April 12, 2021, 5:02 a.m. ET
Bowen Yang: I met this group of friends mostly through social media and mutual friends, but I actually know Adrian from when we were both working at One Kings Lane five or six years ago. He and I kind of attuned ourselves to each other, the way that any Asian person, and specifically queer Asian person, will: “Oh, I see you.” And then the separate friendships converged at Bubble T, which was a novel concept back in 2017, a roving party inspired by and catering to queer Asian folks but also inclusive and open to anybody.
The last Bubble T we went to before things shut down was the Lunar New Year party in January 2020, and it was on a Saturday, so as soon as the “S.N.L.” cameras stopped rolling, I beelined it to Elsewhere, an event space in Bushwick. I hadn’t had a particularly good show that night, which sours your whole mood. You need some kind of coping salve, and Bubble T is a place to feel joyful and fun. You release all that self-examinati
Image
For the essays in this issue, we commissioned and chose works about friendship; the images are not meant as literal reflections of the text. “Mustafa” (2020), which is exclusive to T, was made by the New York- and Memphis-based artist Tommy Kha, who said: “This is part of an ongoing, lifelong body of work called ‘Return to Sender,’ for which I invite different people to kiss me and I don’t kiss them back. Not as fun of a project during a pandemic, but I still wanted to mark the moment. In the end, I only felt comfortable collaborating with people I know and trust people who are friends and it was so restorative to see them again.”Credit.Tommy Kha