“Dear you,

Letters take time, I am beginning to realize. They take time to traverse the distance separating you from me, they take time to be written and then they also take you in its time. By the time you read these words, I imagine you would have become a different ‘you’ and I may be a different ‘me’. It seems that in letters, we are always writing to the future—a future, a certain possibility of what might be.

I’m thrilled that in a little more than a week from now, the Tom of Finland stamps will finally be released. Yes, the work of Tom of Finland has always provided a release for many (myself included)—a release of inhibited desire, of unfulfilled fantasies, of secret longings. Yet the launch of these stamps will stimulate another release—a setting free into the public realm of what once only belonged under the mattress, or in the furtive glances exchanged in dark alleys.

[…]

I sincerely hope that in reading this you, too, would write a letter to the future. It may be to your future self, or to someone who inhabits a future that you desire, or indeed to someone you don’t know yet. It may be a confessional letter, a letter of advice, a love letter, a letter of apology, a personal letter of any form. From the multiplicity of personal stories, memories and longings, we begin to think and feel a ‘community’ that is perhaps not yet here, to galvanize in the present the concrete possibility of a there and then.

I would keep your letter anonymous, and it will be part of a performance installation for the Amorph International Performance Art Festival held on the 16-19 October. In exchange for your letters, I would send you a letter from someone else’s future, along with a Tom of Finland stamp. If you are keen, do make sure that the letter would reach me by 25th September at the following address. […]

I look forward to corresponding with you in the there and then of another world.

Yours,

[Signature]

30th August 2014”