Cary Kehayan | In Search of Avery Willard / 2012

cerberus: avery willard as gay filmmaker

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cary Kehayan (director) In Search of Avery Willard / 2012

 

I begin not with the films but a basic primer about the filmmaker / photographer / gay event producer Avery Willard of which so little is still known.

      Strangely enough, I probably even met him at one time or another since I regularly visited the Christopher Street Bookstore, actually not much of bookstore, but an underground gay room for which you paid the man behind the counter for entry into several rooms where other gay men were waiting for the right person to come along to have sex. I often found that “right” person and, in fact, had the very best blow job of my life in that dark, damp space sometime in 1969, a period in which Willard worked there.

      For Willard the Christopher Street Bookstore was a kind of cover for his real careers, which few knew about except for those invited to his special showings and performances. From the 1940s on Willard photographed major movie and theater stars, including photographs which his friends found in a closet of hundreds of notables such as Butterfly McQueen, Billy Holliday, Anthony Quinn, and Barbra Streisand; while otherwise organizing drag shows at Club 84; and gradually through his own name and Ava-Graph Films label and beginning in the 1970s under the pseudonym of Bruce King, making films that straddled porn and experimental art films. Yet as one of the historians speaking in this film perceptively points out, while others of day—such as Bob Mizer, Kenneth Anger, and even Andy Warhol were still presenting gay life as a metaphor, for Willard it was literal. The gay body in its sexual manifestation was at the center of his films.

      Focusing on leather boys and other tough costumed types, Willard’s films were most definitely for those who enjoy the male body and liked to watch their figures get an erection and masturbate right through ejaculation or show off their asses and fuck. That he often did this with gay boys as superimpositions against city lights, masturbating boys starring at mirrors or engaging in staged theatrical events, and finally turning their essence into multiple images or abstractions permitted his work to still be seen as semi-art rather than pure pornography.

      It appears, however, that the montages, mirrored-images, color interventions, and outright cinematic abstract images were not added to get past the censors, but were an essential part of what fascinated Willard about filmmaking. He was after all, a first-rate photographer, and his porn films incorporated that history and his adoration of theatrical drag queen accessories.  

      That he was never arrested for the latter, however, was not the result of his artistic interventions, but because of the fact he never widely screened his films and most of them still today, languishing in the New York Public Library special collections, are awaiting transfer to DVD. Many of the films shown in Kehayan’s documentary are not readily available for viewing.

      As those who knew him personally, among them fellow filmmaker James Bidgood, the former drag queen Adrian (Henry Arango), and Agosto Machado, interviewed in Kehayan’s film all assert, Willard didn’t really care whether or not others saw works such Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils (1965), starring Adrian as Salome in drag or his leather suited studs in Gay Boys (1940), Reflections (1966), Dream Boy (1966), Leather Narcissus (1967), and Clouds (1971), all made before he turned to actual porn productions under the Bruce King moniker.

        All of his friends agree that although Willard went about his business with a surety that no one else quite possessed in those days, he was not particularly friendly or even well-liked. Almost everyone “dished him,” and many wanted nothing to do with him. Moreover, it appears he has few obvious sexual contacts accept perhaps with his models. He clearly did not seek out deeper relationships, but like his films moved quickly on time and again to the next one, the next model, the next way he which he might satisfy his ever-changing desires. It is appropriate surely that he served as a kind of Cerberus to the underworld of quick sexual desire. He seemed friendly, once paid, as he greeted even a 21-year-old boy such as me to what others might describe as a hell of lust.

      As one historian of three presented in this film, John Cox, Jeffrey Escoffier and  Joe E. Jeffrey puts it, Willard’s work is a messy amalgam of seemingly oppositional images, the male dressed and performing as females and the male pretending to be one of the macho straight men of the world of motorbikes, firemen, cops, and hustlers—both pretenders not unlike the characters of Warhol’s world behaving a bit like Warhol’s camp model dancer Paul Swann, men so devoted to their fantasies that their performance of the lives becomes an expression of camp.

      Bigood laments the fact that Willard did not at all attempt to permit entry in his art by the heterosexual world—except perhaps for the commonly straight audiences of Club 82, who as Adrian laughs, often sent their wives home and enjoyed an evening out of late night sex. But that was clearly his intention, to serve a coterie of admirers interested in precisely what he was interested in, but who sadly never quite showed up for his events—at least until years later, long after Stonewall when the LGBTQ community began looking back at the men and women who had helped to pave the way for their existence. If he was bitter, as one commentor believes he was, Willard had reason to be, a great photographer forgotten and a dynamic pioneer of the gay world ignored.

      As I suggest, most of Willard’s works are still not readily available. Clips of all the movies listed above do appear in this documentary, but they hardly do justice to the actual works themselves. I have found copies of two of the films, which I discuss below. 

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2022)