ROOM READS

Whitney Mallett: I was trying to remember how you first came into my consciousness. I think it was via Twitter, long before Interior Motives. You had some kind of fame in the Bernie era?

Ben Mora: I was fired from the Bernie Sanders campaign. I’m not ashamed of it. In fact, with hindsight, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I was a regional field director based in Detroit, Michigan. I was at what you call a barnstorm, which is like a community organizing event to get people to go canvas. As I left this barnstorm, my phone blew up. An article had been published about me. I had a private Twitter account where I was posting a lot of very mean things about the other candidates in the Democratic field.

There was one specifically about Amy Klobuchar?

These tweets are all literally burned into my brain. I said, “Amy Klobuchar looks like that optical illusion where it's an old lady but also a young woman depending on how you look at it but with her it's just two different old ladies.”

And a star was born.

A star was born, yes.

What’s your journey from there to the host of a gay interiors gameshow?

My great pivot? Well, after being publicly fired, I fled to New York. As most soft people do, I started a podcast. It’s called Seeking Derangements. I’ve been a podcaster for the past six years, and now I’m a game show host. You just have to hope that you can pivot any kind of virality into content monetization.

Were you one of those people who started being interested in furniture during Covid? What inspired the idea of reading people’s bedrooms?

Making fun of gay people, just to be flat out about it. I have no interest personally in interior design, style, or fashion. I dress very plainly. It’s a nuisance to me to think about these things. I don’t have much of an eye for it, and it’s just not something that really speaks to me. In a formalist or institutional sense, it’s not my wheelhouse. But mocking gay people is. That’s the entry point to the show for me. But of course I have opinions about other people’s taste.

You seem interested in the anthropology of taste.

That’s a nice way to put it. The show can be as serious as you want it to be, and it can also just be total fluff. People can watch it with an eye for interiors. Or you can watch it to laugh and mock and have a damn kiki. It’s very modular.

Personally, I keep a really messy room and you don’t see a lot of representation.

We need to see messy, messy bitches platformed. 

There are so many images of spaces that look not lived in and perfect.

There’s the cis gay guy in L.A. who refers to their couch as a piece. But all this really conveys is an algorithmically-delineated sense of taste that they accumulate not for function or comfort, but for self-presentation. It’s to show off and have it be an extension of your personality. That’s the stuff I really do hate. I would take a messy room over that any day, personally, because it’s honest.

You’ll have rooms on the show cluttered with a million Monster cans, but you also have rooms that may not be quote-on-quote tasteful but they are very actualized and express a stylized vision. Like remember that red room?

You couldn’t see any of the walls in that room because they were draped in red velvet fabric, floor to ceiling. There was what I would only describe as like a micro-awning. Wood paneling in the style of a confessional. Crosses everywhere, rosaries everywhere, dark, dark, bloody colors. There was a treatment on the wall to make it look like it had wrought-iron diamond paneling. It was, of course, from Amazon. Like a plastic appliqué. But I loved it simply because it really felt like one person’s mission to make their room look like this — they weren’t beholden to anyone else’s idea of good taste.

Which does feel refreshing today.

There was another room on that episode that I was afraid of showing for a while. You can’t even really call it a room. It’s a closet. I was afraid of showing it because I wondered if people would think I was punching down on the poor or destitute. But I feel like if they submit these photos, they know what the show is. Why are they not allowed to also voluntarily be roasted for their living situations? And I was like, Well, it’d be weird if I just didn’t show anyone who was maybe living in a tough situation wanted to laugh at themselves as well. At the end of the episode Star [Amerasu] and Angel [Money] were really giving this 22-year-old cis male closet-dwelling young man some life advice. It was cracking me up to have two dolls just be like, “You need to get it together, bitch. Clean your closet.” Like full Jordan Peterson advice.

Jordan Peterson has a Marie Kondo-esque philosophy?

He has a book where he tells young men to start building a sense of self-respect, national duty, and whatever other traditional values; they can start becoming this man by maintaining a clean room. It’s pop psychology bullshit.

My partner is always saying I should start the day putting a few things away. Just tidy up for five minutes. He also overheard me watching the show and said, “Wow those people sound bitter.”

[Laughs]. Do we sound bitter?

It was one of the episodes with Ivy Wolk. I wondered if he’d have had the same reaction to another episode.

Personally, the show brings me a lot of joy each episode. I love recording it. But I know what episode you’re talking about. It was probably during the second room, which was a doozy. It was troubling, and I’ll be honest, a little disconcerting. We started to figure out too much about this person, and got exhausted in the process.

Do you often get feedback from people whose rooms were featured after their episode airs?

Most people, when they’re featured, just comment on the YouTube and say that they loved the segment and that they were so happy to make it on. I have more than 5,000 submissions right now, so making it on is quite a feat.

You said you started this show to make fun of gay people.

I’m saying that a little facetiously, for the record. Are they going to hear my voice?

No.

Now I’m worried I’m going to sound bitter.

I was worried how I sounded when I recommended the show in an interview I did about my media diet. Here I am talking to this majority straight audience about how you guess if this person is trans or not from their bedroom.

Straight people are watching in higher and higher numbers each week. A lot of them are confused. Maybe there’s some downside to giving straight people access to queer lingo and queer spaces like this, but I don’t really believe that. No matter what straight people take from gay culture, gay people will find a way to keep it pushing. In some ways, straight co-optation keeps the culture alive.

They’re hashtag allies.

They’re taking their ass to class. Older people are watching the show more too, commenting, like, “my daughter showed me this.”

Now you’ve said you didn’t really get into this because of a passion for interiors, but is there anything you’ve learned about how people live in their bedroom spaces?

The biggest divide between rooms is generational, and less so, sexuality, gender, or location. Like under 25 means plushies, more tech, like handheld gaming devices, and a lot more music stuff. You can see a prolonged adolescence through these rooms. I think millennials who also live in a state of perpetual adolescence try to refute that in their spaces. I think maybe there’s a millennial guilt or performance thing going on, so their spaces are generally a lot cleaner. There’s a giant fucking work-from-home desk in the room that’s very, you know, office, not Twitch-stream gamer setup. Generational, I would say, is the biggest divide that I’ve found.

Right.

But honestly, the conceit of the game is a little foolhardy and perhaps even stupid. The stereotypes are more often broken than they are confirmed on the show. It’s not always a straight guy with cinder blocks in his room.

I think it’s the best show, congrats! Everyone you have on is so funny.

A lot of the contestants I’ve known for a long time from just being crazy online. I’m like, you’re so funny, come on the show. I’d actually love to get some architects on the show. And I have yet to have a gay interior designer!