GAY TIMES Magazine

4 November 2019

REECE KING Queer British model Reece King returns to our cover louder, stronger and even prouder than he was before. Blurring the binary is one of the joys of the job for model and influencer Reece King. “I love it,” says the pusher of envelopes and challenger of masculine norms. “I didn’t have the language for it when I was younger so it’s interesting to go from constantly being told that what I’m naturally doing isn’t acceptable or isn’t seen as understandable to now not having to be just one thing,” he explains as we chat on set. When Reece first spoke to Gay Times Magazine as our February 2018 cover star, he’d already tweeted about his bisexuality. “But it was like my identity wasn’t fully formed,” he says now. “There was so much pressure to show my identity to the world even though I didn’t really know what it was myself. I do still feel like I’m learning. I feel like I know who I am but I’m still in the process of unravelling my identity. I think that’s an eternal thing - that I think I’m gonna keep finding more of myself.” Identifying now as queer, we speak to Reece about the shift of visibility for LGBTQ models in the industry, using his privilege to help other queer people of colour, and why the future relies on continuing to blur lines. BENNY DRAMA Benny Drama is at the forefront of a new wave of queer comedians breaking the internet daily with their cleverly edited, perfectly contained, LOL-inducing brand of observational comedy. If you’ve not seen the video that propelled Benny to internet fame yet, you need to seek it out immediately. It includes Antoni Porowski’s signature Canadian twang with a lisp, Tan France’s obsession with “printed shirts” and Jonathan Van Ness’s “So, like, Ron is basically this little baby caterpillar, he is crawling up the tree ready to just get in his little cocoon and pop out. Metamorphosis! Hilary Duff! Yes! Hello! OK hunny!” Uncanny and on-the-head only just begin to describe how brilliant his parody of Queer Eye is.