Part One
Establish the core tension: human vs. dog
You want me to make us feel safe?
First, there was just the human with a desire to submit, not to just to a man or God, but to a world where he could be both author and actor. The human took that desire and gave it a name: Magnus, a creation of human ingenuity.
And on the night of the Midwest Rubber Contest, stage lights illuminated a shiny, oiled-up Magnus who stood next to the other contestants. An audience of pups and their handlers and creatures who sat in packs filled the Leather Archive Museum, waiting to see who'd be announced as their next ambassador.
The ambassador is selected based on their score in the categories of: stage presentation, audience vote, fantasy, judges interviews and on-stage interviews.
Magnus, a self-identified dinopup, was asked publicly during his on-stage interview, "How will you make black, trans, and queer people of color feel more welcomed in this space?"
That question broke the veil separating the production of the fetish weekend and the real world. The illusion of duality was broken, and Magnus was not just a dog or a dinosaur, but a black man, in a predominantly white fetish competition, asking how he, a minority, would address an issue that effects him.
This question took him to the floor of the restroom where he slammed and locked the door shut. While sobbing on the ground with the pressure of vulnerability and visibility weighing him down and he sat questioning what caused his uproar in emotions.
He still won the competition and was named Midwest Rubber 24. And this answer to the question? "I exist mostly in very queer spaces, so when asked how I'd make trans folks, women, and people of color feel welcome, I realized that's me and my friends you're talking about. It's a different perspective than someone wondering how to include 'the other.' For me, it's, how do we feel comfortable here? That's a different question."
Midwest Rubber Contest is part of Chicago's Fetish weekend, whose vision is to "...cultivate a space and inclusive environment [where] contest can feel valued, supported, and empowered to be their authentic selves". Magnus journey to the stage, was a reconciliation of experiencing life through two-selves.
Part Two
The journey into becoming
We are all in the Multiverse of Magnus.
The human (unnamed) behind Magnus creates art in cycles of five years. They moved through mediums of video and sculptures and their most recent and current cycle is, performance and creative writing, with Mangus, and their book at the center.
This tension between the and search for a true self were documented in Magnus's untitled, ongoing book. As he was writing the book he "wrote out the traits and characteristics for each character." Which later became "a reflection of the different expressions of self [Magnus] that I have and what it means to go back and forth between them."
According to the book's lore, Magnus and his sibling, who represented his "human" side, were on a journey to find the source of their powers. At the time of the interview, only two chapters were completed, but the entire story was outlined — and one character was determined to die (he did not tell me which character though, he said that was a surprise.)
Although the Magnus has become somewhat synonymous with his fetish and kink expression, Magnus expressions stretches across queer and art spaces. For him he enjoys connecting with people "who are mostly just different from the norm".
His expression of Magnus is expansive, and contextual to his fashion choices, friends, and setting, but there's a always a little pup and dinosaur energy in him he say, "sometimes I am dinosaur, sometimes I am not. Sometimes the armbands make me feel more like a spinosaurus than a triceratops, or maybe more godzilla than dinosaur. it just varies and changes"
Each piece of clothing and performance, adds on to the last, essentially creating Mangus in real time. His dinopup hat has carried him throughout his five-year Magnus cycle, and his pup mask was one of the first physical manifestations of Mangus. And the latex? Well, Mangus says he just likes tight, shiny things.
In collaboration with nightlife performers Boo Boo Kitty Fuck and Finn, Mangus created Tailz queer pet party rave, a place where POC kinksters and club kids could play. His friends and communities contributed to what he informally calls, the "Multiverse of Magnus".
Denied the call
He was an educator, what if one of his students found his instagram online? What would they think of their teacher wearing latex and a three foot long cock cage? The cockcage is a reference to his performance at Cage Fight, where he and his friend, and Tailz cofounder, Bobo Kitty Fuck, performed as agent cats and dogs.
After going through a mountain of material he'd created throughout his art cycle. There was a half-formed magic system, and what seemed to be an infinite collection of self-reflection notes, but prose, and no book.
When asked to present a piece of his art, Magnus stumbled to find something coherent to share with others. To make sense of his musings, he slipped into a four-month period of re-reading years' worth of his somewhat scattered writing. During this period, he stumbled upon the list of questions he had posed to himself a year before asking if he was ready to go on stage.
The calling.
One of Magnus' teachers, who was also a K-12 superintendent, helped ease some of his hesitation about marrying his passion for education and relationship to kink. Magnus unexpectedly opened up to his teacher about everything: the competition, the latex, the art — all of it.
To his surprise, the superintendent believed that Magnus's ability to navigate his authenticity and performance was a skill, not something to hide from. He told him that as a superintendent, he'd hire Magnus, as Magnus.
Part Three
Is the magic in the cum?
The untitled, ongoing book's magic system has one guiding principle set by Magnus: the magic will not be rooted in European belief systems.
In search of the origin of their characters' powers, Magnus looked to pre-colonial African spiritual practices, a time when spirituality was eroticized. Erotic, not strictly as sexual, but, as Audre Lorde defines it, "the measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings."
As queer people, if we reject the rigidity of sex heternormative sex based on reproduction, then our minds can expand to imagine eroticism in everything. Ordinary objects, such as latex, move beyond being just a material from a sap tree to a material with a meaning that causes people to travel across the world and form a community around it. It becomes a fetish by our ascription of meaning to it.
Western colonization has demonized fetishes that come from the community rather than institutional structures. This negative, and anti-Black connotation of fetish is embedded in the word's etymology. Fetish comes from the word "feitiço", first used by Portuguese traders to describe what they thought to be West Africans, "slavish" submission to "haphazardly chosen material objects."
The Portuguese described a "fetish" as any object arbitrarily imbued with imaginary powers. This idea was used to justify the enslavement of millions of Africans, whom Europeans claimed exhibited a "slavishness… an infantile submission of their inner autonomous will to the random determinations of the mechanism of natural events."
In his search for power, Magnus becomes a character built through worldbuilding, writing, and performance — one who defeats a villain waging war on the veneration of latex, mirroring the Portuguese travelers who called such devotion fetich and preached monotheistic religion.
In Magnus' world, once the source of power becomes reimaged, much like science fiction, no human condition becomes immune to examination. With a magic system not rooted in hegemonic knowledge imposed on bodies, Magnus became free to reimagine relationship structures, his sense of self, and everyday interactions. He began to process his emotions through his own invented magic system.
As a pup, he's able to join a pack or engage or call someone "dad dog," which ultimately proves he can "relate to someone on a different type of relationship that's structured differently from a strictly romantic sexual relationship." The options for connections are as infinite as the Multiverse of Magnus.
Uniform kinks aren't sexy. They are dangerous.
Latex has power because Magnus and hundreds of kinksters around the world give it power. Uniforms have power because millions of people around the world recognize the aesthetic material and attribute meaning to it. Both are objects of transformation. Latex transforms the body into a glossy surface, erases identity, and renders the wearer a projection of worldbuilding fantasy.
Uniforms attempt to strip the individual of their own power in order to become a mindless agent of the state who follows commands. Both are objects we venerate and imbue with power, but Magnus found a way to get his power from pleasure and the erotic, not from Uncle Sam. Who then is the real "slavish" individual, the one who concisely submits, or the one who submits through propaganda and then performs acts of violence?
Magnus' kink journey resurfaced. Days when the human educator challenged the blissful ignorance that whiteness affords. In his words, "In spaces that are mostly white or full of cis men, people don't always like being challenged, and I love challenging people. I started keeping things to myself for a while. This moment [Midwest Rubber] felt like a return to me, saying what I feel again. It took a lot to get back there."
He also shared, "I was tweeting a lot about my opinions, and people would block me. It would be funny, because at events people would flirt with me and then they'd be like 'let's add each other on social media' and when I would type my name on their phone, it would say I was blocked."
The final performance.
On the second weekend of October 2025, and if the prophecy rings true, the final year of Magnus at the cycle, hundreds of people from around the world made the pilgrimage to Chicago to reconvene with friends, attend workshops, and see the latest innovations in latex fashion.
For his performance, Magnus came running out with a huge cutout of a penis locked in chastity. An evil supervillain followed him out and declared war. She wanted to ban latex forever. Magnus had to use his superpowers to save her, so he pulled out a huge wand massager and vibrated his penis until he ejaculated. A huge load of cum came spraying out, cementing the supervillain to the ground, and saving the day.
That skit was more than erotic storytelling; it was the presentation of a fully embodied character, and a call-back to five years' worth of performance art and creative writing. It was an invitation into the multiverse of Magnus.
Magnus returned to the Dinohat and paired it with a pup mask, and the dinopup was born. The Dinopup became part of a pack of other pups who made up a dress for Abiheet. The same Abigheet who was the supervillain in his MRI performance. They redid that same performance for his Midwest Rubber performance.
Magic made real.
Magnus was able to show veneration for objects, but he also found his power in veneration for his ancestors, which allowed him to navigate time and memory in a unique way. In 2023, before he began competing as the character Magnus, he unfortunately lost his grandmother.
I want to share this part of the interview directly from Magnus.
"She passed in 2023, the year before I did the fetish performance. I'd never come out to her. I was processing what it means to show veneration for someone when there's this… this complexity. How do you show veneration for someone who's also caused harm?
I was processing my emotions through that consideration, and it ultimately became the first chapter of my book because, in that chapter, I basically meet her in a dream. The dream world is supposed to be where the spirits of the living and the dead can come together."
The book, after four years, Magnus had only written two chapters, but he created a world where he was able to meet his grandmother again. He never came out to his grandmother, but he created a world where he could meet her in liminal space between life and death. He met her as Magnus.
He created a portal, a world that transcends time, space, and perhaps some of the Eurocentric ideologies that make it hard to love those we are closest to.
By the end, there was one?
At the start of this journey, there was just a human with a desire to submit. The human took that desire and gave it a name: Magnus, a creation of human ingenuity.
Magnus was a creation. A mask. A performance. Just like the human.
Magnus told me that one character will die at the end of his book, but he did not specify which. Now, at the end of the art cycle, I must ask…
Has the creation become more real than the person behind it?
This is a story as told by the drone ja.