Gender performance has been a hot topic and we caught up with Humhu (he/him), who like many of us is trying to understand gender identity and expression from a creative point of view. When handed the photobook, ‘Boys Will Be Toys”, they have designed it in a way that the reader notices its two divisions – Masc and Femme. There’s no formal starting point to the photobook; if you begin on the femme side, a set of glamorous shots catch your eye, radiating a certain risque. The softness comes through despite the makeup and fishnets that would generally be considered “badass”.

The masc side then grips you with a stunner element, the compulsory gore and tough-act. You can also get a peek at the softness that is concealed under stylish sunglasses. The pictures have been taken outdoors, leading us to the question of gender divisiveness of spaces, with the masc often being equated with the outside “real” world. It could be interpreted as representing how a person, assigned male at birth, is automatically expected to present themselves in a certain way outside domestic spheres.

It’s visible that Humhu (He/Him) and team (Ankit, Revant Dasgupta and Tito) wanted to portray an exaggerated and expressive way to poke questions about the gender binary and its compulsory nature. The styling of the subjects in this project has been done with meticulous thought and with a high regard for fashion.

What was the inspiration behind this photobook? Did it start as an idea for a photobook?

The 3 of us — Ankit, Tito, and I — are all close friends. About one and a half years ago, on an evening that [felt] high on creativity, we began brainstorming and having fun. It was all done in my studio. We shot the femme part inside my house and the masc shots outside, in my building. There was some sense of purpose in that we wanted to portray certain things, but the images we took were all very random. We discussed the idea of making a zine out of it, and after a lot of trials and discussions and test copies, we landed on it being a photobook with a hardcover.

You compared femme and masc to being two sides of the same coin, what does that “coin” represent for you?

Well, the coin represents ourselves for all three of us. The project has been a personal exploration for us as artists and human beings. We all do different yet similar kinds of work. The coin for me and Ankit as a performer was to see how far we could stretch ourselves. How much can we, as subjects, embody the masks of two polar “opposites”? It’s not just about being one and making a caricature of the other, because that’s how we have seen it represented in the mainstream media. We have these cis men playing these cross-dressing roles in Bollywood. They mostly end up making a mockery out of it like they are these well-built, muscular actors wearing dresses. And they are not embodying the femme but they are making a mockery of it. They’re doing it as cis-het men, they are not letting go of the cis-het masculinity and not letting a softer femme come in.

How did it “feel” to do the two sides of masc and femme shoots?

It felt very wholesome, to do both sides on the same day; it felt transcendental, almost as if we had crossed the gender barrier and were not just “one” thing. And it’s also what the project aims to do as well: that boys will be toys and not what people often say, which is “boys will be boys”, boys shouldn’t just be boys! We want to say that boys will be toys instead. You know, just like how when we were kids, we would construct and deconstruct entire realities and re-mould our toys into whatever we wanted them to be, we wanted to do the same thing as adults!

There’s some level of harshness on both sides of the ideas, but one is more censored and the other more gory. How did you come up with this?

Honestly, it was quite organic, we hadn’t planned to the T, about what we wanted to say and represent. It was more of a feeling, of what should be or can be done next and we followed it without questioning. It’s also to do with the authenticity of both sides. So when we decided to do the femme side, we had a guy with tape as the nipple pasty. As for the gory side of masculinity, it was to show the fragility of masculinity and the “hurt” male ego. It was us covered in the wounds to the ego. We didn’t just want to show the glamorous or crude sides, but also embody it on both sides.

What’s that one thing about boyhood that you’d like people to take away from this?

One thing about boyhood is that it’s tangible, flexible and stretchable. It’s not limited, just like girlhood and non-binary hood aren’t limited to certain ideas. Boyhood is whatever you make it to be, it can be structured, individualist, soft, femme, raw, masculine. It is up to you how you define boyhood, it can be anything.

If the masculine/raw side of photos is blood, how do you think it translates to the glamorous side of femme? Aren’t we then restricting them?

This has to do with the storyline we’re presenting. They’re boys, out in the world, being their tough sleeves and they went out, got hurt and are all roughed up. But when they come home, in their private space they can choose to be their soft selves, that’s queer, feminine, without the elaborate props. All this glamour and self-expression is allowed in the comfort and safety of their house, come home and chill, take it easy. Indulge in selfies inspired by Kim Kardashian or Kylie Jenner, it’s sacred and protected. But we know that they’re both masks, neither of them is real, yet we wear them. They are contradictory and also complement each other like Yin and Yang, it’s both restricting and contradicting one another. There’s a bit of masc in femme and a bit of femme in masc.

When does the femme and masc presentation come together for you?

They come together, whenever anyone creates a look that has elements of both, in a wholesome way. Even if the presentation is 99.9% of one and 0.01% of the opposing energy, you’re still consciously choosing to mix and match their energies and styles. There are small details that can be accounted as either masc or femme, but both are inherent in all of us, no matter who we are and how we identify, as it’s a spectrum. We all have it in us and we’re beyond the structure of the compulsory binary. We just have to realise that we don’t have to pick either side.

It is interesting to see how the early days of the shoot worked, but it is also noteworthy that as one goes through the photobook you realise that each image has a femme and masc side to it. Each pose has been recreated as a parallel to another. It is visible in the images that despite being posed and staged, they do not feel like a forced expression. The subjects are comfortable moulding into the roles that they are posing as. It’s a wholesome sight, and it reminds one about what Virginia Woold once said in her publication, “Room Of One’s Own”. She reminds that for any artist to be a “wholesome” or well-rounded artist, they need to be androgynous. They need to be in touch with their masculine and feminine energies.