copyright 2025, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media,
Jump Cut, No. 63, summer 2025

Queer ga(y)ze and desire in Flesh and Pink Narcissus

by Kel R. Karpinski

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.

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]

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.

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 it 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.

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]

The film embodies this over-the-top ethereal quality while highlighting the body of its protagonist, Bobby. Fleshisa “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.

Queer film heritage

We can see the influence of earlier queer films like Kenneth Anger’s (1927-2023) Fireworks (1947), Jean Genet’s (1910-1986) Un Chant D’Amour (1950) as well as Jack Smith’s (1932-1989) Flaming Creatures (1963) among others on both Pink Narcissus and Flesh. Film critic Dennis Demody, in a documentary on James Bidgood, even goes as far as to describe Pink Narcissus as “Cocteau with cock.”[32]

Thomas Waugh theorizes,

“This pair of opposites [queen-hustler] dominated both the fiction writing and the underground cinema of that transitional decade, from John Rechy to Jack Smith, with Warhol being one of the many artists, high and low, engaged in this iconography.”[33]

Waugh includes Flesh amongst these films that feature both hustler (Joe Dallesandro) and queens (Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis). Although Joe does not approach “swishing” queen, there is a softness to his masculinity that is often overlooked, which will be expounded on in later sections. The character of the hustler had made an earlier appearance in Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) My Hustler (1965), and the gay-for-pay hustler shows up in contemporaneous films Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Boys in the Band (1970), which saw wider audiences.[34] Likewise, Richard Dyer connects Pink Narcissus to this queer film heritage, including to Warhol himself, writing,

“The film has imagery from most phases of the underground: the sensitive young man, a visionary use of nature, intensified B-picture Hollywoodiana, hustlers and sailors… Stylistically, the use of 8mm blown up to 35mm gives the film both the iridescent colour of Anger and Markopoulos and the graininess of Warhol. The structure, oneiric, mythic, masturbatory, with a moment of terrible self-discovery towards the end, suggests the forties underground, but the looser, languorous shifts from one sequence to another also recall Flaming Creatures.”[35]

In addition to the imagery and themes of these films, they also share elements of audio montage. Scholar Juan A. Suárez writes that radio and television were “two formative influences on many 1960s underground filmmakers. But while filmmakers imitated the format of these commercial media, they subverted their implicit ideologies and contents.”[36] He points to the mock commercial in Flaming Creatures as well as the way the music in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) uses lyrics of “heterosexual teen love and longing” set “to homoerotic images.”[37] He explains,

“A central function of music in [Jack] Smith, the Kuchars, or Anger, for example, is to work as a coded message to be deciphered in conjunction with the image…In combination, image and sound evoke an unreal realm of fantasy and play.”[38]

We see these same elements of play and fantasy at work with the audio playing in both Pink Narcissus and Flesh. Suárez goes on to say,

“Sound-image juxtapositions in avant-garde cinema tend to work in this manner: they are conceptual rather than natural or organic; sound and music function less as emanations from the world of the image than as reflections or asides.”[39]

These audio intrusions and montage show up in both Pink Narcissus and Flesh. The idea that the sound-image juxtapositions function as a type of reflection becomes even more interesting when considering how the hustlers are reflecting their desire.

Through an analysis of the two main characters Joe and Bobby, in the films Flesh and Pink Narcissus (played by Joe Dallesandro and Bobby Kendall, respectively), I argue they create a performance of desire for their audience by making themselves the object of desire rather than being a subject of desire.[40] Through the creation of the self as an object of desire, Bobby and Joe find agency through their performances of desire. I apply a textual analysis in the tradition of Cultural Studies: I am more interested in how these texts can be interpreted by viewers rather than examining the directors’ intentions.[41] This method allows for more exploration of the queer possibility and nuance within these films.

Finally, both of these films engage in a dialectic about Times Square without actually ever showing Times Square itself. Pink Narcissus, with its alternate version of the space, plays with ideas about queer fantasy while still including cues to the actual Times Square. Flesh, by not including Forty-second Street, creates a narrative about Forty-second Street versus the neighboring areas of Bryant Park and Third Avenue by extension. Thus, by mapping these films onto the city, the hidden histories of queerness, still silently embedded into the city itself, come into view.

The gaze, identification and performing desire

In these films, through the characters of Bobby and Joe and their performances of desire, they turn the gaze back onto themselves thus subverting their own objectification. Through this inversion of the gaze, the hustlers perform their desire for the johns with a distinctively queer gaze or “ga(y)ze,” that it is neither a male nor a female gaze. Scholar June L. Reich posits,

“The language of performance, critical to the theoretics of postmodern bodies, usually constructs subject and object as spectator (reader) and performer (read) in a dualism that either forecloses or negativizes agentic possibilities.”[42]

Through the creation of the self as an object of desire, Bobby and Joe find agency in this performance of desire. In their interactions around Times Square, these characters explore their sexualities and queerness through these performances, creating space for more nuanced possibilities of queerness. This then shows how queerness can resist specific identifications to take on more fluid meanings.

Feminist scholar Laura Mulvey coined the term “male gaze” in her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Mulvey theorizes that the male gaze is created by the camera, representation and characters, and by the audience who receives it. She posits three “different looks” or gazes in cinema: “that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion.”[43] Women on screen are passively consumed by the active male for the pleasure of the male viewer and thus objectified.[44] Queer Studies scholar Alexander Doty explains that as Mulvey theorizes the gaze: “patriarchal masculinity leering at objectified femininity—writes homosexuality out of existence.”[45] Scholar D. N. Rodowick furthers expounds on this writing, “Mulvey discusses the male star as an object of the look but denies him the function of an erotic object.”[46] Mulvey’s theorization does not account for a same sex or queer gaze of any kind.

Scholars Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman write about the limitations of gaze theory as it has been traditionally theorized wanting “to suggest a ‘queerer’ or more fluid model of identifications, and consequently of the text.”[47] Similarly responding to Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze, Thomas Waugh writes,

“If heterosexual culture simplifies and rigidifies the dynamics of male subject and female object through the tyranny of gender difference, same-sex eroticism opens them up, rendering them ever more volatile.”[48]

He argues against the separation of subject and object that Mulvey describes as happening in heterosexual encounters instead describing a sameness or unity:

“Same-sex eroticism layers upon the individual erotic object choice the option of identification as well as voyeurism, project as well as objectification: we (often) want to be, we often are the same as the man we love.”[49]

Conversely, I argue that the characters in these films queer this dynamic between subject and object by flipping the script. They become themselves the object of desire for their gay male clients and thus for the audience. Clients are made legible as gay men, but through a queer reading, they too become more complex.

The characters portrayed by Bobby Kendall and Joe Dallesandro become themselves the object of desire for their clients, turning the gaze back onto themselves thus subverting their own objectification. The characters “Bobby” and “Joe” create the self as an object of desire, a form of empowerment in which they find agency in their performance of desire. Through this inversion of the gaze, that is neither a male gaze nor a female gaze, operating in these instances as a distinctively queer gaze or ga(y)ze. Bobby and Joe re-inscribe their own gaze, and thus their masculinity, onto themselves to create that performance for their clients and, by extension, for a queer viewing audience.[50]

Contemporaneous reviews of these films diminished the complexity and nuance of the characters’ sexualities, leaving little room for ambiguity nor the potential for sexual fluidity. A New York Times review from 1968 described Joe in Flesh simply as “bisexual,” not doing justice to the fluidity and potentiality of his queerness.[51] Similarly, Bobby’s character in Pink Narcissus gets simplified to a “gay male prostitute”—ignoring the nuance of his sexuality and its many characterizations throughout the different fantasy settings.[52] The characters’ sexualities are more complex than these reviews convey and cannot simply be reduced to a surface-level reading.

Flesh follows a day in the life of Joe, a young hustler played by Joe Dallesandro. The film begins with an opening shot of Joe naked and asleep in his bed only to be awakened by his wife. She insists he go out to make money for her girlfriend’s abortion. From the opening of the film, there is a focus on Joe’s naked body—fetishizing his form. Joe’s body is not only on display for his clients but also for the pleasure and desire of the viewing audience through the ga(y)ze. While he traverses spaces near and around Times Square, he explicitly voices that he does not want to go down to Forty-second Street. The film shows Joe on the street and through his interactions with various johns: a stroll down the avenue while men cruise him, a quick hookup in a bathroom stall, an extended session with an artist and ultimately a meeting with a regular john. At the end of the film, Joe finds himself back in his apartment with his wife and her girlfriend. He lies about actually having worked and learns that the girlfriend no longer needs the money anyway. The final shots of the film zoom back in on his naked body in bed again to close out his day.

In Pink Narcissus the young hustler Bobby Kendall appears in various scenes lounging in his pink, gilded hotel room. These scenes are then juxtaposed with different daydream sequences. Each scene comes to mirror each other: those in the hotel room with either those on the street or the other daydream sequences.[53] The film opens with a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis as Bobby enters the hotel room, lights a candle, and then admires himself before a wall of mirrors. These mirrors in his daydream then transform into an arena with phallic columns where he is a matador urging along a young handsome biker, played by actor Don Brooks. The scene also transforms into a row of urinals in a tearoom where the two men have a sexual encounter.[54] When a handsome young bellhop arrives, the scene changes into a Roman court where Bobby transforms into both a classical statue and then a Roman slave. Bobby is transported to an “Arabian Nights” style all-male “harem” with his gaze fixed on a dancer who wears nothing but pearl necklaces and a gauzy scarf.[55] Bobby doubles—simultaneously finding himself on the street in Times Square hustling and in the hotel room receiving a phone call from one of the johns who is on the street. He blows out the candle he lit earlier similarly showing the cyclical nature of his work as it does for Joe in Flesh. The alternate Times Square is presented in stark contrast to the fantasy of the hotel room, yet all of these sequences present unique fantasies.

Pink Narcissus and the fantasy of Times Square

There is a strong connection between hustlers and the gay subculture of Forty-second Street/Times Square in both of these films. This space becomes symbolic in Pink Narcissus.[56] For example, there are moments where Bobby is simultaneously in the hotel room and in Times Square soliciting johns. This doubling illustrates a tactic of queer survival—being mutable in identity and being able to exist in multiple spaces at once.[57] Bobby’s gender presentation shifts as well, from feminine within the domestic space of the hotel to masculine out on the street. In the hotel, he wears luxurious, gauzy fabrics and lounges while taking a call on a gem-encrusted gold telephone, enveloped by a soft pink light. Times Square, brimming with all of its vices and men (many of whom go bottomless even in the winter), awaits Bobby just outside his window. Gay Scene film critic Bruce King in his contemporaneous review of the film, calls it a “depraved Times Square, Forty-second Street area.”[58] Likewise writer Bruce Benderson describes “the hellish apotheosis...a descent into a depraved underworld of homoerotic desire in an urban setting.”[59] Benderson further explains,

“That fragile butterfly becomes synonymous with the innocent, budding masculinity of a beautiful young man in a Times Square hotel room, who is quickly learning to use his body for pleasure and gain.”[60]

The outside world stands in stark contrast to the indoors of the softly lit pink, gilded hotel room. Outside is dirty and dangerous with the perverse and criminal lurking around every corner.

Bobby wears all white when he is out on the street, although the contrast to the dirtiness and darkness of the street is much more apparent than when he is lit by the pink hue of his hotel room. His clothing appears stiffer and gives him a more masculine air. On the street Bobby has a greater need to perform his masculinity to elicit the desire of his clients and also to protect himself from the dangers that lurk on the street. In the safety of the hotel room he is more able to explore his femininity. Bobby sheds his outer layers almost immediately upon entering the hotel. His clothes lie on the hotel floor like fallen flower petals of the titular Pink Narcissus. Yet on the street, Bobby is surrounded by darkness, the only visible light emanates from the neon signs. The sign closest to him reads “TASTE ME” as well as large arrow covered in light bulbs announcing Bobby’s presence on the street. Each space, the hotel and the street, represent their own kind of fantasy: escapism through luxury and anonymity. The hotel presents an escapist fantasy and spatially provides a heavenly ethereal quality above the hell of the streets into which Bobby descends. The alternate Times Square, despite the nightmarish quality, still represents a fantasy of desire and sexual vice amidst the grime.

The first time the film introduces this alternate Times Square, Bobby opens the window, and the sound of the radio announcing the day’s hockey scores can be heard and subsequent channel surfing of other radio shows including news about a union strike. There is no dialogue in the film and save for the song “I’ve Grown So Lonesome Without You” and then “alleluias” sung during the rainstorm scene, the only other voices in the film are from New York news radio stations. The radio only plays when Bobby is either staring out the window onto Times Square or when he is actually out on the street. The radio is an “intrusion of reality,” to borrow a phrase from Richard Dyer, as are the other “realistic” elements that the film includes in the street scenes.[61] Even within this space of fantasy, there is a reminder of the harshness of the real world—queers are never allowed the luxury to escape for too long.

Outside Bobby’s window, there are neon signs naming the hotel he is in as well as several other hotels, theatres and bars. The signs mark the space and locate the viewer in this fictional Times Square. The hotel room serves as a contrast to the street below. Everything in the hotel is pink, silky and soft or alternatively glittery and gilded like the jewel encrusted telephone that Bobby answers when johns phone him up. The hotel room is brightly lit, while the street is dark, dirty and gritty not unlike the actual Times Square. Even Bobby transforms outside of the hotel room. The street has the feeling of a soft-core porn scene with all of the men walking around without pants. Here the fantasy of the gay porn spills out from the porn theatres into the streets of Times Square. The press release, from a recent exhibition of James Bidgood’s work at CLAMPArt in 2022, reads: “He translated the city surrounding him into a flamboyant queer utopia, driven by his love for everything kitsch.”[62] It goes on to say,

“Using humble materials in combination with his advanced tailoring skills and aesthetic literacy, Bidgood built a cosmos of queer belonging in his apartment…Within this space, and in front of his lens, the homosexuals that were ostracized by larger society could be beautiful, glamorous, complex, silly, or simply themselves, transforming into characters from another universe.”[63]

This conception of “queer belonging” in Bidgood’s work, especially in Pink Narcissus, cannot be underestimated at a time when these representations were hard to find.

Back out on the street outside Bobby’s window, the playwright Charles Ludlam stars in a variety of ridiculous roles. Ludlam pushes a cart advertising the sale of “dildos, artificial anuses and vibrators.” Nearby a large neon sign of a lit cigarette says “COME.” Like many of the signs in this alternative Times Square, this one serves as a double entendre both inviting Bobby into this space and signaling the desire for sexual gratification and orgasm. The word play also extends to the image of the lit cigarette which points to use of the term “fag.”

In this Times Square, various bottomless uniformed men walk around, including a construction worker, who does not understand the safety hazard. A john in a telephone booth calls up to Bobby in the hotel room. A sign reads “Bet You Can’t Eat Just One,” at the time the newly minted slogan of Lays Potato Chips, also alluding to the insatiability of these men’s sex drives. The john in the phone booth looks expectantly up to the hotel window. Bobby, now also bottomless, lies on the floor. Even in the space of the hotel room, Bobby performs desire for his johns in the way he lounges seductively in his nearly transparent clothes or in the way he traces his fingers along the receiver as he converses with the johns who are still out on the street. It feels as if they can see him in these moments just as he can see them from his window.

In the reflection of the phone booth a neon sign is mirrored that reads “We Are Always Open” pointing to both the all-night nature of many Times Square businesses as well as the promiscuity and availability of those who frequent these spots. There are also signs that say “Lost our lease” and “Going out of business.” Although clearly a fantasy version of Times Square geared mostly toward a queer audience, the film maintains some of the “realness” of the actual Times Square including these signs which indicate businesses getting pushed out of the space. These scenes also include a “bag lady,” played by an actor in drag, who digs through the trash and gets shooed away by one of the shopkeepers. These moments all act as “intrusions of reality”—the fantasy is still there, but the viewer is forced to consider how these spaces can exist simultaneously.

While a bottomless sailor is rubbing his cock on the street, Bobby is in the hotel on the phone with a john who calls from the telephone booth looking eagerly up at the hotel window.[64] The bottomless construction worker reappears this time next to a “Men Working” sign, a typical sight for a construction site, but here serving the purpose of drawing our attention to hustlers working the street.

Next to a sign for “Cissy’s Bar” is another that reads “Notice this a raided premise,” alluding to raids by the Vice Squad of both sex-related establishments such as the porn theatres as well as the continued raids of gay and queer bars at the time. Though the film was released in 1971, Bidgood had begun filming in 1963, and it is important to consider that the most famous bar raid of the Stonewall Inn had happened during this stretch in 1969. The bar raid at the Stonewall Inn occurred in the summer of 1969 where gay and trans activists fought back against the police. Sometimes called the Stonewall Uprising; it marks an important moment of queer resistance, which many cite as the beginning of the Gay Liberation movement in the United States. Bar raids would have been an unfortunate regular occurrence for those who frequented known establishments catering to queer clientele. The film expertly juxtaposes the harsh reality of bar raids with the fantasy of many bottomless men ready and willing, with cock in hand.

Bobby, while still in the hotel room, also simultaneously exists on the street talking to the john—he inhabits both places at once. Throughout the film, Bobby changes shape and place, and by the end of the film he himself has transformed into the john. This is one of the many ways that the potentiality of queerness appears in the film. Bobby shapeshifts and does not retain a static identity. Through his performance of his desire and masculinity for the johns he is able to inhabit the desire in such a way that he becomes the john himself. Thus, through the queer ga(y)ze, Bobby becomes the object of desire for his clients. In this way, the film blurs the line between feminine and masculine, top and bottom, even hustler and john. Writer Parker Tyler posits, “Pink Narcissus is rather like Flaming Creatures but with the female’s presence taboo’d and exiled.”[65] I argue that rather than the female presence being exiled, it is embodied in Bobby’s fluidity and the femininity he inhabits within the safety of the hotel room.

A woman walks down the street with a sign announcing “Our Lord is Coming” while throwing pamphlets everywhere. This, on one hand, alludes to religious activists who in real life would protest the sins peddled in Times Square. It also alludes to the act of orgasm. When Bobby walks away with the john, at the same time in the hotel, the other Bobby hangs up the phone. The two iterations of Bobby are still totally in sync. The performance of desire for the johns becomes seamless for Bobby as a queer means of survival.

When it starts snowing outside and with icicles forming on the buildings, all the men are still pantsless, but now they are all rubbing their cocks “to keep warm.” Amidst the snowstorm, a cop wearing only a hat and jockstrap and carrying a billy-club either does not notice any of the debauchery taking place or more likely does not mind. Pink Narcissus includes a police officer in this fantasy version of Times Square, but this one is seemingly benevolent and just as interested in acts of public sex as all of the other characters. Dyer describes the uniformed men as “all part of the standard repertoire of gay porn.”[66] In gay porn, uniformed men are included as an idealized fantasy—trade or seemingly “straight” men are made available for gay desire.

In the next scene, a corpse-like figure appears next to a blood bank with two skeletal figures gesturing outside of it. Another reminder of the harsh realities of life on the street—people dying of drug overdoses and starvation. A man jerks off outside of the phone booth while a cowboy, wearing nothing but chaps, stands on the other side. The cowboy reads as a nod to the character of Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy. Moments later a well-dressed man steps out of a car with red plush interiors then enters the phone booth, to become Bobby’s next client. The sign “Get ‘em While You’re Hot” flashes on Ludlam’s dildo and artificial anus cart—a reminder that beauty is fleeting, and that many hustlers age out of the profession as they become “undesirable.” The performance of desire is only legible if the john does in fact desire the hustler. While not presented in any kind of chronological order, because Pink Narcissus was shot over the course of seven years, the viewer sees Bobby actually aging throughout the film at different moments. Time is queered here through this disruption further adding to the fluidity of Bobby’s own queerness and identity.

Although we view Bobby walk away with the john on the street, the john comes alone to the hotel room and rings for Bobby. Bobby answers the door and is suddenly transformed into the john signaled by Bobby donning the john’s clothing. Bobby, now as the john, blows out the candle he lit in the opening of the film showing the cyclical nature of his work, similar to how Joe’s day is bookended in Flesh by shots of him naked in bed.

Flesh—There are places besides Forty-Second Street

Flesh like many films produced by Warhol’s Factory insists on capturing a certain reality. “Commenting on Warhol’s methods, Morrissey explains that ‘people in our films don’t so much act as they do something for the camera. We shape our story to fit the people.’”[67] Film scholar David E. James explains,

“The supposition that Warhol democratically documents people ‘being themselves’ provided the basis for the endemic supposition that his cinema was voyeuristic.”[68]

Paul Morrissey started working with Andy Warhol on Chelsea Girls (1966), but Flesh became his first Factory film without Warhol due to Warhol’s recovery after the assassination attempt by Valerie Solanas. Flesh is often named as a “Warhol film” despite him being in the hospital while it was being made. Flesh is seen both as homage and citational of previous Warhol films including the opening scene as pointing to Sleep (1963), and the later scene with Terry fellating Joe in front of Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis, but never quite showing the act, as a reference to Blow Job (1963).[69] Film scholar Tony Rayns writes, “A correspondent of Jonas Mekas’ [sic] (Village Voice 6/2/69) observes that Flesh ‘is a good illustration of what Andy Warhol isn’t about,'" noting the difference of Paul Morrissey’s film work.[70] Film critics James Lithgow and Colin Heard herald Flesh as “with more of a ‘plot’ than most Warhol films.”[71] Film critic Rex Reed praises Flesh, despite his critique of Morrissey’s camera work, writing,

“Paul Morrissey's direction is patchy and the camera work is as terrible as you might expect, but in the way in which it utilizes people in their most arresting behavioral patterns, as stripped of pretense as babies on their mothers' breasts, and in the way it shows how film can be opened up to expand our way of thinking outside conventional film barriers, ‘Flesh’ is a wildly funny and highly innovational movie.”[72]

Queer scholar Jon Davies explains the importance of the film,

“Flesh, for example, is groundbreaking not just for Joe’s full frontal morning wood in the first scene, but for its absence of violent or humiliating encounters between hustler and john, or the once-requisite death by murder or suicide the punished queer characters in Hollywood for decades, described most trenchantly by Vito Russo in his 1981 book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies”[73]

Flesh stood in contrast to many of the available films at the time proffering a more complex presentation of queerness and one without tragedy.

Flesh is the first film of what would become a trilogy with Trash (1970) and Heat (1972) to follow. Davies explains,

“While Flesh deals specifically with prostitution, Trash with drug addiction, and Heat with fame, the entire trilogy tackles the broader ills of its era: narcissism, commodification, and exploitation.”[73]

Though each starring Joe Dallesandro, there is little connection of the plots of these three films besides dealing with these themes.

Flesh opens with Joe naked in bed while the song “Making Waki Wiki in Waikiki” plays on the radio, and it is the only music heard in the film. Upon waking, Joe voices his concern to his wife Geri about having to go down to Times Square. He tells her, “I’m not in the mood to go down to Forty-second Street you know, so like, I call up two or three people and then hand over the money. Then I can’t call these people anymore, why would I want to do that?” She responds, “Go somewhere else and get it. There are other places besides Forty-second Street. Are you going to do it?” Here Joe is using “Forty-second Street” as a stand-in for Times Square.

Times Square becomes a spectre in Joe’s moves to avoid it. Times Square, in Flesh, becomes so hellish that Joe does everything he can to avoid it,similar to how author John Rechy described it as “haunted” in his famous novel about hustlers: City of Night.[75] This also harkens back to Benderson’s description of Pink Narcissus’s fictionalized Times Square as a “hellish apotheosis.”[76]

In the next scene Joe is out on the street. He is wearing a red bandanna with a blue button down over a t-shirt with jeans. This is a slight variation on the t-shirt and cuffed jeans that scholar Barry Reay identifies as the hustler’s “uniform” as named by Rechy in City of Night, which, at the time, hustlers in Times Square would have worn.[77] In this scene, Reay describes the camera itself as cruising Joe as it moves across his body.[78] Joe performs his masculinity even through wearing the so-called hustler’s uniform. While at home in his bed, he is always shown naked except when Geri wraps his penis in a gauzy scarf not dissimilar from the fabrics that Bobby is draped in while in his hotel room.

Instead of going to Forty-second Street, Joe stands outside of the Lexington Avenue and Fifty-third Street subway station, then part of the Queensboro IND line, at the Third Avenue and Fifty-third Street entrance.[79] The viewer can hear the sounds of traffic as it drowns out the conversations he has with potential johns.

Joe moves further down the avenue and then walks by the Greenacre Park Sign on East Fifty-first Street between Second and Third Avenue. A man cruises Joe as they pass in front of a sign that reads “Closes at 9PM.” Ironically, the park closes at 9PM to try to curb just such illegal and “deviant” activity as the sex work that Joe is engaged in as well as others cruising here.

After going home with an older artist who photographs and draws Joe in poses resembling classical Greek sculptures, Joe is back on the street. Joe performs desire for this client and performs his masculinity “playing dumb,” letting the john “sculpt” him into various poses. Here he reflects the ga(y)ze of his client as well as for the audience. This scene also works as an allusion to Dallesandro’s posing for physique magazines in real life. Waugh describes Joe as “trade-flavored beefcake,” which further points to his physique magazine modelling.[80]

When Joe leaves, he is outside of Bryant Park talking with other less experienced gay-for-pay hustlers.[81] Reay names Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, as a popular spot for hustlers outside of Times Square proper.[82] Joe tells the other hustlers, “You straight? Ain’t nobody straight. What’s straight? It’s not about being straight or not straight you just gotta do whatever you have to do.” Joe shows that this performance of desire allows a certain fluidity of sexuality that does not have to be wrapped up in labels, exploring its queer potentiality. As Joe talks to these other hustlers about their work he says,

“Yeah, it’s hard to learn what you have to do, but once you learn how to do that it’s easy. If you have to care what the other straight people are going to think then you’re not in your bag. Don’t worry he’s only gonna suck your peeta.”

Scholar Nicholas de Villiers explains about this scene,

“Joe the hustler’s sexual orientation is vague, representing the nebulous category of ‘trade’—not gay, but willing to have sex with men—which still existed in the 1960s and 1970s but declined in inverse proportion to the success of ‘out’ gay politics. At times, Joe seems to challenge the purity of the binary gay/straight, but at others he speaks if the lines were clearly drawn.”[83]

Joe more often challenges this, and when he does speak of sexuality in “clearer” lines, it is in the context of performing desire for a client. Even then, he still asserts a certain amount of mutability as discussed later with his regular client David.

Joe tells one of the other hustlers to find a good street corner. The hustler asks Joe, “Where? Cause I don’t know where to look.” Although they do not explicitly mention in their conversation to avoid Times Square/Forty-second Street, it is clear from the conversation that both Joe and the other hustler wish to avoid that area. The film never makes explicit why Joe “doesn’t want to go down to Forty-second Street.” These other locations, while still in walking distance from Times Square, provide a vibrant hustling and cruising scene that allow him to avoid the potential competition with other hustlers as well as to better avoid potential run-ins with the police. It could also be seen as a strategy to avoid the over-masculine posturing of other hustlers and not having to perform such a strict code of masculinity. Joe tells the other hustler, “Actually go down by the Fifties by Third Avenue. That’s a good area around Fifty-sixth Street...Fifty-fifth Street by the newsstand” (where he was seen earlier outside the subway station). Joe explains, “Your best bet is standing where you were” meaning where they just were outside of Bryant Park. He then reiterates to check out the spot near the newsstand. He describes it saying, “There’s big pop posters down there. It’s good down there.” This is also one of the locations that Rechy’s City of Night narrator goes to hustle outside of Times Square marking it as a popular and common spot for hustlers at the time.[84]

After the two hustlers separate, Joe goes into a phone booth and makes a call to a regular john of his named David. He asks, “Are you going to be home for a while? What you say I stop over later on?” Joe knows that he can count on David for the rest of the money he needs. When he exits the phone booth, he crosses against Bryant Park and the back of what was then called the Central Building of the New York Public Library. Phone booths serve prominent roles in both films as an essential and necessary part of street life to communicate with regular johns.

Interestingly, both Pink Narcissus and Flesh, while interacting with the idea of Times Square do not ever show the actual Times Square. Pink Narcissus shows this alternate vision of Times Square through a queer fantasyscape while in Flesh, the absence of Times Square is striking.

Postmodern Narcissus stories

In the Greek myth of Narcissus, the titular character is condemned to fall in love with his own reflection after rejecting the advances of many wood nymphs, most notably Echo. The myth has a homoerotic, if not queer, legacy that can be traced through canonical and seminal texts on mythology. In her classic text Mythology, writer Edith Hamilton describes Narcissus: “His beauty was so great, all the girls who saw him longed to be his, but he would have none of them.”[85] She goes on to use the term “disgust” to describe Narcissus’s feelings specifically toward the wood nymph Echo who longs for him.[86]

I offer the queer reading that Narcissus rejects the advances of his female admirers not because he can love no one but himself but because he longs for someone for whom he can reflect their desire. Narcissus, like the protagonists Bobby and Joe, is not necessarily collapsing the subject/object dichotomy as Waugh suggests occurs in same sex relations, but Narcissus is aware of the desirous effect he has on others and wants to reflect their gaze back to them. Although Echo desires him, she can never have him and instead spends the rest of time merely “echoing” him—an act that does not actually subvert the gaze. Her echoing becomes a passive act desirous of that which she can never have, whereas Bobby and Joe find agency in their performances and interactions with johns, actively seeking to reflect back the desire of their clients. In the case of Bobby and Joe, it is not that they desire the clients but rather they are desirous of the attention that the clients give them and want to create that desire in turn for their clients.

There is an obvious connection between this myth and the film Pink Narcissus. Scholar Gilad Padva writes, “If Ovid’s Narcissus is only homoerotic, than [sic] Bidgood’s Narcissus is explicitly homosexual.”[87] The myth of Narcissus also immediately calls to mind the scene in Flesh when Joe goes home with the artist who poses him reminiscent of classical Greek sculpture as well as his adoration of Joe’s form. While this might immediately recall Adonis first, both myths draw upon the great beauty of these young men, yet the myth of Narcissus more aptly fits with this theorization of the gaze and also as an embodiment of Greek idealism.[88] Dyer explains,

“This inspiration from classical antiquity, which is of course based on the nineteenth century understanding of the classical, is classical in two senses. First, it invokes the period of classical antiquity as an unquestionable touchstone of the finest achievements of the human race—if gayness can be shown to be characteristic of the classical age, then how it can be condemned now?”[89]

Likewise Dyer cites André Gide’s book Corydon (1925) saying its “use of nature and antiquity purify the subject of the homosexual…This set the tone for the defense of homosexuality, up to and after the period in which Un Chant d’amour was made.”[90] In using this same reference to the classical and calling upon the ancient Greeks, gays were using these cultural references to justify their own existence as we too see in the allusions to myth of Narcissus.

The first shot in Flesh of Joe out looking for work is through his reflection in a puddle on the cobblestone street and not a direct shot of Joe himself. His image, like Narcissus, is reflected to the audience and to potential johns on the street. We also see Joe’s reflection in the shop window while he is hustling on Third Avenue. Pink Narcissus also plays with the idea of the mirror and reflection as a wall of mirrors transform into a wall of urinals in a tearoom where men go to cruise each other. These mirrors also transform into pillars of an arena, designed as ejaculating penises, where Bobby is a matador urging along a young handsome biker with whom he has had a sexual encounter in the aforementioned tearoom. Performing his desire for the johns even when alone in the hotel, Bobby masturbates in front of a mirror further reflecting his desire. In Bobby’s doubling in the Roman court, he also comes to mirror himself and his desire in his two roles as emperor and prisoner and as bullfighter and peasant.

Their reflections, both in the puddle and in the mirrors, show the desire of the johns as it is mirrored back to the johns, not to the hustlers themselves, and symbolically transform both the hustlers into modern Narcissuses. There is a fascination with the beauty of these men both within the context of the films from the other characters and also from the viewers of the film. Part of what made these films resonate with gay male audiences (and still makes them resonate with queer audiences) is the beauty of the actors Joe Dallesandro and Bobby Kendall. While the entire film of Pink Narcissus is a veritable fantasy-scape, Flesh still very much enacts this notion of fantasy of the viewer into the intimate moments of Joe’s life and work, and it is no less steeped in the fantasy of Joe’s sexual encounters with the johns.

Flesh begins with Joe naked and asleep in bed a shot very similar to how Bobby is shown lying on the floor listening to the radio in his hotel room. Flesh ends on a similar shot showing the cyclical narrative but also points to the possibility that the whole thing has been a dream. One of the characters in Flesh remarks “lots of things feel real that aren’t.” The hustlers’ performances of desire and masculinity “feel” very real while only being a part of the fantasy. In the fantasy, the only thing real is their bodies.

Bobby’s and Joe’s beauty become even more important in contrast to the hideousness of their surroundings. They also exhibit a fluidity of masculine and feminine at play in their beauty. These two young men are undeniably masculine but framed and shot in such ways that play on the feminine and show those soft edges. Benderson writes, “Bidgood experimented with the possibilities of contrasting Kendall’s youthful, smoldering masculinity with effeminate, precious costumes and décor.”[91] Bobby himself becomes part of the décor as he transforms into a sculpture, and likewise in one scene, Joe also becomes a living statue as he poses for one of his johns conjuring up images of Greek myths like that of Narcissus. In Pink Narcissus, Bobby is obviously set amidst the feminine in the setting of the pink-hued, gilded hotel room and then he performs a certain kind of masculinity on the street for the johns and arguably for the other male hustlers.

The close-ups of Joe at the beginning and end of Flesh show the softness of his body while still being muscular and lean, and in some ways, these moments of stillness betray the femininity that is hidden behind his usual performance of masculinity. In this context, both Bobby and Joe become empowered through their femininity and through their embodiment of the object of desire and the feminine. Their performances of masculinity are a way to both carve out space for themselves on the street and even as a survival tactic because society does not allow space for femininity especially that which is subversive and deviant. Dyer writes,

“In-betweenism probably remains the most familiar and widespread gay typology. In its tragic and violent modes it reinforces negative views of gay sexuality; in its representation of the nastiness or ridiculousness of not being really one sex or the other, it serves to maintain the notion of rigid gender role differentiation. Yet it may also, through a paradoxical inversion, embody a rejection of those roles.”[92]

The characters of Bobby and Joe not only invert that as a rejection of those roles, they also consequently subvert and blur those lines.

Scholar Jennifer Doyle writes,

“This element of [Joe’s] ‘look’ prompted Stephen Koch to theorize that ‘the hustler, identifying himself as the sexuality of his flesh and nothing more, proposes himself as a wholly passive and will-less being, subject exclusively to the will of others.’ But this reading of the hustler’s ‘look’ does not address all the ways that the hustler reverses the opposition of passive and active and then turns that opposition inside out.”[93]

Others have also suggested that Joe is nothing more than a “blank screen on to which we can project all our fantasies,” or that he is “reduced to an object of visual consumption” overlooking the way in which the character finds agency and mirrors the desire of his clients back to them.[94]

Resisting identification

There is something inherently queer about how this particular desire is being formulated and performed by the hustler characters especially as the performers of said desire are resisting any specific identification. Scholar Kerwin Kaye writes, “By the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay writers were forcefully questioning the ‘straightness’ of any man who had sex of any sort with another man.”[95] He continues, quoting from Morgan Hunt’s Gay: What you should know about homosexuality, “‘As for the hustler,’ wrote one observer, ‘most gays look down upon him for maintaining that he’s really straight.’”[96] Yet he contends,

“In added irony, for the majority of those who worked on the street, identifying as straight often retained an economic benefit due to clientele preference for ‘trade,’ despite gay liberation.”[97]

Because there is no dialogue in Pink Narcissus, it is more difficult to consider how Bobby is resisting identification in this context. Whereas in the dialogue of Flesh, this becomes much more obvious. This can be seen when Joe is talking to some other young, gay-for-pay hustlers outside of Bryant Park. They are less experienced, and he offers them advice saying,

“You straight? Ain’t nobody straight. What’s straight? It’s not about being straight or not straight. You just gotta do whatever you have to do.”

He understands being a hustler requires a certain flexibility and fluidity of sexuality.

Later David, a regular john of Joe’s, says to him, “We’re not queer,” and Joe responds, “I know, but a lot of other people don’t understand that.” They are using “queer” here as a pejorative term as it was understood at the time (and likely used against them) not necessarily as a way to refute their sexual tendencies. In the same conversation, David asks Joe, “Did you marry her?” And when Joe responds affirmatively, David adds, “As gay as you are?!” While in a previous scene, after Terry (played by Geri Miller) has finished fellating Joe, she asks him “You’re not turning gay, are you?” when she finds he is not as captivated by her breasts as he apparently had been previously.

When read in comparative context, these scenes show that in different spaces Joe understands how the term “gay” shifts. While he is with Terry, he is having a sexual interaction with her not as part of his work, which does not appear to be a transactional interaction. With David, he can feel more comfortable with his use of gay because it relates explicitly to their interaction and transaction as hustler and john. Joe also explains that he feels his relationship that David is more than just a john. He tells David that he views him as a friend and that he “honestly” wants David to like him.

On the surface, this scene implies that Joe feels more comfortable with David than he does with his other johns (or even his wife)—enough so to use the term “gay.” While not discounting that, a deeper reading shows that this is just another way that Joe is performing David’s desire back to him. If David views them both as gay and understands their relationship in those terms, Joe, of course, would want to reflect that sentiment for him.

Queer hustlers and film legacies

The legacy of these two films can be seen in traces in the 1970s and 80s, as well as in the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. Even now, queer films and queer culture at large continue to be fascinated with the theme of the hustler as well as with trade. Queer film scholar R. Ruby Rich explains about New Queer Cinema,

“Of course, the new queer films and videos aren’t all the same, and don’t share a single aesthetic vocabulary or strategy or concern. Yet they are nonetheless united by a common a style. Call it ‘Homo Pomo’: there are traces in all of them of appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind.”[98]

Many of these films were looking back to early queer films, like the hustlers in My Own Private Idaho (1990) or in the case of The Living End (1992): “As film critic Derek Malcolm wrote in a 1993 review of The Living End, ‘It’s what some of those Paul Morrissey/Andy Warhol epics of the sixties might have been had they become activated by the fear of AIDS.’”[99]

Waugh writes about a similar return of the gaze as seen in Pink Narcissus and Flesh,

“In some cases, the returned look of the object can so dominate or unsettle or overturn the narrative structure that an entirely new narrative mythos emerges, the object as subject—as in Fassbinder’s groundbreaking Querelle or its realist precursor Fox and His Friends, or in Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane.”[100]

These films all build on similar themes and ways of exploring queerness.

Traces of Pink Narcissus can be seen in the HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (2003) directed by Mike Nichols. In a scene in which the characters Prior and Harper meet in a joint dream/hallucination, there are living statues/columns that harken back to Bobby as a statue in the Roman court. The influence can even be seen in the ethereal quality of parts of Derek Jarman’s The Garden (1990). Writer Aaron Travis in his write up of Pink Narcissus goes as far as to compare itto Eraserhead (1977), which seems like a stretch unless considering the nightmarish quality of some of the street scenes.[101] These legacies even extend beyond film to photography with James Bidgood as seen as having “influenced a generation of artists including Pierre et Gilles and David LaChapelle.”[102]

Conclusion

By mapping these texts, Flesh and Pink Narcissus, onto New York City and in sharing their histories, I have shown how these queer histories live on and contribute to “a cosmos of queer belonging.”[103] Just because these histories of Times Square are no longer visible to the naked eye, does not mean that they have disappeared. They continue to live on through these texts and through the experiences of those who lived them. I too locate myself amongst these histories not only as queer subject but also as I physically trace a path from Hell’s Kitchen across Forty-second Street to Bryant Park and down Fifth Avenue to Thirty-fourth Street in my research and studies. I traverse these spaces just like so many queers before me. The value and legacy of our queer histories cannot be underestimated especially at a time when so many bigots are hellbent on completely erasing us.

Part of the reason I was so drawn to writing about these narratives that are in dialogue with the space of Times Square is because the space itself has changed so drastically. In so many other parts of the city one can still glimpse fragments of the past: a cobblestone street, a brownstone, a family business that has survived the decades. It is much harder to find these traces in Times Square. Projects such as Queering the Map (queeringthemap.com) seek to document and map current queer histories through crowdsourcing—not just the major events but the everyday moments and intimacies. Although Queering the Map is based in Montreal, users from all over the world are able to easily add their own map pins with memories or events to the map. Zoom into the Times Square area on Queering the Map, and one can still find queer stories despite the Disneyfication of the area. I have dropped a few pins across the city to share my own queer history as well. Wider participation in collaborative mapping projects such as this helps to counter erasure of these important histories.

My interest in these specific narratives stems from the unique ways that they engage with queerness. Because there were fewer queer narratives available at the time of these films means that these allow for nuance and possibility. We queers learn to find representations of ourselves where there are none—even growing up many of us cite queer readings of supposedly “non-queer” characters and films because we did not have access to those that existed. There is a magical feeling about creating something from so little (although we crave more explicitly queer narratives as well). Scholar Ellis Hanson writes, “being out never prevents queer spectators from locating themselves in the film, whatever their pretense to critical distance and marginality.”[104] These kinds of queer narratives in these texts (when they do exist) are so often still relegated to the margins for us to have to seek them out.

In many ways, current films that feature more mainstream gay narratives, take Love, Simon (2018) for example, are less queer and offer less nuance because they serve up such a normative take on the gay experience and do not offer actual queer narratives. Films like Love, Simon or Call Me by Your Name (2017) target mainstream audiences and thus offer a more sanitized even white-washed version of what queerness, or really, gayness looks like that is more palatable to the general public. These films tug on our heartstrings no less but offer an idealistic, best-case scenario for what gay lives look like in twenty-first century—not the lives that most of us are actually living.

We often falsely think of progress in a linear fashion. The films discussed here were created over fifty years ago, and yet offer us more space to see queerness in ways that do not fit neatly inside any one box than the way it is served up through these current mainstream films. I hope we continue to illuminate and share queer stories of the past and continue to create those for the future. As Valentine suggests,

“What if…we saw the queer past less as something to rewrite and more as something already available to read?”[105]

Notes

Acknowledgements

• In memoriam of James Bidgood 1933-2022 and Paul Morrissey 1938-2024.
• Thank you to Sean Edgecomb, James Wilson, and Elizabeth Alsop for your support and assistance with this project in its earliest iterations. Thank you to Callen Zimmerman for being my partner in crime—spreading my zines around Times Square. Thank you to Paul Moreno for your grammar expertise and taking me to finally see Pink Narcissus on the big screen. Thank you to Amelia Wilson for reading earlier drafts and sharing in my joy. Thank you to Brian Clamp of CLAMPArt for sharing your knowledge and resources of James Bidgood. And thank you to Rosie Uyola for all of your notes and encouragement. Also, a big thank you to Christina Hanhardt for introducing a generation of Hampshire College students, myself included, to Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

Filmography

• Anger, Kenneth (1947) Fireworks. U.S.A.
• Anger, Kenneth (1963) Scorpio Rising. U.S.A.
• Araki, Gregg (1992) The Living End. U.S.A.
• Berlant, Greg (2018) Love, Simon. U.S.A.
• Bidgood, James (1971) Pink Narcissus. U.S.A.
• Fassbinder, Rainer Werner (1975) Fox & His Friends. West Germany.
• Fassbinder, Rainer Werner (1982) Querelle. West Germany and France.
• Friedkin, William (1970) Boys in the Band. U.S.A.
• Genet, Jean (1950) Un Chant D’Amour. France.
• Guadagnino, Luca (2017) Call Me By Your Name. Italy, France, U.S.A. and Brazil.
• Jarman, Derek (1990) The Garden. U.K., Germany and Japan.
• Jarman, Derek and Paul Humfress (1976) Sebastiane. U.K.
• Klein, William (1959) Broadway by Light. France and U.S.A.
• Lynch, David (1977) Eraserhead. U.S.A.
• Morrissey, Paul (1968) Flesh. U.S.A.
• Morrissey, Paul (1970) Trash. U.S.A.
• Morrissey, Paul (1971) Women in Revolt. U.S.A.
• Morrissey, Paul (1972) Heat. U.S.A.
• Morrissey, Paul and Andy Warhol (1966) Chelsea Girls. U.S.A.
• Morrissey, Paul and Andy Warhol (1968) Lonesome Cowboys. U.S.A.
• Nichols, Mike (2003) Angels in America. U.S.A.
• Poole, Wakefield (1971) Boys in the Sand. U.S.A.
• Schlesinger, John (1969) Midnight Cowboy. U.S.A.
• Scorsese, Martin (1973) Mean Streets. U.S.A.
• Smith, Jack (1963) Flaming Creatures. U.S.A.
• Van Sant, Gus (1991) My Own Private Idaho. U.S.A.
• Warhol, Andy (1963) Blow Job. U.S.A.
• Warhol, Andy (1964) Sleep. U.S.A.
• Warhol, Andy and Chuck Wein (1965) My Hustler. U.S.A.

Notes