Just being friends with people now for over 15 years, you realize what we all came out of. What we came out of was the intense feeling of growing up. It sounds kind of cliché, but it's true.

I'm not going to hide behind anything.

I slowly began making a few photos with animals over the years, and I liked how people reacted to them. When I would have the animals on set, I'd notice the way the models would interact with them and there was so much true emotion that you rarely see between two human beings.

From 8 to 19, I was skateboarding every single day. That was my life. I worked at a skate shop. I watched skate videos.

I went through a pretty big David Bowie period when I was younger, and that has affected me profoundly in my life and my work.

The cool part about New York is that you can do that. You can talk to all the people you admire.

When I moved to New York, I was still in the closet.