< PreviousJack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 112Jim Stewart stopped in front of the Castro Theatre. It was filled with teenage boys. “Cocksucker!” they shouted out the open windows, then squealed their tires and were gone. The ticket line was silent. “Oh dear,” the elderly woman said, “I wonder if they were referring to me?” The ticket line burst into laughter. Fassbinder’s Fox, although the main characters are gay, is more a film about working-class values versus upper-class values. It’s a film about the exploitation of love. The couple portrayed happens to be gay. Some thought the film homophobic, some thought it too pessimistic. Most Fassbinder films offended some- body. It was New German Cinema. If burgeoning Political Correctness was finding Lina Wert- müller not the feminist it had hoped she was, and the gay Rainer Werner Fassbinder not gay enough, Political Correctness was absolutely horrified by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Italian film director’s battered body was found in Ostia, the ancient deserted seaport of Rome, in 1975. He had been murdered by a young male prostitute. Many thought the youth had not acted alone, and that Pasolini’s murder was politically motivated. Pasolini had enraged the Vatican in 1964, with his film The Gospel According to St. Matthew. He enraged the Church plus nearly everyone else with the last film he made, Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom. Based loosely on the work of the Marquis de Sade, but set in the Republic of Salo in northeastern Italy during the waning days of Mussolini, Salo is roughly filmed in four segments similar to those in Dante’s Inferno. Nine young men and nine young women are sadistically- sexually exploited for the pleasure of their captors, the reigning men of power in Salo: the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President. One of the most egregious scenes involved the forced feeding of human feces. Elliot Stein, a freelance writer for The Village Voice and a friend of Luc’s in New York, told me he had flown to Rome when Salo was being filmed to interview the young actors. He was curious if they felt “damaged” by the Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues113 scatological scenes. While he chatted with them on the set, they continued to snack on the faux-feces of chocolate and nuts. Stein concluded they did not feel “damaged.” When first released, Salo was banned in most places through- out the world. In San Francisco the tiny Cento Cedar Cinema, near Geary and Polk Streets, had the courage to screen the film. To the shock of some viewers, they found themselves turned on by certain aspects of the sadistic sex scenes. Paul Hatlestad, a friend of mine who saw Salo at the same time I did, returned from the lobby with popcorn and sat in the wrong row. Thinking he was sitting next to Steve Barnett, the man he came with, Paul reached over and placed a man’s hand on his hardening cock to indicate he was turned on by the film. But it wasn’t Steve’s hand. Steve Barnett thought it was a great pickup move. One night I picked up a man at Allan Lowery’s Leatherneck Bar at 11th and Folsom. I brought him back to The Other Room. After we finished our fantasy—I forget now if it was Coach & Jock or Frat Boy & Pledge Master—we started talking film. Wakefield Poole’s name came up. “Have you ever seen any of Poole’s films?” I asked. “I sure have,” Paul said. “I’ve only seen Boys in the Sand,” I said. “I’d love to see some of his other work, especially Bijou or even Bible.” Bijou, starring Big-Dick Bill Harrison, had been critiqued as having a certain sexual film noir quality about it. Wakefield Poole’s Bible was his only soft-core straight film. “I might be able to arrange something,” Paul said. I wasn’t quite sure what Paul meant. We exchanged phone numbers and drove down to Castro Street for early morning cocktails. We slipped into The Elephant Walk, a bar at 18th and Castro that had a beautiful large stained glass work over the bar. It was of a charging elephant, reminiscent of the Rock Hudson- Elizabeth Taylor film of the same name. It somehow survived the cops’ revenge attack on the Castro during the White Night Riots. I found out later it was the work of Michael Palmer, my roommate for a while up at the Russian River.Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 114Jim Stewart It was close to two weeks before Paul called. We both had been busy. “Would you like to come over Friday night to see a Wakefield Poole film?” he said. “Absolutely,” I said. I had read about Wakefield Poole’s films, read how this past-his-prime ballet dancer had moved behind the camera and turned gay porn into art-film-chic that even straights were lining up to see. Paul gave me an address out on Fell by the Panhandle near Golden Gate Park. The place was the top two floors of a restored Victorian. To reach it you climbed a high narrow interior stairway past the first-floor apartment with its 15-foot ceilings. Paul was at the top of the long staircase. So were about 20 other hot men. I knew a few of them. Most I didn’t. “Wake’s ready to start if everybody will come upstairs,” Paul said. Had Paul meant Wake as in Wakefield Poole? He had. I grabbed a cold one from the kitchen sink loaded with ice and Olys and headed up the last flight of stairs to the attic screening room. I saw Allan Lowery and sat down on the floor next to him. The film was about to start. Allan held a small brown bottle up to his nose and inhaled deeply. Poppers, I thought. He handed me the bottle. Not poppers. Coke. Good coke. I maneuvered the small bottle to refill the special cap and snorted. I did it again. Once for each nostril. I handed the treasure back. On the large screen I saw a handsome young man packing things into boxes. I knew that guy. I’d had him over for a session when I still lived on Noe Street. In fact, I had taken some self- portraits with my fist up his ass. It was Terry Weekly. The screen credits called him Tom Wright, but it was Terry. Near the end of the film, Peter Fisk, the hot actor with the tattooed forearms, pulled his arm and a stainless steel ball out of Terry/Tom’s ass. Up on the screen, it rolled across the floor of the empty apartment and into the corner. We had just been treated to a private screening of Wakefield Poole’s new film, Moving. The lights came back on. Barely. Men had started to couple- up, or triple-up, recreating some of the scenes we had just watched on the screen. I found myself with a lithe young redheaded dancer Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues115 from Eugene, Oregon, I had wanted for a long time. David’s nipples were a perfect titty-pink, his ass a dusty rose. His freckled supple body could bend in any position I wanted it to. I came back to the house on Fell Street. Several times. I finally met Wakefield Poole in person. He was Paul Hatlestad’s lover. One night I saw all of Wakefield’s films. There were just the two of us in his attic screening room. Fueled by Wake’s free coke, the films went on forever. What a divine obsession. Wake would stop the film, we would each snort a couple of lines off an antique mir- ror, then he would tell me how he had shot the preceding scene. Wake offered me work on Mirrors, a new film he was shoot- ing. As carpenter, I made a three-panel folding screen for Mylar mirrors and rear-projection-screen inserts. Cal Culver, aka Casey Donovan, the star of Boys in the Sand, was filmed jacking off in front of the mirrors. Partway through the filming the mir- rors were replaced with the rear-projection panels. Projected onto the panels was prefilmed footage of blond Lewis deVries, as Cal’s chauffeur, jacking off. The Mylar mirrors didn’t work the way Wake wanted. As photographer, I shot stills of Cal Culver during the film- ing. I learned that Culver could go all night without losing his hard-on and then cum-on-demand. I also got to take home the white boxer shorts that Culver had worn during the filming. They proved a great turn-on prop in The Other Room. As a bonus, Lewis deVries agreed to a three-way at my place. Unfortunately Mirrors was never released. Two years of high school Latin did not prepare me for the film Sebastiane. The sound track was Latin. Fortunately Derek Jarman’s version of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom-by-arrows had English subtitles. Artwork depicting the bound arrow-pierced nearly-naked body of the third-century saint has been the stuff of homoerotic fantasies for centuries. Not just in the West either. Japanese author Yukio Mishima, in Confessions of a Mask, not only wrote of climaxing over a copy of a 17th-century Guido Reni depiction of the bound and pierced saint, but he also posed and was photographed as the saint himself. Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 116Jim Stewart Although the film caused riots in some cities, when it opened at the Cento Cedar in San Francisco it did not disappoint. The naked Roman soldiers with full-frontal nudity and erections were far superior to anything in the Hollywood gladiator genre of the 1950s. If you liked gladiator movies when you were young, you were in ecstasy over Sebastiane. Shortly after Luc and I had seen Sebastiane, we were going through the Pink Section of the San Francisco Chronicle looking for a good film. “Here’s one,’ Luc said. Robert Gets His Nipple Pierced. “Can’t imagine what that’s about,” I said. “Anything playing with it?” “Yes!” Luc said, all excited now. “Salome!” “Is that the John-the-Baptist’s-head-on-a-platter Salome?” I said “The very same. They’re playing at the Art Institute up on Chestnut.” We were off. Robert Gets His Nipple Pierced proved to be a short, hand-held camera documentary of Robert Mapplethorpe getting his nipple pierced. Definitely an underground experimental film. “Who’s Robert Mapplethorpe?” I whispered to Luc when it was over and they were switching projectors in the film depart- ment’s screening room. We were seated on folding chairs. No popcorn. No jujubes. Not even espresso or seed cakes. Luc shrugged. The main feature started. Salome, a 1923 silent film, is an early art film shot in the United States. It is based on Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name, a loose interpretation of John the Baptist and King Herod’s daughter. The film sets matched the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations in the printed version of the play. Legend has it that the entire cast was either gay or bisexual. At one point, as Salome approaches John the Baptist, the title for the silent action reads “Kiss me on the lips.” The man of God refuses, and is sent off screen to lose his head. When his severed head is brought back on a silver charger, Salome lifts the lifeless head up by its hair and holds it next to her pussy. “Now kiss me Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues117 on the lips” reads the title across the bottom of the screen. Luc was in Paris, visiting his mother, when Jack Fritscher brought Robert Mapplethorpe to San Francisco. I first met Mapplethorpe with Jack at Gene Weber’s place, thanks to Max Morales, a friend of Gene’s. Later the same night, on a party circuit, Max and I ran into Jack and Robert at a big blowout in Wakefield Poole’s attic. Who would have guessed this young Manhattanite-in-leather would become the heavyweight photog- rapher who would soon scare the bejesus out of God’s right-wing bullies? Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 118Jim Stewart Jim with Cigarette 1977: auto-photograph by Jim Stewart at 766 Clementina Street. Chuck Arnett, David Hurles, Bill Essex and others once lived in building across the street, seen out the window.Next >