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When film historians speak of the first screenings of Louis Lumière’s “The Arrival of a Train,” they describe the Paris audience flinching in their seats to avoid being struck by the image of a locomotive rushing toward them on screen. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, but it makes me wonder how those who attended the 1971 premiere of James Bidgood’s iconic queer classic “Pink Narcissus” must have reacted to its, er, climactic moment.
A gauzy, softcore reimagining of Disney’s “Fantasia,” with well-endowed (live-action) hustlers in place of dancing cartoon hippos, “Pink Narcissus” unspools like some kind of erotic visual concerto. Ogling his rough-trade star Bobby Kendall, as the muscular young man admires his own ephemeral beauty reflected in countless mirrors, Bidgood stacks one super-saturated sexual fantasy upon another until such point that the film can’t contain itself any longer, erupting directly into the camera — and by extension, all over the screen/audience.
That shot could only be possible in 1971 (the year before “Deep Throat” became a mainstream success), when the laws restricting pornography had relaxed enough to allow theaters to program Bidgood’s magnum opus. Considering how intensely personal every frame of the dialogue-free film was to its creator, it’s ironic that when Sherpix released “Pink Narcissus” — and still to this day, as an essential new restoration from Strand Releasing and UCLA Film & Television Archive hits theaters — practically all the credits read “Anonymous,” and no cast is credited.
For years, people speculated as to the identity of its creator, imagining that “Pink Narcissus” might be the work of Andy Warhol, or perhaps Kenneth Anger. Much later, Bidgood reluctantly emerged as the author of a project whose revolutionary way of worshipping the male form went on to influence the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (whose “Querelle” reads like a direct homage) and John Waters, who considers it a formative viewing experience — as do I, and so many who witnessed the film at precisely the right moment in their lives.
“He was a great artist, and the fact that the whole film was filmed inside a loft is truly amazing,” gushed Waters, who selects one movie to show at the Provincetown Film Festival. (The one time I attended, the sly taste-terrorist picked “Antichrist,” which gives you a sense of the ratio of admiration to shock value he’s looking to achieve.) This year, Waters will be presenting “Pink Narcissus” — no connection to Waters’ most notorious film.
“Because my movie was called ‘Pink Flamingos,’ people got it mixed up. They would make a good double feature,” Waters said by telephone. “But I never tried to be beautiful, and he did.”
Back in 1971, Bidgood’s decision to remove his name from the movie wasn’t out of shyness on Bidgood’s part, but because Sherpix’s owner, Louis K. Sher, had wrested the film away from its perfectionistic director (who’d dedicated nearly a decade to making it in his tiny Hell’s Kitchen apartment). Sher tasked Martin Jay Sadoff to recut and score the ravishing Super-8 footage as he saw fit, rushing the result — which ranks among the most luscious films of all time — into theaters to capitalize on the newfound market for explicit content. (In 1970, the Academy awarded the best picture Oscar to “Midnight Cowboy,” making history by giving that prize to an X-rated film.)
Bidgood’s name wouldn’t have meant much to audiences at the time anyway, as he had never made a feature before … and never would again. The project is an amalgamation of filmed sequences he made to augment his photographic work, which he sold under the name “Les Folies des Hommes” (a glittering signature of sorts, which appears early in the otherwise anonymous project).
Born in Wisconsin, 18-year-old Bidgood moved to New York City in 1951. “He was completely out [of the closet]. He was never in,” insists Kelly McCaig, who befriended Jim in his later years, publishing a gorgeous new coffee table book, called “Dreamlands,” to coincide with the film’s theatrical re-release. Artistic by nature, Bidgood designed his own sets and costumes, some of which were so snug, they had to be sewn directly onto his models’ bodies.
In the ’50s, Bidgood discovered Club 82, a basement drag club in New York’s Lower East Side where he was hired both to perform and make costumes. It was there that he was introduced to Jay Garvin, the strapping dancer who served as the model for Bidgood’s early erotic portraiture. As far as I can tell, Garvin does not appear in “Pink Narcissus,” though he did pose alongside Bobby Kendall (not his real name), a gay-for-pay stud whom Bidgood filmed over the course of seven or eight years.
“He’s a very pretty boy, although he thought he looked like a monkey,” Gayletter Magazine wrote shortly before his death. “Bobby was straight, actually, and was a terrible hustler. He was too nice and was awkward about accepting money.” Though Kendall apparently lost his hair shortly after the film opened, the film captures the bulging lad in the full flower of his beauty, with sharp cheekbones, dark curls and impossibly plump lips. Waters isn’t wrong when he tells me, “I think Bobby Kendall is the only person that has ever challenged Joe Dallesandro as far as being the most sexy underground movie star.”
In the 1950s, pornography was forbidden, but men who were attracted to men could buy so-called “physique” magazines, in which studs wearing scanty pouches flexed their muscles for the camera. By all accounts, Bidgood was a voracious consumer of porn his entire life. In his 20s, however, Bidgood was disappointed by the lack of imagination shown in such publications, especially when compared to the look of hetero offerings like Playboy.
According to a 2006 interview with Bright Lights Film Journal, Bidgood found himself wondering, “Why are all these boys standing in front of the same frigging fireplace with the same funny little piece of jersey over their dingies?” Inspired by glamour magazines and the lavish, Technicolor look of Hollywood movies (especially Ziegfeld Follies and those of Powell and Pressburger, such as “The Red Shoes” and “The Thief of Bagdad”), Bidgood constructed an elaborate underwater set in his narrow railroad apartment, posing a greased-up Garvin amid the handmade reefs and seaweed — and so the Bidgood aesthetic was born.
While some dismiss his decadent, highly artificial mise-en-scène as kitsch, Bidgood’s overripe imagination (and his unique ability to translate that vision to film) revolutionized erotic gay photography. French duo Pierre et Gilles freely credit Bidgood’s style, which they amplify in their own work, while David LaChapelle has demonstrated how that impulse might look on a massive budget (remember, Bidgood shot most of “Pink Narcissus” in his railroad apartment).
Nearly every article written about Bidgood describes his work as “camp” — a reductive diagnosis that downplays how absolutely stunning some of his compositions are. “It’s not campy,” insisted Waters. “That word, I don’t think works for it at all. It’s just beautiful, in a jaw-dropping way that is so uncommercial, you respect it. ‘Pink Narcissus’ doesn’t fit in any genre. It doesn’t ask to be liked. It almost dares you to like it, which is really kind of great.”
The same year Bidgood began filming “Pink Narcissus,” Anger unleashed “Scorpio Rising” and Jack Smith made “Flaming Creatures.” According to McKaig, “He did not have any links to any of the New York underground film scene. Jim started as a drag artist, and his drag was directly inspired by ’30s and ’40s Hollywood. I think it’s one of those cases where multiple things were percolating at the same time, like the creation of the photograph, which happened simultaneously on two different continents.”
Bidgood had always been a self-taught artist, and part of his charm comes through the mix of naiveté and invention — as in the ravishing opening sequence of “Pink Narcissus,” an 8-foot tracking shot through an imaginary garden at night, in which spider webs sparkle against an artificial moon. This dreamlike sequence always reminds me of the scene in which the two children escape by rowboat in “The Night of the Hunter,” the only film directed by another gay legend, Charles Laughton. “That was shot in miniature, and the camera was on some kind of rig, that was basically a bicycle chain he could pedal, and then the camera would move as a dolly,” McKaig explained.
From double exposure to stop-motion to DIY optical effects, Bidgood was full of creative solutions you might not expect from someone who’d begun as a still photographer. At first, he sold his portraits to homoerotic magazines such as Muscleboy and The Young Physique, but he soon realized that he could earn more by advertising in the back pages and selling 35mm slides and short film reels to “collectors.” That’s the real reason he began filming “Pink Narcissus,” taking advantage of the work he’d put into the sets against which he asked Kendall to pose. (Kendall was just 16 when the 26-year-old Bidgood first hired him, said McKaig, who has the model release form signed by the boy’s father.)
“Pink Narcissus” is comprised of a series of fantasies, each featuring Kendall in a different environment, each more exquisite than the last. A lonely shepherd seeks release in the wild. Surrounded by photos of himself, a vain young hustler awaits a trick in his opulent apartment. A horny matador dangles his cape in front of his crotch, taunting a leather-clad biker. Two strangers in tight-fitting pants satisfy their urges in a public toilet (complete with papier-maché urinals and hand-scrawled graffiti).
According to McKaig, that latter sequence was likely based in Bidgood’s own appetite for public cruising: In the late ’50s, he enrolled at Parsons School of Design, “but he didn’t graduate because he got arrested” for cottaging, McKaig said. “That segment doesn’t have the smooth sort of soft fancy of the others. It’s the most aggressive of them — and the only one that I could sort of link to Jim’s personal life.”
Otherwise, the vignettes are all hyper-sensuous and unapologetically erotic, appealing even to non-gay audiences. How do I know? Waters likes to show “Pink Narcissus” to straight friends. “It’s the kind of gay movie where you’d think, ‘No straight person could sit through this,’ but they could not believe how beautiful it was and how it is truly outsider art,” he says. “Just as punks like ‘Pink Flamingos,’ I’m sure opera fans appreciate ‘Pink Narcissus.’”
In more suggestive scenes, Bidgood transformed his tiny tenement space into a Roman temple or an Arabian harem. In the latter, you might feel as if Bidgood’s diaphanous costumes leave little to the imagination, when in fact, he’s deliberately appealing to that part of the subconscious … while slyly navigating obscenity laws in the process. “As long as whatever was not nude, it evidently was legal. But legal or not, it seemed to me many times sexier, far more naughty than had it been bare,” Bidgood told an interview from AnOther Man in 2019. ”It is very often what you don’t see that is the greater turn-on because your mind fills in the blanks with what that particular viewer hopes they would discover.”
Watching “Pink Narcissus” again in its glorious new restoration, I’m seduced all over again by how coy it all seems — even the more vulgar Times Square sequence, a parody of the decadent city he so loved, featuring Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, as the abortionist and the man selling “pissicles.” A quarter-century has passed since my first viewing (and 54 years since the film was initially released), and now, it’s virtually impossible to avoid X-rated imagery, which spams our inboxes and ambushes our Google searches.
Meanwhile, Bidgood’s influence is more apparent than ever. Whatever Bidgood’s intentions may have been in assembling his own footage, Sadoff didn’t ruin his vision so much as the director imagined. By embracing an experimental, avant-garde style and layering it with a trippy musical score (which includes classical pieces played backward), the theatrical cut anticipates the techniques now associated with MTV a decade later. No wonder musicians have taken inspiration from Bidgood’s aesthetic.
Guest editing Dazed in 2019, Charli XCX confessed to being “really obsessed” with “Pink Narcissus,” explaining, “I would always use both Pierre et Gilles and James Bidgood as references for music videos and photo shoots.” The same clearly goes for Little Nas X, who puts himself at the center of the gaze Bidgood once lavished upon Kendall, constructing sets that are exponentially kitschier than anything seen in “Pink Narcissus.”
Given that Bidgood eventually claimed authorship for the film, you’d hope that he enjoyed some kind of financial success, but like the models he so modestly compensated for their work, Bidgood saw very little money for “Pink Narcissus.” Preferring to remain anonymous, the muse he’d christened “Bobby Kendall” went to college, moved away and got married — though he stayed in touch with Bidgood over the years.
“Ya know, because of all that sissy scenery in that ‘Narcissus’ thing, I guess people expect me to be lounging around in a silk caftan, face powdered and rouged with 20 yards of orchid chiffon draped around my neck, with my bong and a few boys by my pool,” Bidgood told Butt magazine in 2010. Instead, he lived in poverty, unable to pay his rent on Social Security alone. McKaig helped out, arranging art shows and such, and Christian Louboutin hired Bidgood to photograph his shoes in his signature style. Queer director Ira Sachs invited Bidgood to appear as an extra in his films “Keep the Lights On” and “Love Is Strange” before his death in 2022.
Alas, Bidgood’s latter years were a far cry from the daydreams he cast in “Pink Narcissus,” even if the apartment was the same. Thanks to celluloid, and those dedicated to preserving it, however, the fantasy lives on forever.
