Provocateurs Peter Berlin and Brontez Purnell on public sex, immortality, and the importance of self-authorship

18th November 2021, 1:48 pm

 

Peter Berlin (in background) Photography by Laurence Ellis

The most famous story about Peter Berlin is relatively innocuous. Out cruising for sex in Paris, he suddenly became aware of a gorgeous young man walking his way; an exquisite synthesis of Rogaine-ad hair and rippling musculature who, Berlin soon realized, was his own reflection in a shop window. His real-life Narcissus moment has become a myth of its own as younger generations discover the work of an image-maker half a century ahead of his time. But, in all fairness, Berlin looked objectively godlike. The story says less about his vanity than it does about ours. Humans have been mesmerized by their own reflections since our Neolithic ancestors learned to polish lumps of obsidian—we wouldn’t have needed Greek mythology to caution against excessive self-admiration if we weren’t prone to it in the first place. In a world full of narcissists who can’t walk past a storefront without trying to check out our reflections, it only seems outrageous that Berlin didn’t recognize his.

In the early ’70s, Berlin wound up in San Francisco to find a cruising scene at its hedonistic zenith. He soon became a fixture, sewing his own pants to ensure his sex organs looked sufficiently Saran-wrapped, and squeezing into them with one goal in mind: getting laid. The self-portraits, preserving this image of a man in his virile prime, are imbued with this same candor. “I was looking in the mirror, looking good, and took a picture of it,” Berlin reflects. This routine—Berlin acting as both artist and muse—spanned decades, evolving into a staggering body of work that gay youths will be jerking off to for years to come. But there is a surprising innocence, if not purity, to Berlin’s performance for the camera; androgynous and more early Playboy than hardcore porn. (John Waters famously compared him to Jayne Mansfield.) Years after retiring the character of Peter Berlin, his image still plasters the apartment walls of his creator, who treasures them mostly for their honesty. Berlin also directed and starred in a couple of porn films, but he doesn’t recommend them and their “stupid” storylines. In fact, he never got off on porn. Orgies never appealed to him either, and he always found it boring to watch people fuck in public parks. He spends a lot of time thinking about nature, and humanity’s relationship with it outside of public sex. Specifically, he wishes we’d stop destroying it.

Brontez Purnell can’t remember where he first saw Berlin’s image. He describes it as something eternally present, a seminal part of gay history and intrinsically connected to the places where it happened. This is how many young queer people today see Purnell. By the time the writer and musician moved to the Bay Area at the age of 19, shortly after the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, Oakland was already at the tail end of its indie rock explosion—or so it thought. Purnell found a community in the scene’s punk underground, playing guitar in Seth Bogart’s Panty Raid and gaining prominence as a go-go dancer and singer at the infamous live performances of queer electroclash outfit Gravy Train!!!!. Purnell had a presence in the Oakland community before he actually moved there; he started making fanzines at the age of 14, mailing them to fellow misfits around the country from Alabama and then Tennessee. This early awareness about the importance of self-authorship, formed as a gay Black kid growing up in the South and cultivated in a punk-rock scene that can still be dangerously hostile to homosexuality, has remained a hallmark of the writing that has made Purnell an alt-lit icon. His latest book, 100 Boyfriends, shuttles the reader from anguish to drug-induced euphoria through the misadventures of queer men. Purnell’s approach to self-authorship can serve as a foil to Berlin’s photographs. His work is no less honest, but Purnell writes fiction. His characters are in fact composites, drawn not to reveal his specific experience but to give his readers a way of seeing themselves.

Brontez Purnell

Meeting for the first time at Peter Berlin’s San Francisco apartment, the two era-defining gay heroes discuss our innate desire for immortality, the strange sex lives of worms, and why being able to carry our entire histories in our iPhone’s camera roll is a beautiful thing.

READ THE COMPLETE CONVERSATON Text by Hannah Ongley


Peter Berlin @ TOM House

Featuring the work of Berlin along with images by Tom of Finland, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andy Warhol, Peter Berlin: Icon, Artist, Photosexual pays tribute to the man who in the early to mid-1970s revolutionized the landscape of Gay male eroticism and became an international sensation.    

BRONTEZ PURNELL | TOM House Exit Interview

Summer 2019 artist-in-resident, Brontez Purnell, discusses his time at TOM House with Rubén Esparza.

Eight Artists on the Influence of Tom of Finland

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Remembering Tom of Finland through stories of those who knew him

  As a selection of Tom of Finland’s photographs go on show, his friends, lovers, and models provide an oral history of the man behind the myth Those who had the pleasure of meeting Tom of Finland (born Touko Valio Laaksonen, 1920–1991) may have expected to encounter a walking, talking version of his drawings. Instead, they would… View Article

Published: 18th November 2021

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