Ben Mora arrived in New York this summer with nothing more than a carry-on, and he has no plans to decorate his sublet: a monklike cell with a full-size bed, a fan, and bare white walls. But Mora thinks that if you look close enough, you can tell this is the room of a 31-year-old gay man in the city — at least if you’re familiar with prewar layouts and online algorithms. “You get male immediately. Cis male,” he says. The tells are no hangers in the closet, balled-up socks shoved into a corner, and a suit thrown over a floating shelf. As for gay: “The beauty products would probably give it away,” he says, pointing to serums on a closet shelf. Then there’s his $70 water bottle — matte black, minimal, and vaguely masculine but less straight dude than a sun-faded Gatorade bottle refilled from the tap would be. “That is not a silicone straw; that’s a silicone fixture on top of a stainless-steel straw,” he adds. “Gay.”
This is Mora’s shtick, a bit he turned into the celebrity-studded online game show Interior Motives, which debuted last summer on YouTube. It now has 120,000 subscribers on that platform, more than 5 million views, an international version, and a Patreon, where fans pay $7 per month for extra, R-rated episodes and the chance to play against one another live. Contestants join Mora on a recorded remote call to look at photos of three bedrooms and try to guess an owner’s gender identity, sexuality, age, and location. Submissions come in from across the country and are presented with an additional clue: an image of the inside of a fridge, a medicine cabinet, a car, a workplace, or an Instagram Explore page. The idea that our objects are actually legible in this way, Mora says, “is fundamentally stupid.” But certain guessers are surprisingly astute in ways that are mesmerizing to watch and occasionally informative. A poster of Zendaya may seem femme but actually suggests masculinity to the artist Juliana Huxtable, who notes that the actress has “really intense futch energy.” In a messy, mattress-on-the-floor room with a Swans poster, actress Ivy Wolk doesn’t spot enough books for an incel, and Courtney Love agrees. The show’s first homegrown star is Marlou Gabumpa — known to fans by her handle, Marlizzle — a 26-year-old bisexual trans woman in Seattle who has won eight fan games back-to-back. Recently, she correctly identified a 20-something cis gay man by his chrome mushroom side table.
Mora edits each episode himself, often while sucking on pouches of Zyn. The use of emoji captions, satirical sponsorships, canned-applause sound effects, and an intro with retro graphics gives the show its particular unserious tone, and Mora as a host is self-effacing. “I’ve invented a way to monetize making fun of gay people’s bedrooms,” he joked on the first episode to go viral. He tells me he believes the show’s success stems from how it “circumvents some moralizing that usually happens with identity, which has become this site of deep preciousness — and a minefield where you can’t really joke about these things publicly.”
The show launched from Mora’s childhood bedroom in Des Moines, Iowa, where he had moved to spend time with his mother, who has bile-duct cancer. “For full transparency, my room is completely filthy right now,” he said in one episode, turning the camera toward a dirty plate on a chair and clutter on a desk. But the space also looked warm and woodsy; the home was partly built by his father, a contractor from Costa Rica, which explains the Latin American folk art. When we meet in July at Mora’s sublet, he describes his family’s aesthetic as “earthy, crunchy, NPR. Like someone who listens to world music and is just critical of liberalism enough to not donate to UNICEF.” Mora says he was a difficult teenager — a heavy weed smoker who sometimes bitched at his parents. When he was only 17, he moved to Denver, where he worked in restaurants and as a maid. Meanwhile, his posts on Twitter — which the writer Steven Phillips-Horst, his follower turned friend, describes as “cultural-signifier Mad Libs” — started getting attention in certain dirtbag-left corners of the internet.
When, in 2019, it seemed like Bernie Sanders had a real chance at the presidency, Mora felt moved to come home and volunteer for the campaign, and he proved so effective at door knocking that the team hired him full time; he went on to organize events focused on service workers in Des Moines. After the caucuses, he was sent to Michigan. It wasn’t long before a reporter got screenshots of Mora’s tweets (at the time, his account was private). Mora had called for Hillary Clinton to be “catapulted off the planet,” wrote that Elizabeth Warren looked “like shit,” and compared Amy Klobuchar to “her name: pained, chunky, confused origin/purpose.” But perhaps the most biting vitriol was directed at Pete Buttigieg, whom he described as “what happens when the therapist botches the conversion” and said “combines the natural devious disposition inherent in gay men with a bloodthirsty careerist drive.” He was immediately fired.
The revelations made Mora a symbol of toxic Bernie-bro culture to a certain set of Democratic media types. But they also made him famous. While some strangers sent hate mail, others donated to what he calls his “Venmo severance package,” endorsing his right to free speech or simply sponsoring his shitposting. He flew to New York to visit a friend in March 2020 and arrived as “an instant microcelebrity,” as he tells it, with invites to appear on podcasts. That month, he also launched his own — Seeking Derangements, a loose, chatty show begun with friends. Last year, he was doomscrolling, hung-over, and came across a video of a messy room on TikTok. Who is living here?, he thought, before finally catching a glimpse of the person. Mora didn’t save the video and couldn’t recall who had shared it, but he remembered the appeal of a space that makes you wonder who lives there. He tested the idea of turning that question into a game for his podcast. The response was instant. Less than a year in, Mora is earning enough to pay for a part-time producer, an assistant, and a graphic designer and to rent a co-working space on the Upper East Side.
The underlying politics of the show aren’t lost on Mora, who still considers himself a leftist. He opens episodes by asking contestants which object in their room might give away where they’re calling from, sometimes leading to discussions about bad landlords and forced moves. “The show is in some ways about the housing crisis,” he says. Submissions often come in from people in their 20s still living at home. One showed a room with a tree growing through it. An upcoming episode will feature someone who sleeps in their car. “People are living in the craziest rooms of all time,” he says. “And they’re fine with that being made fun of because it’s all just true. And we’re all suffering from it together.”
Mora likes to walk to work, sometimes through Central Park, and finds he doesn’t get recognized as often as he did in 2020. But he’s now in control of that attention. He gets so many requests from would-be contestants, some of them famous people, and curates the mix for chemistry. He’s careful about preserving the show’s unpretentious feel and saving screen time for the regular comedians, podcasters, and artists who gave early episodes their particular crackle.
In July, he had John Early and Kate Berlant on the show and posted a preview of the episode on Instagram. When Tajah Orr, a bisexual cis woman, saw the clip, she dropped her phone. She didn’t expect to be chosen, but that was her room with the rumpled red duvet and the prominent copy of Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama. She procrastinated actually watching, assuming she’d feel defensive. Instead, she felt detached: The photo wasn’t her room, exactly, and she wasn’t her room either. “In that moment, I’m having one of the most meta moments of my young-adult life,” Orr says. “Watching people talk about my room while I’m in my room.” She found herself watching along, for pleasure.
