Peter Berlin on the art of cruising in Fire Island
After our recent post on the art collective PaJaMa, I visited ClampArt to check out some early drawings by Paul Cadmus. Covering every wall of the gallery were striking self-portraits by Peter Berlin, dressed in outfits designed to enhance his various states of sexual provocation and tumescence. Who was this self-appointed sex god who mastered the art of ‘the selfie’ decades years before smartphones made them ubiquitous? I got talking to the owner who explained the story a man born ‘Baron Armin Hagen von Hoyningen-Huene’ who became ‘Peter Berlin’ while cruising San Francisco and New York in the early '70s.
“Is there a Fire Island connection?” I naïvely asked. He showed me the famous photo Robert Mapplethorpe took of Peter Berlin on the boardwalk in Fire Island. “He’s still alive, you know. Do you want me to put the two of you in touch?”
A week later I’m on the phone with him from his home in San Francisco. He’s now living the quiet life as Armin Huene, having retired ‘Peter Berlin’ a long time ago.
We talked for over an hour about his memories on Fire Island with Robert Mapplethorpe, his thoughts on open relationships, and the art of cruising.
- John Dempsey
Peter Berlin shared with Pines Historical Society some rarely-seen photos taken on Fire Island.
“Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe had a house on the island that they rented for the season. On Monday, everybody else had to go back to work. Not me. I could go and do whatever I wanted, it was amazing”
Photographer, filmmaker, porn star, and exhibitionist, Peter Berlin evades categorization; he is simply one of the greatest queer sex symbols of the 20th century. And while he is responsible for some of the most arresting gay imagery ever made, his work was never limited to the still or moving homage–his entire life was a performance. He embodied the persona he created 24 hours a day. He was a living, breathing, cruising work of art.
By the time Peter Berlin arrived in Fire Island in the mid ‘70s, he was already famous.
Starting in the early 70s, he began photographing himself in erotic poses and making skin-tight clothes to wear as he cruised the parks and train stations of Berlin, and the streets of Rome, Paris, New York and San Francisco. He became an embodiment of the strutting ‘70s male sexuality in clothing of his own design.
The Dutch pageboy haircut. The skin-tight leather pants. That impossible-to-miss bulge. In the 1970s, Peter Berlin became an object of obsession as big—and as larger-than-life—as Marilyn Monroe or Mae West, making him arguably the first openly and overtly gay sex symbol of the modern age.
Born Armin Hagen Freiherr von Hoyningen-Huene during the war in German-occupied Poland and raised in Berlin, the future Peter Berlin experimented with clothing, arousal, and exhibitionism from an early age. In his early 20s, he worked as a photographer for an interview program on German television, photographing some of Europe's celebrities and film stars, including Alfred Hitchcock, Catherine Deneuve, and Bridgette Bardot.
Upon moving to San Francisco in his early 30s, his super-powered libido, spectacular narcissism, and a lust for exhibitionism came together in a perfect storm to create Peter Berlin.
From then on, he lived his life as his sexual alter-ego, and he took on his new identity with militant dedication. Normal clothes were not sheer enough nor tight enough for his needs. He started designing himself looks that simultaneously concealed and revealed everything.
Fifty years before “the selfie” he began making erotic self-portraits, capturing himself nude or in hyper-sexual, self-made outfits. From the start, capturing his own image was central to his sexual expression. During the height of his cruising period, his entire life revolved around the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Each day he would go out, select a target, and draw them into his world. Naturally they would bite and, once caught, he would move on, knowing they would follow, a process that could go on for hours.
“My life was cruising — where should I go today or where should I go tonight? Cruising, cruising, cruising. Out in Fire Island after we’d go to dinner parties, the meat rack would be very popular.”
For Peter, cruising was about looking and lusting, rarely about touching or even talking–”If you talk, everything can be destroyed…Silence is exciting.” His practice nurtured a new sexual philosophy, which transformed sex into a purely visual experience.
His enthralling persona caught the attention of all the major artists of the day: Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe photographed him, and Tom of Finland uncharacteristically accepted a commission by Peter to create a now famous collection of drawings that feature him.
Peter Berlin paid Tom of Finland $400 for a series of drawings of him in various cruising scenes.
A signature of Berlin’s work is the use of double-exposures, allowing him to appear twice, creating the illusion of two Peter Berlins seducing each other–he did this so successfully people often asked if he had a twin.
His activities culminated in two landmark erotic films: Nights in Black Leather (1973) and That Boy (1974). The success of these films burned his identity into the psyche of gay men all over the world and empowered them to embrace their own sexuality.
Peter Berlin has achieved immortality through the persona he created, taking an obsession with his own image and making it our own.