BUDS DIGEST 003 / FEATURE
YANN HOROWITZ & ADAM WIEST SHARE THE GUEST BONG
Photographed by ADAM WIEST
Yann and Adam captured by Adam in South Africa, 2021
Out professional skateboarder YANN HOROWITZ and his longtime partner, photographer ADAM WIEST, sit down for a loving interview about life in South Africa and the rejuvenating effects of smoking DMT in the desert.
HOROWITZ, the adorable co-creator of “A Simple Path,” (a new show that explores underground creative scenes across Africa, Europe and beyond) gets cozy and chatty with WIEST. The two talk travel, community, and kush in this intimate and bonded conversation for Buds Digest.
BUDS: Hey guys! How are you? How’s it going in South Africa?
ADAM: We are good. The country is in a bit of turmoil at the moment…
YANN: Because we were in lock down again, there's a lot of unrest going on which is just heavy at times.
BUDS: Do you feel safe?
YANN: We do, yeah. How we are situated, yeah. We're very lucky.
ADAM: Without sounding naive, yeah. I mean, living in South Africa, I think you accept a certain amount of “danger.” But, you know, you never know what can happen, but we feel relatively safe. Personally, I don't like fear mongering, you know, it's very easy to get scared of the other or this or that, but of course there's reasons why this is happening. You know, there's a lot going on in this country, due to the pandemic, and even pre pandemic pandemic…
YANN: There's just a lot of haves and have-nots.
ADAM: Just getting really to a boiling point, but nothing to worry about here.
BUDS: There's a bit of a fantastical feel to the terrain out there. Do you have favorite trips you've taken together in the region?
YANN: So we’ve been on quite a few trips together and usually into nature…
ADAM: We're incredibly lucky to live in South Africa. You could never leave this country and you could go to every setting you could imagine. You can be in the ocean, the mountains, in the desert… specifically in Cape town. You're probably, at any given time, less than an hour from any of those environments, which is incredible. And most of the people here are very nature oriented. They love their hikes, their surfing. Yann is a big skater.
YANN: I do like to escape the city and see the world.
ADAM: Yeah, funnily enough, we just got back. We were away on our friend's farm, which is just 40 minutes outside of the city.
YANN: Rolling, gorgeous hills. Incredibly beautiful. Beautiful farm house; a fireplace in every room. We've grown to really love the desert. We seem to like to thrive in the deserts.
ADAM: We're big desert boys. There's an area just outside of Cape town called the Karoo. It's a semi-arid desert and it's the home of the regional burning man event called Afrikaburn, which we're definitely not strangers to but we've been there in many capacities outside of the ‘burn.
YANN: The first year we were dating, we went to Afrikaburn together and that kind of sealed the deal. It was a week in the desert, on a lot of psychedelics and very little food and we made it out alive together and stronger. So, I feel like that's probably where the desert comes into our relationship.
ADAM: I was obsessed with the desert long before he came along! But a few months after we started dating, we went to Afrikaburn together and that definitely solidified our relationship – in a big way – as it does, you know, extreme environments and psychedelics and free love…
BUDS: Does Afrikaburn have a big gay contingent?
ADAM: To a certain extent, yeah. I would imagine, although I've never been to Burning Man, but in much the same way, there is a very open, new faith in humanity sort of thing. So, anything sort of goes, you know, like whether you're gay or straight, there is room for everyone there. I remember the last time we were there, there was a guy who had a giant dick and he was completely naked, except his dick was painted gold.
YANN: That was his whole outfit.
ADAM: It was kind of genius and no one bats an eyelash. It's completely normal. They have a lot of young kids and people go there and bring their whole families. We've known people whose families have been going for generations. It's really interesting to see how people operate in that environment. It definitely is an exercise in excess and there's pros and cons to it, in a lot of ways, but, we always go with the people that we love and make it for ourselves.
YANN: And basically your campsite has no one near you, so you can go there for a week and not see another human for the entire week.
ADAM: I love that we're coming off as, like, Burning Man nudists here.
BUDS: Yann, I feel like we’ve seen plenty of photos of you naked already.
ADAM: I mean, it's sort of my forte as an artist, so, it definitely helps with the content, and my art, so to speak.
BUDS: Tell us about your photography, Adam.
ADAM: Work that I do typically, I think if anything that is a major component of it, is that it is not heavily produced shoots. It's something that, to me, is quite experiential. I am very much aware of being in a position where I take advantage or exploit people, or my partner, especially when it comes down to being naked. I want things to happen really naturally. And my aim is to create beautiful images in a really natural way through living that experience and not necessarily premeditating it. I might be like, “take your pants off and go stand over there,” but like, you know, uh, in a very respectful, beautiful way. *laughs*
BUDS: What are both of your experiences with cannabis or THC?
YANN: When I was a teen, I was living on the east coast of South Africa in a little beach town and there was a taxi there that used to sell these things called slopes. It was two grams of weed wrapped up in newspaper, but it was like bush weed. It was grown in the hills about a 20 minute walk from where I was. My introduction to weed was a very informal one. I was hooked straight away, actually. I smoked through a lot of high school.
ADAM: In Durbin, where Yann is from, everyone is known for smoking a lot of weed. People have bongs in their cars.
YANN: It was really laid back and warm and there’s nothing else to do except get stoned.
ADAM: Even if you don't smoke weed, there's a guest bong in your house, you know what I mean?
That's even my experience when I've gone to Durbin or visited with Yann. That's another trip we went on together.
YANN: I smoked a lot more when I was younger and I do enjoy weed, but I'm not a very highly functioning stoner. I've realized, as I'm getting older, I can't really smoke during the day and get all my shit done. So I keep a spliff away for the nighttime, once everything's done, just before dinner. I can smoke up and relax.
ADAM: I would say I'm a stoner, but I'm not an all day stoner. I would prefer to smoke in the evenings, but I'm definitely way more of a functioning stoner, so I can smoke weed and be social and kind of function pretty normally. My instruction to weed is a little bit different. It was through my delinquent brothers, who at any given point in time were drug dealers themselves. I went to high school actually in Nairobi, Kenya. The weed we smoked there was also pretty terrible.
YANN: Bushy…
ADAM: You bought weed in pre-rolled packets of joints and it was really bushy weed. In terms of weed in Africa, things have come a long way.Back in the day, you didn't have access to very high grade, indoor kinds of weed. And if you did, it was extremely expensive. Even though technically not legal, laws have changed, laws have definitely made it easier to access and there's a lot of.
BUDS: Has cannabis ever entered your bedroom with you guys? Have you ever tried something like THC lube?
YANN: We'd love to…
ADAM: I'm intrigued… to be honest, I don't necessarily think of weed, like very sexy, but that being said, I’ve probably had sex or hooked up being high.
BUDS: It's very relaxing. Often weed puts you into a nice relaxed state.
ADAM: Like, how does it absorb?
BUDS: I’m not sure. We'll see if we can rustle some up to send to you guys and we’d love a full review.
YANN: Absolutely.
BUDS: Yann, tell us about traveling for your new show ‘A Simple Path’ – we love the first episodes. It looks like a lot of work.
YANN: We wanted to document at least five different African countries for the [first season of] the show, because we wanted to make sure we document skate communities that people aren't aware of. And I feel like Africa is one of those continents where the countries we go to do not have a skate scene or a skate shop. They don't really have the means to have a skate community, but they're doing everything in their power to have one. And that's what this show is about. It's about the creatives and the skate community keeping the underground alive. I'm just happy to be that person to be able to, I dunno, let people tell their truths and show what they're up to to the rest of the world.
ADAM: But you're right. It's a lot of work. He’s working his little butt off.
YANN: We do six short stories per episode and in each city you’ve got six days. It's a lot. So, we get there, we unpack our bags and we just go. It's meeting new people every day, which I love. That’s one of my favorite things, to be a stranger in a new city. But it's just insane, getting used to all these different cultures and meeting all these creatives, and getting welcomed into all these different scenes and houses and homes and food. It's been such an incredible experience, but it's flown by.
BUDS: How did you get approached for this show?
YANN: We were sitting around in lockdown, no one was making any money. We're spending all our savings and a friend of mine, who has worked for National Geographic and has been making travel shows his whole life, was the one that called me. He said “let’s film a pilot for a travel show here in Cape Town, send it off to the right people and see who buys it.” So, myself, my good friend, Brett Shaw, who's the editor and brain and producer behind the show, and a good friend of mine, Joubert Van Staden. The three of us pretty much paid for the entire pilot out of our pockets. Brett had all the networking abilities, sent it out to the right people, and the next thing I knew, about two months later, I got a call saying, ‘pack your bags, we got a TV show.’ It was literally a COVID baby.
BUDS: It's great that it's people you know really well that are working together on it.
YANN: I think we're just using each other's strengths, you know, like – they knew I could be crazy and charismatic on camera.
BUDS: You definitely are. What can we expect from future episodes?
YANN: We finished the last three episodes of the season in Europe. So, we squeezed three episodes out of three weeks, which is quite crazy. It was absolutely exhausting, but it was such an amazing experience. I met so many beautiful people, but, yo’, traveling through Europe during COVID with all the camera equipment, no rest days, was intense. We had dinner with the producers for the show and they love what we're doing. So, we've signed off for the next season. We're gonna start filming for the next season, same time next year!
BUDS: Congratulations!
YANN: Thanks! So, we're just discussing where we wanna go next. I'm thinking: Central America and South America. It's a part of the world I've always wanted to see and I wanna utilize this show.... So, not only do I get to meet these beautiful communities, I get to experience parts of the world that I necessarily wouldn't be able to. I'm really excited. I've been enjoying this down time because I know next year's gonna get just as busy. So, I've turned off quite a bit. It's been a lot of relaxing, which I think I needed.
ADAM: Absolutely.
“I kinda want to be the person that I didn’t have when I was growing up as a young skateboarder.”
BUDS: Do you have queer friends that inspire you?
ADAM: Absolutely! Specifically because Yan is in the skate world, which tends to be quite hetero dominated, we, in this country, within the past couple of years made a very specific decision to surround ourselves with people that were of a like-mind, so to speak. We definitely wanted to foster more of a gay community around us. And I think within the last couple of years, we've actually done that in an amazing way. The people that we hang out with, the parties that we go to, the things that we involve ourselves in are interesting and forging a path that is less traveled here in Africa, specifically. One of the people that Yann worked with in the show has become a close friend of ours; Queasy, whos a drag queen superstar DJ
YANN: She's incredible. In episode one of the show, she's one of the creatives that we [feature] in one of the short stories. She puts me into drag for the first time and I take her for a skate lesson on top of Table Mountain.
ADAM: Honestly, to watch the whole thing was such a beautiful exchange because she had always wanted to access, you know, this hetero-dominated skate world, and Yann his feminine side. It was really beautiful to see where their overlaps were and what they could learn from each other. We strive for those kinds of situations. Our really close friends are, you know, somewhat alternative in the spaces that they occupy and they're proudly and uniquely...homosexual. *laughs*
YANN: I think the drag scene in general always inspires me. I think queer fashion inspires me. The ballrooms inspire me.
ADAM: What's super cool is that, and you wouldn't necessarily think, but ballroom [culture] has inspired a whole new generation of kids in Africa, specifically South Africa, to get into ball culture and the elements of vogue. The voguing and dancing and creative aspects of it, but also in a bigger way, the family aspects, especially because a lot of these people are coming from religious backgrounds. It's super cool to see people [making] these things happen for themselves and creating these communities in, in spaces that otherwise aren't necessarily conducive to it.
YANN: That’s definitely the queer scene here that inspires us.
BUDS: Yeah. Gorgeous explanation.
YANN: There is a trans skateboarder from Oakland that really inspires me, her name is Cher Strauberry. She's just doing the coolest. She's a punk rocker, she's creating the best music. And it's also Brian Anderson, who's an openly gay in New York at the moment. He's also, you know, paved the good way for conversation to be had about gay athletes.
BUDS: Yann, you're likely inspiring even young people now – I think a lot of people would say thanks to you too.
YANN: That's what I've kind of strived to do.
ADAM: It's amazing, man. Kids reach out to them all the time.
YANN: They do. I get messages all the time from kids who are coming out to their families. I kinda want to be the person that I didn't have when I was growing up as a young skateboarder. Like, I really had no one to look up to. I didn't really know what to do. That's why I like [the messages], if anyone wants to message me and ask me questions.
BUDS: And what inspired you to become a blonde?
YANN: Um, boredom… um…
ADAM: It looks good, right?
YANN: I even did my mustache and little bits of brow.
ADAM: I'm a sucker for blondes.
YANN: Adam loves, like, blonde Swedish men, so I was like, listen, I'll live off the fantasy for you. I’ll toy with it - also, hair goes back, you know? I don't have any obligations to be in front of the camera anytime. So, I'm just experimenting, having fun.
ADAM: We also live above a hairdresser.
YANN: And she’s my friend, so she calls me and she's like, “Hey, let's, let's do something fun.” So I was like, fuck it, go blonde,
BUDS: I thought you might be breaking your programming - having a Britney breakdown or something.
YANN: One of the first things a friend said to me as he saw me was, “Are you okay, like mentally?”
ADAM: I mean, you're going through a big shift down, you know?
YANN: I know, it was half experimenting, half break down.
BUDS: This summer, I had an amazing queer-psychedelic experience at Honcho Campout in Pennsylvania. It’s a one-of-a-kind, independently run music festival with a great population of open minded people. Do you guys have good experiences with psychedelics in nature?
YANN: For us, when we take LSD together, we are always on the same page and we tend to thrive as a couple on LSD. We'll take it at a festival or around friends, and for me, it's like, we laugh a lot together; it's like medicine.
ADAM: Apart from the substance or drug itself, I think that's a key to our relationship; we laugh so much together.
YANN: I think LSD kinda heightens that as well. So, it's definitely made our bond stronger.
ADAM: In many ways it accesses the core of what you are, but then feeling really comfortable with that and kind of expressing yourself purely.
YANN: A friend of mine, Yanik, who I actually used to date back in the day, made a lifetime supply of DMT. He befriended a shaman that works in the Peruvian jungles and they brought enough ingredients to South Africa to make like a lifetime supply. So, every month we'd go on these little hikes or adventures with them and we'd have these rituals.
ADAM: Yeah, that was a really profound time. We were almost, I wouldn't say recreationally, but we would, specifically, on a weekly or monthly basis, go somewhere amazing and sit and meditate and smoke DMT.
YANN: These were like warm hugs from the universe. If we went on these adventures, these DMT hikes, I would feel good afterwards for about a month straight.
ADAM: It sounds cliche, but it's like, you'd have all the answers, even though you don't necessarily have the answers. You’d be at ease with maybe not having the answers – and definitely a lot of clarity in mind. It’s definitely bonded us, especially with DMT, which is not the most social substance and you don't really, typically experience it together. But we’ve had moments where we'd smoke simultaneously and Yann would be lying on my lap and I would feel his heartbeat through his body and his pulse beating through me and, at the risk of sounding like a total hippie, it was amazing. Really special moments like that. We took San Pedro in the desert together and watched a sunset that felt like it was eternal
YANN: *laughs*
ADAM: We’ve definitely experimented with a few psychedelic substances. For Yann’s 21st birthday, he took his parents to Africa Burn…
YANN: They asked me what I wanted to do, “Should we hire out a bar for you, do you want friends there, family?” And I was like, listen, I want the whole family to take mushrooms with me on my 21st, in the desert. So,I forced them to buy both my sisters and themselves tickets to this festival. They came with me and on my birthday, I gave my mom her first gram of magic mushrooms ever and my dad's first gram of magic mushroom. I wited for all of them to ingest them and then I just ran into the desert. I was like, “bye!”
BUDS: Oh my god.
YANN: And my parents ended up having the best time of their lives! And since then, they've been really curious about psychedelics! We've taken mushrooms as a family now since then, about four times; once on Christmas, which was a very interesting Christmas. We all ended up on the beach, like butt-naked for the day, which was really funny. At this point in time, my parents weren't really doing well with their marriage. They were fighting a lot and I had seen what psychedelics have done for our relationship and how it just makes bonds stronger. So, my initial plan wasn't, you know, to just watch my parents tripping. It was for them to figure some things out. And it did! It was like a leveler. I think it kind of stripped away the ego a little bit. It's so crazy. I just feel like, you know, psychedelics are that powerful, they can kind of just remind people to let go of things and live and breathe and relax.
ADAM: It's definitely not a constant thing, but something that, if you set your intentions on it and create the spaces and moments for it to happen, it can really be beneficial to you in a physical capacity, but also mental capacity.
BUDS: Have you ever had something you would consider a ‘bad trip’?
ADAM: The thing is, if we ever do these things, we do them in environments that are conducive to doing them, you know? We are responsible about it and kind of like to make sure that we are gonna have the best time possible. But, yeah. I'm sure we have, but typically, I mean, I'll speak for myself, I don't like to like use the term ‘bad trip’ because I feel like if something is coming out of you that's not agreeing with you, I guess you're not in the right headspace. You can't necessarily blame substance on that. You kind of have to look at what your head space was and what you were going through.
YANN: I just feel like the substance is trying to show you something. So, even that ‘bad trip’, is like a lesson. I've had really, really bad trips on mushrooms before, and it's only ever been mushrooms. And so I'm very hypersensitive to them. I got stuck in a time loop once that felt like forever and I couldn't talk and I couldn't ask anyone for help; it was a really scary experience and it felt like it lasted a lifetime and then the next morning when I eventually could go to sleep, but I woke up, it was an experience I'll never forget, but I feel like it kind of had to happen.
I was in the closet at this time. And that was part of a few events that led up to me coming out. It was just realizing how unhealthy I was on the inside by keeping all this like pressure in. The bad trip had to happen for the next bad trip to happen for the next bad thing to happen. And then eventually I was just like, dude, I can't do this anymore. What happens if I get struck by lightning and I never told anyone that I was gay?
BUDS: I'm sure you're probably getting excited now that the weather's changing – to be outside again.
ADAM: Cape Town in summer is amazing. It's the place to be, honestly. Everyone from Europe comes down here, it's almost too much. It's overwhelming the amount of, um, scheduling that needs to happen. It's not just parties and stuff. It's also the season for a lot of work and job stuff. It's very much like a model city.
YANN: We're moving into a new house.
ADAM: Yeah, since we last spoke, Yann has become an uncle and myself by proxy and we're moving into a giant new house with another couple and their dog. A couple that we love and we kind of are connected with in a deep way. We call it, like, “a love square.”
YANN: We’ve managed to kinda fall in love with this couple and vice versa and then they found this house and they wanted to share it with us.
BUDS: Really love that image of this kind of a new kind of family structure that feels very natural to you guys.
YANN: We’ll send photos as soon as we’ve moved in. It's a perfect house for entertaining as well. It's a big reason why we also wanna move in, because Adam's a really good cook and loves entertaining.
