Ben Mora Has Bedroom Eyes

Is Ben Mora the leftist Andy Cohen? “You could say so,” he purrs while chewing a spearmint Zyn on Zoom. “I wouldn’t say no.” The suave, smartly-dressed provocateur has become something of a cult celebrity after launching his online game show “Interior Motives,” where he and two guests try to guess the age, sexuality, gender, and location of participants who submit photos of their bedroom. Guests have included Courtney Love, Hasan Piker, and Gregg Araki, to name just a few. Episodes are uploaded to YouTube and Patreon, and clips, especially those in which comedians roast gay people of all stripes, often go viral on Instagram. “I have always respected Andy Cohen and his kind of Machiavellian way of harnessing power,” says Mora, who prefers to facilitate rather than lecture. “It’s not like I have a vision board, [but] if I did have one, I think Andy Cohen would be on it.”Mora’s project is unique in the current online content landscape—he’s not interested in courting A-listers like Las Culturistas or StraightioLab. People like the game show, he explains, because they can see themselves as the main characters in their “shitty” lives. But that doesn’t mean the brave folks who submit their rooms to his investigations aren’t ribbed relentlessly; indeed, Mora has no qualms about stepping on the toes of his fellow lefty snowflakes.“I think you can bring a community together by tearing it apart,” he says. “The comments that I and the guests make often say much more about our respective communities than it does about the communities we are speculating on.”A sense of voyeurism is essential to the show. Mora and his team select grimy basement apartments without windows, expensive lofts with curated West Elm furniture, and kawaii-laden otaku attic rooms bursting with pink and pastels. Slowly, he and guests zero in on little tchotchkes, the kinds of details that may reveal someone’s sexual preferences or even their tax bracket. After all, not everyone can afford (or even desires) a bed frame. “I see it as just a real, true expression of the economic straits people are in,” Mora contends. “It’s not a coincidence that everyone under a certain age is a bit more barbed than their predecessors when it comes to things like housing.”“Interior Motives” is a rarity in a world that’s afraid of making fun of gay people at a time when their rights are under attack. But it is often true that gay guys love posters of pop stars, straight guys are terrified of bed frames, and trans women like expensive gaming consoles. “I try to do a pretty good job of getting an equal dose of the L, the B, the G and the T on the show,” says the 31-year-old Mora. “But it's like, so what? Why can't trans women have a messy room? Why can't gay guys be corny?” To be invited on his show, Mora says, guests must be able to “confidently call a chair transgender.”Courtesy of Interior MotivesSince Covid and the events of 2020, the online influencer field has skyrocketed. TiKTok and OnlyFans are a part of daily life. The bedroom, then, has become the primary setting for many young people’s lives, a stage on which to express their sense of self. And as the physical distance between cities collapsed, people began lining up for the opportunity to be skewered by C-list celebrities and their gay best friends.One stand-out episode of “Interior Motives” expertly pairs actress Ivy Wolk with Courtney Love. They joke about vaping, Hasan Piker, and Lana Del Rey as Love asks questions about gay lingo. The dwelling in question, Wolk quipped, looked like it belonged to someone who murders women. But the person to whom it did belong later crossed paths with Wolk and cornered the actress. “Nobody, not even my exes, has ever spoken about me like that,” she said. But Wolk shrugged it off. “I was like, ‘Well mama, you submitted!” She calls Mora “a facilitator and aggregator of crazy people.” Hari Nef, meanwhile, put it this way: “You can get away with being mean if you’re very funny. The best way to do this is to target the things you love.”Before his web series took off, Mora was probably best known as the irreverent internet personality who was fired from his role as the Bernie Sanders campaign’s regional field director in Dearborn, Michigan for badmouthing candidates like Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren in a series of tweets. “Imagine having sex with a Warren gay,” he posted in the lead up to the 2020 election. Pete Buttigieg, he mused, “is what happens when the therapist botches the conversion.” These are the kind of queer reads he would later recycle on “Interior Motives.”“In some ways, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says of his termination.But Mora does feel he was betrayed by both the Democratic establishment and the Sanders campaign itself. By firing him, he says, the campaign aimed to distance itself from a Bernie Bro narrative that was becoming increasingly toxic. “What I imagine happened is some Dem loyalist psychopath who was following me screenshotted [my tweets] and sent them to Scott Bixby at The Daily Beast,” he says. After the article went live, a campaign associate called Mora and dismissed him. Still, Mora has “no regrets,” nor does he believe himself to be a victim of that era’s so-called cancel culture.“I was justifiably fired for saying some horrible things,” he concludes. Besides, his transgressions look trivial in comparison to the kind of rhetoric being laundered by the right. “Girl, they have all of those Republican staffers literally sending Nazi shit to each other in all of their internal chats.”Naturally, Mora moved to New York City to start a podcast. “That’s just what you do,” he says. He became the straight man on “Seeking Derangements,” a political comedy talk show with Hesse Denni and Jacques Gonsoulin. He was lying in bed hungover in his small Chinatown apartment when the concept for “Interior Motives” came to him in a TikTok featuring “a desperate person in the middle of nowhere having a mental breakdown.” At the end of the video, he remembers, the camera flipped to expose a butch lesbian in a rural area. “I was like, ‘Oh, this makes so much sense.’ Then I put my phone down and looked around my own room and realized how visibly gay it was. From there, it just kind of came together.”He came up with the format: two guests, one hint, and one non-bedroom image of an intimate area—usually a fridge, since most people’s bathrooms are extremely gendered. Geography, Mora says, allows for interesting discussions about competition between cities and architecture. “You can tell an apartment in New Orleans or you can tell [when someone] is a WeHo Gay with Lady Gaga posters everywhere.”Courtesy of Interior MotivesCourtesy of Interior MotivesNowadays, Mora often records episodes in his childhood bedroom in Des Moines, where he’s moved to help take care of his mom, who has cancer. “I don’t feel embarrassed living at home,” he says. “Intergenerational households are a social good.” Mora’s own room is “a little crunchy, a little earthy, and ultimately pretty lesbian.” There’s a lot of Latin America folk art and heavy wood. The walls are baby blue. He frequently sublets in New York, however, and says he finds the new Mayor inspirational. “I have so many friends who just got their rent frozen,” he tells me. “But as far as the rest of the country goes, especially in the Midwest, where I’m from, it’s horrible. I know people who are paying what I’ve paid to live in New York to live in Des Moines and Iowa City.”For most Americans, the dream of upward mobility or of buying a home is out of reach. Finding a decent, affordable apartment is the far more achievable goal, and they need it to feel like a cozy nest that reflects the whole spectrum of their life. For some that means rainbow flags; for others, it means a giant poster of Zendaya on a horse.Among those Mora hopes to recruit for future episodes of his show are a few notoriously judgmental gay men: John Waters, Ross Matthews, and Carson Kressley, whose groundbreaking TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy shares DNA with “Interior Motives.”“It’s kind of this fundamental concept of gay people breaking into your house and being really, really vicious towards you,” Mora jokes. As he said in a recent Substack interview: “I think gay people, or even just minorities of any kind, are raised to really understand how they present and how they’re perceived.”It’s this hyperawareness of perception and culture that queer and trans people utilize to construct their identity. It’s also a form of branding, whether we want to believe it or not. Everyone remembers the first time they realized their niche interest was actually a widely beloved phenomenon: reading Pitchfork, listening to Fiona Apple, smoking American Spirits. Every piece of lingo, in-joke, and stereotype can be subsumed by the algorithm. ”Interior Motives" tries to hack the system with humor. It's a show, ultimately, for gay people who know how to take a joke. “Gay men love the sound of their own voices,” Mora reminds me. “That’s because they’re the only ones who do.”