Is there a specific goal for you as an artist?

Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, from a 2008 interview:

Q: Is there a specific goal for you as an artist?

A: I believe that, for humanity to progress, the model  of the world, of reality, that parents pass on to their children needs to be replaced when the kids are in their teens by a darker more complex vision.  One, taking into account all kinds of miasma, multiple plans of existence, sexual liberation, human perversity, idiocy, and beauty.  I believe that only benevolent outsiders, such as visionary homosexuals who bare their artistic souls in public, are fully qualified to do this.  As long as children stay with the model of reality provided by their folks, no progress will be made.

My goal is to provide the same service for like-minded kids, that William Burroughs did for me, when I first read the Naked Lunch as a 13 year old in the back of a dingy WH Smith's bookshop in Pontefract, Yorkshire ...

And from AA Bronson's Negative Thoughts:

I am about to write an e-mail to a man I have never met.  He lives in a small town in the Midwest and teaches algebra at a small university, collects food stamps, and spends his time learning Ukranian and drawing strangely beautiful images of cue balls and tarot cards.  He is smart and gifted.  He is wasting himself.

I have learned all this from his home web site.  But in responding to him, in thinking of telling him of his gifts and talents - for I feel it is a responsibility of older gay men to acknowledge the gifts of younger gay men - I realize it is myself that I am talking about, my own gifts and talents that I am wasting.