San Francisco Bay Guardian

Berlin and beyond

An icon of sex — and the biggest Peter in San Francisco — reemerges from the shadows.

By Johnny Ray Huston

johnny@sfbg.com

I know my way around an interview, but I'll admit I'm nervous as I take the elevator up to the fifth floor of an apartment building in the Lower Haight and walk through the decoratively carpeted and stucco-walled hallway to Peter Berlin's front door.

Peter Berlin: Dutch Boy haircut and tight pants showcasing a horn o' plenty. The superior inspiration behind Owen "Butterscotch Stallion" Wilson's Hansel character in Zoolander. If you're a fan of the splendor of man, then entering the house of Berlin — a shrine of self-tribute to an icon of sex — is like going to Valhalla. Director Jim Tushinski makes the trip in the new documentary That Man: Peter Berlin, and what he emerges with is a bit surprising: a teasing and ultimately tender portrait of a modest, vain, playful, and stern youth of 60-and-a-few years named Armin von Hoyningen-Heune — that man behind Peter Berlin.

Who is Peter Berlin? He's a trailblazer from the burgeoning gay liberation era of the early '70s. He's the star of two feature films and the creator of hundreds of stylized photos that might even be able to teach Cocteau a thing or two about Narcissus. He's a legend of San Francisco for his street appearance alone. A caricature come to life, foolishly mistaken for a "dumb blond," Berlin is the epitome of that oft-mocked species, the male sex symbol. "Male beauties have the hardest time in American pop culture," Susie Bright recently wrote in her blog, going on to note that not just gay men, but "anyone who takes an interest ... in masculine eroticism" should learn from the boundary-pushing bravery of Berlin's expressive — rather than merely exhibitionistic — personality.

That Man has no shortage of important names and colorful commentators eager to sound off about Berlin. John Waters likens Berlin to the Jayne Mansfield of The Girl Can't Help It. Armistead Maupin compares him to Emperor Norton as an icon of San Francisco. Tushinski's doc explores Berlin's family ties to fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Heune. It also covers his artistic ties to Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Tom of Finland. Yet some of the best quotes come from the film's subject. Proud possessor of the kind of intelligence and wisdom that doesn't come from books, that man, whose picture could be placed in a dictionary next to the definition of narcissism, has plenty to say about subjects other than himself.

Perhaps it is Armin who answers the door this sunny morning — offering to make me some tea as classical music prances from the speakers of his stereo — but we'll call him Peter Berlin. We pass through the beaded curtain of his kitchen nook, a division more clearly marked and easier to recognize than a shift to an alter ego. The man in Tushinski's doc comes off a bit cooler and more forbidding than the one I encounter. But Tushinski had the formidable task of filming a master of his own visual image. I merely have to turn on a tape recorder and listen closely.

"Now that I'm getting older, I realize that the sexual element of life is just one element," Berlin says, his trademark Dutch Boy a sandier shade than the platinum look he sports in Tushinski's doc. "But it is a very great and important one that is neglected by everything from Hollywood to porn. The whole trouble of the human race is a complete misunderstanding of sexuality. They have twisted it into something so outrageous and against human nature. Now, there's a lot of talk about sex, but very few people have a good time."

"Thank god I didn't grow up with religion," he quips. "The Muslim, the Christians, and everyone have a problem with the dick. To advocate what I believe in, I would have to abolish the Church and burn the Bible. But say that openly, and see what happens."

Berlin may be handsomely attired in a pair of camouflage pants, but he doesn't hesitate to expound on a pacifist philosophy: "If they said, 'Peter Berlin will be on TV for one minute,' I'd say, 'Just listen to me. Tomorrow, all of you — stay home. Don't go to work.' I would go to extremes — even the doctors and surgeons too. People would die, but in general it would be better. I'd like to see what would happen to the crime rate and to people being killed in war — the number would go to zero. And not only would I say not to go to work, I'd say, 'Don't talk.' No more misunderstandings. Today you get stabbed for using the wrong word." Interesting proposition, even if Dick Cheney is too busy shooting people to offer a rebuttal.

"A friend told me, 'When you're interviewed, be light and fluffy,' " he adds with a wry smile. "I have a tendency to get too heavy."

We take our tea into the main room of the apartment, where Berlin promptly shows me a dresser drawer full of hundreds of sex-charged, self-made tapes spanning some 25 years. Caps, riding crops, lava lights, and photographs of Peter Berlin and his lovers surround us. An enormous bed plays the role of sun within the room's cosmology. A TV is a crucial nearby satellite. "You know the film Being There with Peter Sellars?" he asks, perched on the bed's edge. "It's a beautiful film where he just watches television. I used to watch All in the Family and M.A.S.H. and Frasier. Now there is nothing I want to see — except maybe Jon Stewart in the evening."

Berlin's friend Lawrence Helman — a local publicist integral to the making of That Man — had already told me that Berlin liked to watch TV, claiming that Oprah and Judge Judy ("maybe for the S&M") were two of his favorites. A few days later, Jack Shamama, one of the cocreators of Gaypornblog.com, offered an interesting theory about the effect one sitcom might have had on Berlin's filmmaking. "Is the title of [Berlin's 1974 film] That Boy a Marlo Thomas reference?" he wondered. "I feel like there are specific shots in That Boy that match the opening credits in That Girl."

That Boy was Peter Berlin's feature-length directorial debut. But Berlin the film star made his anywhere's-a-boudoir bow in 1973's Nights in Black Leather, where he's a campy glam rock, West Coast counterpart to Warhol's "Little" Joe Dallesandro — the ass crack of his jeans is appliquéd, but he usually presents a crotch cornucopia instead of Joe's hot buns. Ignatio Rutkowski is credited as director, yet Berlin's flair for costume, set design, and shot composition dominates. His look is inextricably linked to San Francisco sites ranging from the Art Institute to Land's End; in one shot, he's even paired with a phallic Coit Tower. When a stranger calls Berlin, purple verbal kinks on a red telephone ensue. Berlin's sex appeal is dominated by the lure and the tease. Still, there are hardcore payoffs.

Shot in Eastman Color in 1974, the rainbow-varied That Boy gets off on visual pleasure rather than physical contact — laying eyes on someone rather than laying them — even if it begins essentially where Nights ends, with the sound of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. While freaks from the Angels of Light fly around nearby, Berlin parades his "huge organ of pleasure" past various Polk Street landmarks of the time: the Wherehouse, the Leland Hotel, the Royal. As "Helmut," Berlin finds a "friend" with "warmth and understanding" in a beautiful boy who had sex with him shortly before becoming blind — someone whose vision of Berlin will remain frozen like a photograph. An angry voyeur stalks them. In the most amazing sequence, Helmut performs a striptease for a photographer. He takes off tight white pants to reveal black leather trunks. Beneath those trunks is a thinner pair of white shorts. Beneath those shorts is a leather jock, which covers a white cloth jock, which Berlin then discards to reveal the final fetish, a leather-and-mesh number. "[That Boy] required 1,300 cuts, and I'd never edited before," Berlin says. "Everything I do is self-taught. It's the same with the way my pants are cut. I took them apart and put them back together."

Berlin's two features deserve a place in the gay porn pantheon as classics of the genre's most artistic and utopian era. Whereas Fred Halsted's 1972 L.A. Plays Itself moves from an Edenic pastoral setting to the violent city, Nights in Black Leather follows almost an opposite trajectory. A more potent comparison might be drawn between That Boy and James Bidgood's 1971 Pink Narcissus. That Boy is more vérité, but as Pink's title makes clear, both films aestheticize-to-the-max the same theme. They also share a love of sheer-white trunks and trousers. Most of all, their "what you see is what you never quite get" approach — taking exhibitionism and voyeurism to another dimension — repeatedly floats from rhapsody back to reality. As one might guess from his array of underwear, Berlin specializes in wrapping one fantasy within another.

"You are right," Berlin says, when I bring up the similarities between That Boy and Pink Narcissus. "I'm glad you mentioned that film — it's beautiful." This agreement doesn't come lightly, as throughout That Man and during our conversation, he's prone to dismiss all talk of influences or artistic kinship. "I don't think a good porno film has been made yet; it's all minor stuff," he declares when I first bring up the subject. "It takes one second for me to look at porn and get bored. I don't see what I want."

In other words, gay porn hasn't followed in the footsteps of Peter Berlin to artistically explore the psychology — the inner dimensions — of sex. "His eroticism is not about penetration or humping," Helman says. "You watch a Peter Berlin film to see what he's wearing, his hair, and what he'd do to get people to want to look at him. It wasn't just, 'Here's my dick.' That's very unusual now. Porn today is like, 'Hi, let me see your asshole,' then fuck, fuck, fuck."

Not everyone thinks Berlin's aesthetic has been lost to time, though. "Peter Berlin's awareness of the camera is one of his most enduring erotic legacies," says Michael Stabile, who cocreated the porn soap Wet Palms with his fellow gaypornblog.com contributor Shamama. "So often, both consumers and detractors of porn imagine the actors on screens as passive exploited bodies. Berlin, on the other hand, reveled in the attention of the camera. His love-it-or-leave-it stance not only presages the cannier [gay] porn stars of today such as Johnny Hazzard, Cory Koons, and Owen Hawk, but also the punk antics of post-portrait fashion models like Gia, Naomi Campbell, and Jenny Shimizu."

If Peter Berlin is an emblem of the '70s, he was also ahead of his time. For his influence as a designer, 2[x]ist and other men's underwear companies should pay him a portion of their profits. Even more obviously, Berlin's specialty of sexual self-representation has become almost ordinary now that gay male cruising has become virtually synonymous with digital pic-taking and pic-trading. Of course, you could troll every hook-up site and porn star blog from here to eternity and you wouldn't find a looker who could look at himself with the flair of Berlin, whose double-exposure still portraits alone deserve a major gallery show. That hasn't happened here in San Francisco, though of all the aspects of Peter Berlin's return, he's happiest about the great success of the Berlin photography and painting exhibit on display through Feb. 25 at Leslie/Lohman Gallery in New York.

Where has Peter Berlin been the last 30 or so years? In That Man, photographer Rick Castro likens him to Greta Garbo — he never really went away; it's just that when, say, Jean-Paul Gautier phoned to ask him to be a spokesmodel, the act of returning the call filled him with insurmountable fatigue. Peter Berlin was alive and cruising in San Francisco; he just couldn't be bothered to step back into the public eye. "I [used to] have Peter Berlin sightings," Helman says. "He'd be walking his dog, or at the supermarket. It was like seeing a cartoon character. You don't think of Superman at the Safeway buying milk."

"Now, you're not talking to Peter Berlin," Berlin says, when the subject of his identities comes up. "Peter Berlin wouldn't talk to you; he would have a good time. That's the difference." Soon after that, he embarks on a description of one of Berlin's good times, which still take place in the room where we're sitting. "One thing that would be interesting for everybody to watch is me getting ready for sex," he says. "I change my room. Here's a mirror [he points], there's a mirror, and I have a lot of black lights — I do all the staging. Then I get dressed. Sometimes I hide my eyes [with sunglasses] — I love to take personality away from the image. I'll put a leather strap here. The camera should just show the reality. Then I call my guy, he takes a shower and comes over, and I dress him up."

The Peter Berlin type — blond, blue-eyed — isn't really my fantasy. The type of guy he seduces and dominates in his films is closer to my taste. Yet as Berlin — who, as That Man makes clear, still gets called "cute" on the street today — launches into this monologue, setting the scene, I'm certainly aware that I'm sitting in the middle of it, almost directly encountering Peter Berlin's pick-up tricks. That man hasn't lost it; he still knows how to cast a spell.

But Berlin has lost the love of his life, and more than once. That Man rather suddenly taps into deep pain when he discusses the final moments he spent with his lover, referred to by Berlin only as James, after the latter — losing a battle with HIV — took a fatal dose of morphine. James wasn't the first to live with the man behind Peter Berlin (the documentary also briefly touches on a relationship with Jochim Labriola, who died in 1988), and he wasn't the last. In January, on the very day Berlin went to New York to celebrate his gallery show and the theatrical premiere of That Man, his friend Bryce, whose picture graces more than one shelf in Berlin's apartment, died at San Francisco General.

Earlier on in my visit, without knowing what had just happened, I point out the emotion that is evident in a close-up photograph of Bryce's face. "Oh, I tell you, he was pained," Berlin says with a grimace. "It kills me to see people suffering. Once in a while he was fine and I would hear him laugh, but that laughter is gone now too, and that's why I don't want to think about it. The tears — they always stay right here."

He spreads some newspaper clippings about That Man across his bed. A large, gold-framed portrait of a reclining Berlin — sporting a few dark traces of a time when Bryce went on an angry spree within the apartment, even painting the TV screen black — hangs over the headboard. We look at a review in the conservative New York Post. "Queen Latifah [in Last Holiday], two and a half stars — I get three stars," he marvels, then jokes, "I must be really great, no?"

As I page through a box of artwork, Berlin plays me some answering machine messages as "an interesting sound accompaniment." I hear the voice of Bryce calling from the hospital, a message from a doctor after Berlin visited Bryce, some birthday wishes from That Man director Tushinski, and a call from Berlin's sister in Germany about her plans to join him during his New York visit. The last message is from a nurse: "[Bryce] has passed away."

Berlin then briefly shows me a shelf full of hundreds of photos in his closet, each picture as striking as the last. The surplus of visual material crammed into every inch of space is overwhelming. We walk into another room in the apartment and look at the small but intricately decorated altarlike bed where first James, and then Bryce, often slept. "If I could find a person who likes to edit, and who likes the Peter Berlin thing, I would move him in here, because now I have the space and equipment," he says.

"That would be my dream lover," he says. "He can be 100 years old and fat."

" 'Peter, keep it light and fluffy.' I'll never forget that." *

The opening-night screening of That Man: Peter Berlin includes a gala benefit for the GLBT Historical Society featuring Heklina, Veronica Klaus, a special appearance by Peter Berlin, and the first-ever Peter Berlin look-alike contest.

THAT MAN: PETER BERLIN

Fri/17–Thurs/23

Call for times (opening night gala 7:30 p.m.)

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

$5–$8, gala and screening $25