Visionary Hollywood director and artist has passed away at the age of 96. He is truly iconic for his love of Hollywood, his experimental films, and his contributions to queer cinema. Let's celebrate and life and art of the one and only Kenneth Anger.
Kenneth was born in Santa Monica, California, where he spent a lot of time with his grandmother who had worked as a hairdresser in Hollywood. He was always openly gay and openly networking - as is the Hollywood way. He bragged of being friends with everyone from The Rolling Stones to Tennessee Williams to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey to Satanist Anton Lavey. Kenneth knew no boundaries when it came to who he wanted to get to know and he spent most of his career pushing the buttons and boundaries of audiences around the world.
He made his first film when he was only 9 years old and he experimented with short films that had queer things (implicit and explicit) throughout his career. Often his films were too much for mainstream audiences, but he earned a lot of acclaim in the underground art world and his work would come to be recognized later in his life.
He spent his time as a young man experimenting with the camera and making fantastic contributions to the underground world. His most famous shorts were made in the 50s and 60s and included Scorpio Rising and L'histoire d'O. In 1972 he made Lucifer Rising and showed off the barenaked body of Hayden Couts in this skintastic short. Those films were also heavily influenced by the occult, a hobby interest for Kenneth in the 60s and 70s.
We love one of his earliest works best: 1947's Fireworks. In this daring, black-and-white queer film he shows off his own bare chest as well as the bodies of Gordon Gray and Bill Seltzer. The film is 15 minutes of black-and-white sadomasochism as two sailors titillate one another. You will certainly love checking out these seamen!
Fireworks actually got him arrested for obscenity despite the fact that it is now revered as an essential film in queer cinema history.
He is quite famous for publishing the book Hollywood Babylon in 1965. This gossip-filled book was inspired by stories that he grew up hearing from his grandmother as well as well-tread gossip that stars used to share with him as a young man. He published the book as fact! The podcast You Must Remember This does a fantastic series on the book where she debunks some stories...and tells the real and sometimes more salacious versions of events that Anger left out for whatever reason. The book caused a HUGE stir, but that did not stop him from releasing part two 20 years later. Leave it Anger to do that kind of thing.
In 1996, he was awarded the Maya Deren Award by the American Film Institute. It's an award given to innovators in experimental and underground filmmaking. He passed away peacefully and will forever be remembered for being an iconoclast who made huge impacts on experimental and queer cinema - as well as culture as a whole!
