DEEJAY SHYBEAR: b. 1975

Pink Acolyte Service: 1999-2008

DEEJAY SHYBEAR was the sixth leader of the Pink Acolyte Union. He served in this position from 1999 until 2008, when the position was taken over by boxanne.jpg (page coming soon). SHYBEAR was the first to utilize a semi-anonymous persona in his position as Pink Acolyte, a tradition that continues to this day. Interestingly enough, while his prolific career included video, he seemingly never actually created music or otherwise performed as a DJ as his name would imply.

SHYBEAR’s collages, though poetic and seemingly perfect for zines, were never compiled and published until recently. Throughout all of his work, SHYBEAR celebrated the large gay male body, presenting it as an almost sacred or worship-worthy source of inspiration. Like all other Pink Acolytes, SHYBEAR utilized intuitive techniques like automatic writing and meditation in order to commune with the spirit of creativity studied by the Pink Acolyte Union. Known by many names, SHYBEAR simply calls it Taffie.

Unlike Pink Acolytes before him, SHYBEAR preferred to talk about Taffie as a metaphorical entity rather than a physical creature. His descriptions of Taffie are reminiscent of the Jungian theory of the collective unconscious – an unseen yet felt presence that connects all those who embrace it.

SHYBEAR almost exclusively utilized found color, image, and texture, barely changing or adjusting them for aesthetic purposes. Scrawled on the back of collage #2, he wrote, “[t]hese things are poems or stories, and like poems or stories, I am just putting together pieces of existing materials.” SHYBEAR saw his use of collage as a form of poetry and writing in and of itself, placing images and text together to craft new contexts for them to exist within.