It's a kind of magick. (GIF via GIPHY)
Kenneth Anger is 96 years old today — and if you had to predict which noted figures would come close to 100 years old, he wouldn't have been one of them.
From an early age, Anger was in trouble with the police (he was caught up in a gay bathroom sting) and making uncompromisingly queer movies featuring imagery that was unabashedly gay and that often more than dabbled in the occult.
He made his first film at 10 in 1937, but destroyed all his work before his 1947 short Fireworks, in which he also starred. It is mind-blowing how gay it is, 20+ years before Stonewall. Some of his other work was blatantly gay, too, most notably Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos, both made in the '60s.
Here's a little taste:
@boyculturedotcom LOOK BACK IN ANGER: The Work of Queer Filmmaker Kenneth Anger, 96, Will Blow Your Mind
♬ original sound - Matthew Rettenmund/BoyCulture
Now, Anger's work has all been restored and resides with the Library of Congress. Something of which he remains proud is the fact that he never sold out ... in his chosen medium. He did, to get money quickly, write the 1959 book Hollywood Babylon, published initially only in France. Filled with lurid Hollywood urban legends (some seemingly created on the spot by Anger himself, not merely repeated), the book struck me as an antidote to Hollywood bullshit and artifice. But it's an overcorrection, filled with completely made-up nonsense and malicious fantasies. The death of Lupe Velez is particularly grotesquely distorted, some would argue in a racist way.
Then there's Anger's joke that he is to the right of the KKK. Considering his films make loving use of prominent Black vocalists, it seems preposterous that he'd really be an avowed racist (Kustom Kar Kommandos's alliteration aside), but it was at best an unfortunate wisecrack.
More interesting to me is how original his work is. Though he was inspired by Surrealism, no one had done anything quite like what he did before, and no resources of which to speak. And when he made for himself a chance to have this voice, he went out of his way to incorporate his gay sensibility. That took guts.
Many are turned off by his infatuation with the occult, but I find it interesting, if only for the iconography. All the righties think gays are into Lucifer, but I think Anger's the only one I ever knew of!
More on Anger here:
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