make no mistake though: She might be Monroe’s reincarnation, but Lepore is an East Coast woman. “I loved the whole thing since I got to be next to Amanda,” Jake Shears said of the shoot. “Because I was just starting to get a little homesick for New York… and basically Amanda just straight up is New York.”

And the shoot is straight up Ghuman. It reminded me of his 2010 directorial debut, Spork. Like a John Hughes flick from another dimension, Spork followed the travails and triumphs of an intersex girl nicknamed Spork and her dancing neighbor Tootsie Roll. Despite the film’s low budget, Ghuman managed to distil glitter and trash into a sumptuous, whacked-out dreamworld where reality is optional and time is relative—an aesthetic carried through in Once Upon a Dream.

To find out more about Ghuman’s newest vision, I called the director to talk about his Monroe-Kennedy fantasy.

VICE: How did this shoot come together?
J.B. Ghuman Jr.: Reggie Cameron, who produced the installation (a.k.a. Money Bags), said Amanda Lepore is going to be here for a different function, and would I be into doing a single photo of her underneath the Marilyn Monroe statue, because she’s constantly saying that Marilyn is her inspiration. I’d met Amanda before—through Cazwell, because I’ve done videos with him—and I thought this could be cool.

What inspired you to create an art project about Kennedy and Monroe?
[Monroe and Kennedy’s relationship was] always looked on as this shameful thing; she was a slut and he was a playboy. I’m not saying either of those are true because I wasn’t there, but I wasn’t trying to put a spotlight on any truth about them. I was just trying to use their situation and flip it. Like how cute would it be if they did steal a DeLorean and said, “Fuck it, we’re going to the future? Let’s get married, let’s go to this hotel, and make it public, and let’s just be in love!”

What’s your broader vision for these art projects?
Buckle up, girl, cause it’s bright, it’s quick, and it’s crazy—and it has lots of glitter. When you know you’re different, no matter where you’re at, you become very imaginative. Not to get too heavy on you, but my dad became stardust about four years ago. When that happened, I kind of lost my identity. When I rebuilt myself, the only thing that didn’t get blown away was my childlike heart. All that stirred inside me into some mumbo jumbo until I figured: Fuck it. Let’s be cool. Let’s make stuff where people like it so it’s a hit, but on the flip side there’s an echo to it, like it creates a certain positive energy when you look at it.

Trans author and artist Sybil Lamb was living in George W. Bush’s version of The Hunger Games—also known as post-Katrina New Orleans—when two men beat her with an iron pipe, taking a chunk out of her skull, and then left her for dead in a rail yard. She received emergency surgery for over five hours, and the subsequent brain damage affected her balance, memory, and language abilities.

Lamb has transformed this experience and her travels around America into a new book called I’ve Got a Time Bomb. Like her survival, the book is magical—and I don’t mean charming or full of glitter. (OK, maybe a little glitter.) I mean magical, as in a logic-defying story that deeply moves the reader. Interested in learning more about Lamb’s novel, I spoke to her about her writing and survival.

VICE: I loved the book. What motivated you to write it?

Sybil Lamb: I needed to list the [reasons why] my last five relationships went bad, [to discuss] my own ongoing mild flirtations with substances, and to talk about that one time I got my head bashed open. When I woke up, I had a plastic head that was missing a lot of cognitive functions, and I’m still just a little bit brain damaged. All the stuff was in other books, from five or seven different zines or short stories from the past ten years. “How to Kill Queer Scum Properly” was the original version of the bashing with a pipe story, but [Topside Press] got me to rewrite the whole thing in third person for the readers.

How close is the story to your life?
That’s a fun question. It’s written in brain-damaged bits of punk rock, so I tried to get a sticker on the front that said 88 percent completely true. The bashing story was completely true though—100 fucking percent.

Are there any major differences between the book and your life?
The only real difference is Trifle and I never actually shot a girl in the leg. (I will totally put that out there right now: I never shot any girl in the leg.) There’s a syringe fight story that’s really cool that didn’t get in the book, but that’ll be in I’ve Got a Time Bomb Two, out in 2018. Also, I didn’t just go around the complete North America once. I went around about three times.

What’s your life like nowadays?
I am in Toronto—that’s the other difference from the book. I’m no longer a crazy, homeless, wandering wreck. Look at this awesome studio I have. The whole building is intact; it’s nuts. I’m still getting used to it. I’ve [lived in a house] for almost six years now—and I’m still freaked out—but I managed to sell all my old punk rock friends out, and I have cashed in. I got at least a steady supply of money, so I can drink and buy cheap dresses [when travelling] in Brooklyn.

At one point, the protagonist helps another character with what she calls an “important downward spiral.” What is an “important downward spiral?”
I feel like so many people need to go test the worst waters—not just test the waters but test the rapids. It’s like picking a scab; it’s like pulling out your little hairs one at a time. You can think of it as a rite of passage, but a rite of passage for whom? Why do you have to keep proving you can take so much? If you can take more, and you’re unbreakable, you’ve gotta just keep doing it—gotta keep building up your calluses until you’re the toughest pile of calloused calluses, smoothed-over warts, and raw hardtack with feet. But you can never really know beauty and intimacy and the reassuring-ness of a touch until you’ve seen horror, hatred, and how not nice a touch can feel. That’s an important downward spiral.

Forever ago in the mid ’60s, a sylph of a girl named Edie Sedgwick captivated the world—or at least Andy Warhol, and through his Factory and his films and his photos, everything and everyone else that mattered. She was the American art world’s “It Girl,” the source material for numerous plays, books, and movies, even the alleged inspiration for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Perhaps that’s part of what inspired the name of the eponymous heroine in Adele Griffin’s addictive new YA novel, The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone. In a phone interview, Griffin says the book is, in part, homage to Sedgwick, whom Griffin stumbled upon as a child when a library mis-shelved the biography Edie: American Girl in between the Nancy Drews and the Hardy Boys.

“It sounds like it could have been a kid’s book, right?” says the two-time National Book Award finalist with a sly laugh. “But … I knew it wasn’t.”

Sedgwick has haunted Griffin ever since. “There was no one in my neighborhood who lived this kind of fabulous, decadent life,” she recalls of her childhood, which she spent mostly on Army bases. “It set my mind on fire.”

That blaze of childhood adulation burst into full flame in the character of Addison Stone, a post-millennial Edie Sedgwick who is “more gorgeous, more reckless, more tragic, more talented” than the original. And this time, she’s also her own Warhol, making her own art, creating her own image. Or as Griffin puts it, Stone is “Edie as Banksy,” referring to the British graffiti and installation artist whose work routinely pushes the boundaries of what high art is and says.

Griffin’s book pushes genre boundaries as well. Conceived of as a “docu-novel,” the story is told entirely in interview segments, as an attempt to reconstruct the meteoric rise and terrible fall (both literal and figurative) of Addison Stone. Griffin is herself a character in the novel, the invisible hand on the other end of the tape recorder in all the interviews. Stone is a precocious artist who goes from lower-middle-class suburbia, to the Whitney Biennial, to her own mysterious death in just a few short years. Along the way, she manages to pick up a Victorian ghost, a wealthy patron, a sleazy agent, two not-always-good-for-her boyfriends, and a cast of trust fund friends that one could easily imagine are the Rich Kids of Instagram.

The main challenge for Griffin was to imbue this art-world story with enough energy to work as young adult fiction, where everything is bigger, brighter, and more. “I needed less of my trip to Frieze with my husband,” Griffin jokes, and more of a young girl’s fantasy life. Luckily for Griffin, that life literally walked into her kitchen one day, when a friend brought over up-and-coming model Giza Lagarce.

“She was so stunning, and so … Edie,” Griffin recalls. “I thought, ‘More of that! More of that!’”

Lagarce became the embodiment of Stone, bringing with her not just her stunning looks, but her wealth of Facebook photos, which Griffin began to “write into” in order to breath the necessary life into the novel. She cites finding Lagarce as the “major rewrite” of the process, and the resulting meld of obviously real images with supposedly real interviews helps to further shatter the line between fake and fact in her story.

But Lagarce isn’t Addison Stone’s only real world analogue. Griffin mined the portfolios of four artists to create the vast collection of images that dot the book. The particulars of the plot, Griffin says, emerged from the interplay between the Sedgwick story she imagined, and the artworks that captivated her. Sophie, a minor character, was created specifically so that Stone could use a portrait by Michelle Rawlings of a young girl with a bloody nose—a portrait she now owns, along with a few of the other “Addison Stone” pieces from the book.

Yet despite all of the photos and paintings and interviews, Stone remains an enigma—this isn’t a mystery novel with a stunning twist at the end, which may disappoint some readers. The mystery here is Stone herself, not what happened to her. But what rises unexpectedly from reading the novel is a lesson that all teenagers would do well to learn: We are all of us mysteries. As characters debate the true nature of Addison Stone, they reveal just how little they know each other and themselves, and how much they project their own beliefs, fears, and hopes onto the world. Stone might shine a little brighter, take up a little more of the oxygen in the room, but she is no more mysterious than anyone else—there are just more people asking questions.

Once, after the midnight premiere of a summer blockbuster, I got trapped on the top floor of a giant multiplex. Three packed showings let out simultaneously, and the theater, in all its infinite parsimony, had shut down everything but the bare minimum required to allow us to exit: one narrow stairwell plunging down four flights, lit mostly by dim emergency lighting.

It didn’t take long for a bottleneck to form at the top of the stairs, which quickly became an impatient crowd, all of us punchy with exhaustion and excitement. Soon people were shouting. Then shoving. The crowd began to lurch violently, as small motions rippled out into panicked attempts to break away. Thankfully, before a full-fledged riot could begin, people pulled down the stanchions and velvet ropes that blocked off the other stairs, and we exploded safely outward in a dozen different directions.

But that visceral experience of the crowd as a capricious-yet-mindless entity has stayed with me ever since. It is this feeling that Dayna Lorentz’s bestselling YA series No Safety in Numbers conjures up in its readers. It’s not just fear or panic, but that sickening moment of inversion where a familiar setting becomes dangerous, and normal people become deadly.

The third book in the series, No Dawn Without Darkness, follows an ensemble of teens quarantined in a mall after a terrorist attack releases a highly contagious, extremely deadly flu virus. The four main protagonists are Ryan, a perfect high school jock hiding a brutal home life; Shay, a beautiful young girl trying to protect her sister and grandmother; Lexi, the computer nerd whose mother, a U.S. senator, is trying to maintain some fragile order; and Marco, the loner struggling to survive in the shadows. With them are thousands of other hapless mall-goers, descending rapidly into deadly anarchy. By book three, not only are they trapped, sick, and terrified, they are starving, cut off from any outside communication, and plunged into pitch-blackness.

Thankfully, in Lorentz’s hands, the books never devolve into terrorism porn or some kind of teen-James Bond spy romp. “It’s much more about these characters,” she says, than the situation. “Terrorism gives me an opportunity to put people through an emotional experience.”

That’s not to say that you won’t find characters turning a wide variety of mall goods into incendiary devices. Indeed, Lorentz jokes that her research for the books has definitely put her on some terrorism watch lists. But the stories she tells from within the mall focus on the most basic job of all teenagers, regardless of their circumstances: surviving and becoming an adult. Lorentz shows us how these particular conditions—lack of supervision, imminent threat of death—merely serve to hasten and distort a process that all young people must go through. This is not a book about a bomb; rather, it is a book about children stumbling toward adulthood through an almost literal minefield.

“A lot of extremity you see in YA is merely attempting to capture the intensity” of being a teen, Lorentz says. “You go to high school and it’s a fight for survival to get through the day. No one is on your side.”

Some adults focus on the terrorism and violence in the series, Lorentz says, and question if it’s too much for teen readers. Teens, on the other hand, read it as a perfect metaphor for what they already experience on a daily basis. And if we’re looking at the question of violence or emotionally disturbing material, No Dawn Without Darkness is not that far removed from YA novels set in World War II, during slavery, or on the frontier.

“I’ve never heard a teenager say ‘This book was too violent for me,’” Lorentz says. Instead, most of the responses she’s gotten are from boys, who are excited to read about “football players who aren’t automatically the bad guy.”

Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of the story is watching the male characters struggle with the meaning of manhood. Perhaps because the YA audience is predominantly female, it’s rare to come across a series that so sensitively explores the many fraught routes that the “average” American boy can take to adulthood, and the concurrent violence they both experience and enact along the way. The title No Dawn Without Darkness might refer to the literal dark-and-dawn experienced by the denizens of the mall in this book, but it is also a reminder that light and dark live within all of us, even kids—even “good” kids. Lorentz is not afraid to explore the best and the worst in her protagonists. In an interesting twist in this age of dystopian fiction, her narrators are, in the end, able to go back home, where they face perhaps their hardest challenge yet: to reconcile who they have become with who they were, and who they want to be. It’s a challenge even teens who haven’t been trapped in a terrorist attack will understand very well.

SASSAFRAS LOWREY: When I was seventeen, the adults I lived with went through my bedroom and found the lesbian books I’d secretly checked out from my county library. I kept them stacked between my high school math and social studies textbooks. Just six months before, I’d run away from my mom’s house and among the items I brought with me were two gay books I’d secretly purchased from the bookstore at the mall. The adults I stayed with found those books, too, and read my journal. They called my school, had me paged to the office, and told me never to come back. I knew then that queer words were powerful.

Three days after I was kicked out, I was crashing on a friend’s couch. I had no idea where to go, or what was going to become of me. I went to my county library looking for answers. I looked at every book shelved under “homosexuality.”  I was searching for answers about what it meant to be young, queer, and on my own.  That day, I didn’t find any books that could help me. Sitting on the floor of that library, I made a promise to myself that if I survived, I would somehow find a way to write the kind of queer books that I was searching for.

Then last summer I got a message on Facebook from a reader and artist named Michelle Brennan. She and I had friends in common but had never met, never spoken. She had heard about my novel Roving Pack and read it after being diagnosed with cancer. While undergoing chemo she began an art project. Taking a shoebox and a little doll, she brought my novel to life, the way that as children in school we did “book in a box” book reports. She mailed it to me as a gift. Opening that box was overwhelming. As an author, I’m living the promise I made to myself as a homeless queer youth that someday I would write the kinds of stories that I needed. That I would write stories that I still need, which bring queer lives to life on the page. Receiving that diorama from Michelle was the ultimate confirmation that I’m doing the work I’m supposed to be doing. Queer books aren’t just important for queer youth. Queer adults need queer books. We need to see our lives, desires, bodies, relationships reflected back at us in books.

When I received Michelle’s diorama in the mail, I was in awe and immediately posted pictures of it online. So many people got excited, and began talking about the power of queer books in their own lives, the books that had inspired them to come out, and the books that inspire them today. They talked about wanting to make art in honor of these books.

* *

HUGH RYAN: When I was nine, a teacher took Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire away from me because it was “inappropriate.” Perhaps so, but it was also the only book I’d ever found with queer characters, even if they were immortal, immoral vampires whose lives bore no resemblance to mine in the suburbs in the early 80s. Without it, I was reduced to looking up “homosexuality” in the card catalog of my small public school library. When all that got me were books on Greco-Roman art, I looked up “sex,” which left me piecing together an understanding of my desires from a book on feline reproduction.

Thankfully, within a few years I started working after school and in the summers, and began to buy, borrow, or steal any queer book I could get my hands on. I was lucky enough to come of age in a time when there were books available. But I’ll never forget that feeling of being alone, not just in my town, but seemingly throughout space and time—so alone that there wasn’t even a book to guide me.

When I founded the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, which is a nonprofit that helps local communities around the country develop art shows to illuminate LGBTQ history, I was primarily concerned with sharing knowledge, spreading those small bits of our history that are hard to find elsewhere. But I quickly came to realize that the act of sharing was, in and of itself, just as important as the information being shared. As adults, we rarely are given the chance to consume, analyze, and give back information on topics we love. That time is relegated (at best) to school, where queer people often don’t feel able to be open and honest. Without having the chance to look at and analyze our own culture, our own history, and the things that matter to us, we are left depending on the analyses of others, which have often portrayed queers and queerness in a negative light.

When Sassafras showed me Michelle’s diorama, I realized this was a powerful way to share important stories that resonated in queer lives, in a format that wouldn’t feel intimidating and was almost endlessly malleable. Together, Sassafras and I wrote a call inviting people to create a diorama based on a book that was meaningful to them in their development of their queer identity. The books could be anything—gay, straight, picture books, math textbooks – so long as the author could explain how it was important to them. After announcing the show, we received nearly 100 proposals from around the world‚—including Canada, South Africa, Ireland, and the Czech Republic—for dioramas that ranged from pocket-sized to life-sized, on everything from picture books to dense philosophy.

Had we not been limited by the space of the gallery, we would have included all of them! In the end, we chose proposals based on a number of criteria: the clarity of the connection between the book and the personal experience; the artistic vision presented (although not the exhibit maker’s artistic training, as we are open to individuals at all levels of skill and experience in art making); and the creation of a well-rounded final show. A few books were proposed so many times that we knew they needed to be included, such as Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde (unfortunately, the artist making this diorama had to drop out of the show at the last minute), Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran, and The Beebo Brinker Chronicles by Ann Bannon. The resulting exhibits explode what the form is or could be, and range from classic “book in a box” shoebox dioramas to translucent towers built on a lightbox.

It has been amazing to see the outpouring of inspiration expressed in the proposals we received, as well as the crucial institutional support from the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, the Lambda Literary Foundation, MIX NYC, and the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library! In our own small way, this show is a gift to the community and an offering to all other queers who like us stood before a card catalogue or library shelf looking for belonging.

Like many gay porn stars, Colby Keller has a knack for versatility—and I’m not talking about how he’s worked as both a pitcher and a catcher. In between working for the top companies in gay porn—including Randy Blue, CockyBoys, and (controversially) Treasure Island Media—Keller has put his anthropology degree to good use, writing about art, barebacking, and capitalism on his blog, Big Shoe Diaries.

For years now, I’ve wondered about what goes on in the dirty mind behind Keller’s goofball grin. When someone told me Keller was giving away all of his possessions—except for a plaque of Lenin—as part of an art project, my curiosity was seriously piqued. With all of his possessions discarded, Keller’s now embarking on “Colby Does America… and Canada Too!”—a lengthy road trip to make art, meet people, and get laid. In each state Keller will film himself fucking a guy in the back of a van in the name of art. Wanting to know more about the Marina Abramovic of gay porn, I caught up with Keller at a Pret A Manger in New York to discuss his art projects, capitalism, and why porn is better than his “horrible, evil job” at Neiman Marcus.

VICE: Why did you decide to create your van project?
Colby Keller: I don’t have a house, I don’t have a home, I don’t have a destination, and I don’t—for at least the immediate time period—want to think of one. The van is a way of thinking about home on the road, and also thinking about our future, because we’re all probably going to have to set out in vans and move around, and there will be a lot of displaced people, and a lot of people will die. I want to embrace this future we’re making for ourselves and that capitalism and this horrible landlord are forcing me into. There’s a porn trope where they’re going to fuck the whole country, so I’m gonna fuck America! America has certainly fucked me, and I’m going to fuck back—but in a nice, positive way.

What made you become a porn star?
I was taking courses at the University of Houston in their studio art program, and I really didn’t like it. So I dropped out of the program and graduated with a degree in anthropology, but there aren’t a lot of lucrative jobs out there in the field, and we were in another recession. I was also curious about porn. My favorite site was Sean Cody, and just on a lark, I was going to send in some nude pictures, totally expecting to be rejected—actually, I kind of wanted to be rejected. I wanted them to tell me I wasn’t worthy! And then they came back and said, “Oh no. We’re actually interested.” I was like, “Oh man. God, they’re into it! Do I have to do this? I guess I have to.”

I eventually got other jobs while I was in Texas. I worked for Neiman Marcus, a horrible, horrible, evil job. They didn’t want to consider me a full-time worker, even though I worked there for two years, 70 hours a week, just cause they didn’t want to give me health insurance and they wanted to pay me $10 less than anyone else on staff.

You often discuss capitalism. Capitalism clearly affects our work lives, but how does it affect our porn consumption and sex lives?
I have some guilt when it comes to that, because porn specifically presents a problem. Does porn inform people’s sexuality, or does porn simply try to access those things in your sexuality to sell itself to you? Obviously, the product always does this thing where you’re never completely fulfilled, so you buy more of it. As a porn performer I feel somewhat responsible for that, because sometimes the images that porn produces aren’t healthy ones. It’s very formulaic: We’re going to give each other mutual blowjobs, maybe the top will eat the bottom’s ass, then there are three fucking positions, then they both come. Who in [his] right mind has sex like that?

You’re a porn performer and also an artist. Do you identify as a performance artist or as a visual artist?
I try to think of it as everything. I don’t want to put a limit in terms of what mediums I can use, but to me the main medium is Colby Keller. Art projects for me need laws—creating a law gives you the power to break the law, which is the best part of having one—but I don’t want rules to limit the kinds of tools I can appropriate as an artist.

With performers like James Deen pursuing porn and other careers, porn has become more mainstream, like it was in the 70s. Why do you think this is happening?
Part of that is about the structural and financial problems that the business itself is encountering, and about social media. The late 80s and early 90s were the golden era of gay porn, and models got paid really well. Companies controlled the images of their models under an exclusive contract. They would do all the work of marketing you and making you a star, kind of like the old Hollywood system. Now there’s much more pressure for the models themselves to do promotional work—to be on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. In some ways it’s good to have ownership of that image, but also it’s a lot of work you’re not getting paid for.