Gallery Carre
Peter Berlin made a work of art out of his sex life. He’s in his 60s now, but only the times have changed. (SFGate)
Feb 15th, 2006 by Viviane
In a fifth-story apartment filled with sunshine, vintage porn star and gay icon Peter Berlin pulls out two deep drawers filled with hundreds of videotapes.
“This,” he says, sweeping his hand across the tapes, “is my sex life.” He says he plans to use the videos — most of them featuring him pleasuring himself while watching videos of himself — in a future film.
Peter Berlin’s sex life is Peter Berlin’s life, period. An iconic figure of the ’70s and ’80s in his skintight leather pants and pageboy haircut, he’s made two cult porn classics, been drawn by Tom of Finland and photographed by Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe. But as Jim Tushinski’s documentary, “That Man: Peter Berlin” (opening Friday at the Castro Theatre) shows, his greatest notoriety comes from his own erotic self-portraiture — and his greatest achievement is a talent for turning himself into an ambulatory work of art.
As befits a work of art, Berlin’s apartment looks like a museum. Photographs and paintings from his 20th century heyday line the walls; multimedia equipment spanning three decades sits stacked around a large-screen TV; a mirror hangs at an angle to the bed. In a corner, an incongruous jar of pennies bows a shelf lined with photography books.
“I collect pennies in memory of four men,” Berlin explains. “When I find one on the street, I say their names: Joachim, Victor, Guy, James.”
At 63, Berlin has outlived a host of friends and lovers. He looks younger than his age in jeans and a flannel shirt, and slighter than one might expect from his pictures. He still has that mop of hair, though it’s thin on top. He admits he hates aging — hates it — but doesn’t mind being surrounded by images of his blonder, buffer self. Taking pictures of himself has been his life’s passion.
“One day I looked at a camera and said, ‘I have found my dream lover,’ ” he says, sprawling across his black bedspread. “He just looks at me, doesn’t talk back, doesn’t ask stupid questions, he doesn’t touch me wrong. I fell in love with a machine, a robot.”
Berlin in fact has one other dream lover. Cruising in Paris one night in the ’60s, Berlin saw him approaching and fell instantly in love. Then he realized he was looking at his own reflection in a store window.
“Every guy I meet is in competition with myself,” he says. “I get into my persona. I look at myself; I have sex with myself.”
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