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.”
