The Boys I Lost to Cocaine (Love Affair) is a wood panel work that reflects on intimacy, excess, and disillusionment within Milwaukee’s gay nightlife scene. Developed as part of a larger body of work for St. Kate, the piece emerges from a period when the artist was dating a go-go dancer and fully immersed in the city’s bar culture. That world offered connection, visibility, and a dense social network, but it was equally marked by drug dependency, blurred boundaries, and emotional volatility. Recreating a photograph taken inside a club, the silhouetted figures suggest a tentative negotiation between desire and distance, a will-they-won’t-they moment of intimacy multiplied outward. Installed and photographed in the woods, the work marks a return to cruising and non-monogamy after the relationship’s collapse. The forest becomes both refuge and reckoning, a space of homecoming that acknowledges loss while confronting the deeper, darker undercurrents of queer social life.