LOS ANGELES — Erotic icon Peter Berlin — an influencer decades before the term was defined — has shed some of his carefully guarded privacy for the launch of a new book, “Peter Berlin: Icon, Artist, Photosexual.”
Berlin’s erotic filmography was slight — “Nights in Black Leather” in 1973 and “That Boy” in ‘74 — but massively influential. (A 2005 documentary by filmmaker Jim Tushinski, titled “That Man: Peter Berlin,” has become a cult favorite.)
The new book trains a spotlight on the “innumerable photographs, paintings and illustrations” featuring and created by Berlin and “pays tribute to the man who revolutionized the landscape of gay male eroticism and become an international sensation… a gay sex symbol and a walking work of art,” enthused a publishing rep.
“Cruising was his career, and with a background in photography, Berlin began taking thousands of erotic self-portraits in the parks, train stations and streets of Berlin, Rome, Paris, New York and San Francisco, where he settled in the early 1970s. As Berlin put it, ‘One day I looked at a camera and said, ‘I have found my dream lover.’”
The icon, now 76, was the guest of honor at a recent launch party where he carried “a photo of his younger face tacked to the top of a wooden tongue depressor,” observed a writer for New York Magazine's TheCut.com.
Berlin, although aware of his status as an elder statesman for several generations of gay men, has experienced what TheCut terms “a crisis of faith: the reality that the world never embraced his utopic idea of sexual freedom, cruising and sex. He sees the world as being robbed of pleasure by politics, jobs and responsibilities. ‘I never had a drive but getting laid,’ he says. ‘Getting out and having a good time. So, I had a fabulous life.’”
Ever the raconteur, Berlin remains hopeful he can inspire the citizenry to embrace a life focused on self-pleasure and “blatant sexuality.” His “single remaining fantasy,” he tells TheCut, is to see a biopic brought to fruition, “a complete account of his life stretching back to his mother fleeing from Russia.”
("I spent an hour in former gay porn star Peter Berlin’s hotel room talking sexual utopias, nude selfies and aging; per Berlin, we should quit working, dress like him and go get laid!" observed TheCut journalist Brock Colyar on Twitter.)
Click here for the story on TheCut.
"Peter Berlin: Icon, Artist, Photosexual," published in November by Damiani, is now available.
