Queer ga(y)ze and desire
in Flesh and Pink Narcissus
From World War II to the early 1970s, the port town of New York City created a liminal space extending from the Brooklyn Navy Yard piers all the way to Times Square in Midtown Manhattan nearly five miles away. The port town of New York City became a liminal space as an extension of the sea. The space of Times Square was itself a continuation of this liminality as people passed through, with men always coming and going. As the heart of the port town, Times Square allowed for a free exploration of vice and desire. This space was (and continues to be) constantly in flux with the movement of bodies, the ever-changing landscape as well as the ever-changing billboards and theatre marquees.[1][open endnotes in new window] In Times Square, through interactions on the street, in bars, hotel rooms and movie theatres; desire and masculinity became a performance among and for men. These performances were seen as queer not only because they were same-sex encounters but because many also fell into the realm of “deviant” sex work. Further, these interactions continue to eschew traditional labels and limits of desire and sexuality. Male hustlers performed masculinity both to elicit desire in others and as a way to secure power. Desire played out in this time and space in ways that are unique to itself, allowing men to engage in these performances of desire and masculinity while exploring and expanding their sexualities.
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| The closing titles for Pink Narcissus, which when released was presented as Directed, Produced, Photographed, and Written by Anonymous as James Bidgood took his name off the project. | The opening titles for Flesh scrolls across the screen much like the “zipper” in Times Square. |
The films Pink Narcissus (1971) and Flesh (1968) both portray gay-for-pay hustlers and their interactions with johns in New York City. Although both of these films are works of fiction, they creatively reflect queer histories of the city and more specifically of Times Square.[2] These films were marketed to gay male audiences and were mostly shown in the porn and arthouse cinemas like those found in Times Square at the time.[3]
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| Pink Narcissus director James Bidgood from the 1960s doing costume design. © Estate of James Bidgood, Courtesy of CLAMP, New York | Flesh director Paul Morrissey appears between Andy Warhol and playwright Tennessee Williams in 1967. Photo from Library of Congress collection. |
All of the encoded queerness of the films Pink Narcissus (dir. James Bidgood 1933-2022) and Flesh (dir. Paul Morrissey 1938-2024) and of their main characters (played by Bobby Kendall c.1945-? and Joe Dallesandro 1948- respectively) was not fully explored at the time of the films’ releases. Through a new reading of these films with an emphasis on the fluidity of queerness through a current queer lens, the full potentiality of their queerness can be further realized. This essay offers a fuller view of their connections to queer history, and through mapping these connections, to that of New York City.
Mapping queer histories
By looking at these texts, one can see how the embedded queer history of Times Square continues to live on even when hidden from plain sight. In tracing the history of the city, one can see how the city changes in each of these moments and how it is shaped by the queer players in its midst. I have created a map to show how these films depict and interact with the space of Times Square.[4]
The map delineates the greater Times Square area as marked by Ninth Avenue to the west and Third Avenue to the east, Fifty-ninth Street/Central Park to the north and Thirty-fourth Street to the south. This area marks not only the primary spaces with which these texts interact, but it also represents how the Times Square area radiates outward to encompass all of these adjacent areas. Times Square can be reached by a short walking distance from any of these locations, and its presence shapes the surrounding areas.
Author Samuel R. Delany, in his famous Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, explains,
“the Deuce—that strip of Forty-second Street that runs from Seventh to Eighth Avenue but (since it’s never been formally defined could be extended all the way to Ninth Avenue and even, say, as far as the Public Library just east of Bryant Park.”[5]
Additionally, “Forty-second Street” is often used as a synecdoche for Times Square, both in the literature and in everyday speech. This becomes especially important in the context of the film Flesh.
Unlike in other parts of the city where one can see aspects of a neighborhood’s past, parts of Times Square have been all but scrubbed clean of these traces. Porn theatres were razed to make way for family-friendly entertainment and commercialism often referred to as the “Disneyfication” of Times Square.[6] Yet these places and spaces are essential for our understanding of queer history at the time. Scholar and philosopher Marshall Berman wrote that in the 1980s some people were already nostalgic for the Times Square of 1970s while others for that of the 1940s.[7] The landscape was always changing—part of what contributed to the liminality of that space. Delany writes in 1999, “The temporal coastline of the Forty-second Street/Eighth Avenue area is still changing in its material visibility weekly, monthly.”[8] He explains:
“A presupposition of both pieces [Times Square Red and Times Square Blue] is that New York City has anticipated and actively planned this redevelopment since the start of the sixties. The demolition proper that began along Forty-second Street in 1995 and the construction that will yield, among other things, four new office towers and several new entertainment centers along both sides of Forty-second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue by 2005, are a culmination of forty years’ expectation and attendant real estate and business machinations, not to mention much concerted public disapproval and protest.”[9]
In various forms, these changes were already taking places and effecting the social landscape even at the time of these films. We often speak of the more recent changes to Times Square, but the space has been shifting for the past century.[10]
Queer theorists Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in “Sex in Public” explain,
“Gay men have come to take for granted the availability of explicit sexual materials, theaters, and clubs. That is how they have learned to find each other; to map a commonly accessible world; to construct the architecture of a queer space in a homophobic environment.”[11]
This essay too engages in the building of a queer geography, mapping out the importance of Times Square as a queer space. Geographer David J. Bell writes of the concept of geoperversion as “sex acts which mark out spaces and more importantly boundaries.”[12] He further explains that it is “the remapping of taken-for-granted landscapes and spaces explicitly by the uses of pleasure therein.”[13] Thus, in remapping Times Square with an eye to these spaces, this essay highlights the history of queer sex therein.
In these spaces in Times Square, cruising took place alongside hustlers working, and sometimes they overlapped. Delany speculates that
“while the lure of hustlers most certainly helped attract the sexually available and sexually curious to the area, a good 80 or 85 percent of the gay sexual contacts that occurred there (to make what is admittedly a totally informal guess) were not commercial.”[14]
Berlant and Warner similarly explain in the context of the queerness of Christopher Street (much further downtown),
“Not all of the thousands who migrate or make pilgrimages to Christopher Street use the porn shops, but all benefit from the fact that some do. After a certain point, a quantitative change is a qualitative change. A critical mass develops. The street becomes queer. It develops a dense, publicly accessible sexual culture.”[15]
Therefore, the development of these public sexual cultures creates and sustains queer spaces.
Geographer Larry Knopp demonstrates the appeal of such transient, liminal spaces such as Times Square,
“Social and sexual encounters with other queers can feel safer in such contexts—on the move, passing through, inhabiting a space for a short amount of time— and a certain erotic (or just social) solidarity can, ironically, emerge from the transient and semi-anonymous nature of such experiences.”[16]
He explains, “Cruising is not so much tied to a fixed site but is all about the flows of movement and passings.”[17] Knopp cites Nigel Thrift’s conceptualization of “‘places’ not as fixed ontologies but as ‘passings’ that are elusive, ephemeral and always in the process of becoming and disintegrating.”[18] Consequently, these passings are part of what creates the liminality of the space itself.
Map of Times Square area with key for sites in essay. Click here to see large.
Queer passings
My initial entry point into this research is through that of my interest in queer sailors and how they too traversed the liminal spaces of New York City as a port city including through Times Square. In both fictional and autobiographical accounts, the sailors on shore leave mixed with the men cruising these areas as well as the hustlers working these spaces. My work finds me near the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, and as I was beginning much of this research I found myself frequently traversing the spaces around Times Square to Hell’s Kitchen and back toward Bryant Park down to Thirty-fourth Street for my studies at the Graduate Center. While many New Yorkers view Times Square as a place to avoid in its current state because of its corporatization and the crowds of tourists, I was curious about what these spaces had looked like before—what the queer culture was like even before what Samuel R. Delany describes in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.
Through my initial research on Pink Narcissus and Flesh, I became interested in Young Physique and then other physique magazines especially through an exploration of sailor imagery. I learned about this whole underground culture of magazines both implicitly and explicitly catering to a gay clientele in the 1950s and 60s. Through this, I was pleasantly surprised to also find images of Joe Dallesandro in these same magazines, not yet knowing that this was how he got his start.
Honestly, there is a part of me that is hungry for all of the queer culture and history that I myself did not know growing up, and in some ways, this being a time period so rich with queer culture, but it being so far from my frame of reference made it all the more intriguing to me. As a genderqueer gay man, I long to connect to these rich legacies as a way to understand not only this history and current queer culture but also myself.
Performing desire and masculinity
My analysis of the films Pink Narcissus and Flesh is informed by queer film scholar Richard Dyer’s Now You See It: Studies is Lesbian and Gay Film (1990) as well as queer film scholar Thomas Waugh’s Hard to Imagine: Gay male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (1996).
Here and throughout this essay, I use the term “queer” drawing from queer theorists Lauren Berlant’s and Michael Warner’s essay “Sex in Public” (1998). They write,
“By queer culture we mean a world-making project,” and “making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation. These intimacies do bear a necessary relation to a counterpublic—an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation. They are typical both of the inventiveness of queer world making and of the queer world's fragility.”[19]
Through queer world-making, Times Square and the adjacent spaces became a counterpublic, though it was eventually pushed out of these spaces. Berlant and Warner continue, “In gay male culture, the principal scenes of criminal intimacy have been tearooms, streets, sex clubs, and parks."[20] This idea of “criminal intimacy,” which often takes place in public spaces, is also tied to the notion of “sexual deviance.” Sex work as well as queerness have long been viewed as a form of sexual deviance. As the main characters engage in sex work, I also draw upon scholar Emma Pérez to posit queerness: “deviant behavior has become a politicized queer identity in the twenty-first century.”[21] Art historian and critic Douglas Crimp writes, describing his work Our Kind of Movie on the films of Andy Warhol,
“I call my project, provisionally, ‘Queer before Gay,’ because I wish to reclaim aspects of New York City queer culture of the 1960s as a means of countering the recent homogenizing, normalizing, and desexualizing of gay life.”[22]
This essay then follows in a similar understanding of queerness through these films at their particular moment in history but also adds more recent conceptualizations to create a more complex and layered understanding of queerness. I am creating a renewed sense of queerness in my reading of these films together, building on the history.
In speaking of Times Square, Delany writes that his “polemical passion here is a forward-looking, not nostalgic, however respectful it is of a past we may find useful for grounding future possibilities.”[23] This essay too looks forward as it highlights the richness of our queer past. In this same vein, I look to writer Colton Valentine’s sentiment in the article “Against Queer Presentism”: “before the queer past can be reinvented or reimagined, it needs, simply, to be known.”[24]
At the time of the films’ releases, the terms “hustler” and “john” would have been commonly used terms for male sex workers and their clients, and these words are what are largely used in the literature about these films. This essay is in dialogue with these texts to engage them in/on their own terms. As historian George Chauncey explains, the term “trade” gets used for men who have sex with men, but do not necessarily identify as gay.[25] The term is often used when speaking about gay-for-pay hustlers, and sometimes trade is used with the descriptor “rough” when referring to especially masculine or dangerous men.
The term “gay-for-pay” (most often used in the context of gay pornography but here used in the context of street hustlers) implies that the men involved “would not engage in homosexual conduct were they not paid to do so.”[26] “Situational homosexuality,” as described by scholar Jeffrey Escoffier, entails certain homosexual acts between men being a result of “sexual behavior strongly conditioned by situational constraints” in examples of prison, being away at war or sea, as well as the economic necessity of sex work.[27] He argues that gay-for-pay falls into the category of situational homosexuality because of the economic necessity—that it is often a means of survival. The difference here I argue is the element of desire or how desire is situated. Situational homosexuality in these other instances still arises from sexual desire, if not for that particular person or body, then for sexual gratification. Whereas with gay-for-pay sex work, the hustler’s desire could be viewed as purely transactional: as a desire for capital. There is also the potential for the hustlers to be desired by their clients.
While I describe both Joe and Bobby as gay-for-pay hustlers, my queer reading of them and the films necessarily unsettles this term, I purposefully complicate the initial surface reading of these characters as simply gay-for-pay. In real life, actor Bobby Kendall was a gay-for-pay hustler. Joe Dallesandro as well as Kendall modelled for physique magazines, which were targeted to a gay male readership—often seen as another form of gay-for-pay work.[28] Directors James Bidgood identified as gay and Paul Morrissey as straight, and yet both of these films show room for expansive understandings of queerness and by extension their characters’ sexualities.
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| Many of James Bidgood’s images for Pink Narcissus appeared in Young Physique magazine as teasers for the film. This particular cover features Bobby Kendall from the film in his hotel room. | Joe Dallesandro posing in the physique magazine Mars in 1968 under the pseudonym Joe Catano. |
Pink Narcissus is a pink-hued erotic fantasyscape. James Bidgood directed Pink Narcissus and shot most of the scenes in his apartment near Times Square (on Eighth Avenue near Forty-seventh Street) over the course of seven years starting in 1963 with the film’s eventual release in 1971.[29] Film scholar Ger Zielinski writes,
“The film serves as a summa of the work that he had been doing for mail-order physique magazines, including Young Physique and Muscleboy—a confluence of heightened camp aesthetics and artifice applied to the athletic male body.”[30]
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| The opening titles for Pink Narcissus which features Bobby Kendall in another mythological role as the god Pan. | James Bidgood’s studio name Les Folies Des Hommes appears in the opening titles for Pink Narcissus. This is the name under which he published his physique photographs as well. |
The film embodies this over-the-top ethereal quality while highlighting the body of its protagonist, Bobby. Flesh is a “day in the life” film that is still very much steeped in fantasy. Flesh was written and directed by Paul Morrissey. The film was produced under the name of “Andy Warhol Presents” and premiered in 1968. While Pink Narcissus took over seven years to make, Morrissey has said, “‘Flesh was made on about six or seven weekends.’”[31] Among the implications of these distinct timelines, one way this can be seen in the production of the elaborate sets of Pink Narcissus in contrast to the bare sets and street scenes of Flesh characteristic of the hyperrealist style of Morrissey. Pink Narcissus also includes more nudity and overt sexual scenes including a tearoom encounter culminating with a biker drowning in a milky white substance, a dancer wearing several pearl necklaces that are stroked until orgasm with the pearls as ejaculate, not to mention Bobby and the many pantsless men on the street masturbating. Conversely in Flesh, there is a quick scene with a john and another scene reminiscent of Warhol’s Blow Job where the acts are alluded to but nothing is actually shown.
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| Again in the style of the Times Square news zipper “Andy Warhol Presents” scrolls across the screen marking it as Warhol production even as Morrissey was at the helm. | One of the many elaborate sets from Pink Narcissus. Here Bobby is shown on his stomach in the grass, which is part of a bigger “outdoor” set built by Bidgood in his Hell’s Kitchen apartment. |
