More than Man Enough

I first became aware of Buck Angel nearly two decades ago, while perusing videos on TitanMen.com (I’m a patron of the arts). Buck was featured in the 2005 video Cirque Noir (only watch at work if you’ve already turned in your two weeks’ notice), but the trailer is very discreet about what makes Buck stand out from his porn star brethren. I ultimately passed on the video because fisting, but the Cirque Noir trailer did pique my interest in this Buck Angel guy. That’s when learned Buck Angel is not like other men.

Buck Angel is “a man with a pussy.”

I’ll admit my interest in Buck Angel the porn star pretty much ended there (I like dick, OK?), but several years later, when director Dan Hunt’s 2013 documentary MR. ANGEL hit Prime, I decided to learn more about Buck Angel the man, for reasons I’ll elaborate on later.

Like the Cirque Noir trailer, the first few minutes of Mr. Angel are coy about what makes its subject unique. Scenes of Buck in the shower, shot from the shoulders up, touching up his bald pate with a razor are intercut with home movie footage of Buck as a little girl, let us know he’s trans, and Buck lets a Berlin cab driver (and audience) know that he’s in the sex industry, telling the driver that he prefers Berlin’s openness with sexuality (“[The U.S. is] very scared of naked people,” he laughs). It’s not until Buck arrives at his Berlin destination, the Venus Show, where a life-size poster of him nude adorns the wall of his booth, that the audience learns what made Buck unique among porn performers of that time.

Buck Angel’s beauty regimen.

At first, he seems surprised by the poster or, rather, that event organizers went with such a graphic image, but he’s happy with their choice as it confronts attendees at the Venus Show with his exceptional anatomy. “With pants on I just look like a dude.”

Buck Angel with his co-workers.

Just another day at the Venus Show.

It’s getting to know the Buck Angel with his pants on that is the primary focus of the documentary. Though there are many segments focusing on Buck Angel, porn performer, Mr. Angel is not a porn documentary. Instead, it shows audiences that while Buck may not have the genitals of a cis-gendered man, and his job isn’t a typical 9-5 office gig, he is, basically, just a dude, albeit one who must see a gynecologist.

Buck’s a pretty likable guy. Quick to laugh, thoughtful and, considering some of the shit he’s had to deal with, remarkably positive. I mean, these people might not like him but fuck them.

Bored now.

Yet even in the world of adult entertainment people can’t see the man for the pussy. A meeting Buck has with Lucas Entertainment founder Michael Lucas proves disheartening, the pouty-lipped porn star/mogul, who has made a video catering to fart fetishists, sees little market value in videos featuring a man with female genitalia. No cock, no sale.

“Just because I have a pussy does not make me not a man,” Buck says, later asserting, “I’m not an ‘it.’”

For the record, Buck says he decided against bottom surgery because penises created in the operating theater just aren’t up to snuff. Given that phalloplasty sounds like a grueling ordeal to go through only to wind up with dick that can’t even get hard without use of a prosthetic, it’s easy to see why he’s better off just using a strap-on.

Buck shows off his tattoos.

Still, it’s not easy for people to understand how someone can identify as one gender while having the parts of another. I certainly didn’t, which is what led me to watch this documentary initially. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite get the message my first watch.

Learning I was the Asshole from a Man with a Pussy

I don’t come out well in this story, but here goes. Way back in 2012, my husband and I were having lunch with some friends. At the table was a friend who came out as trans a year earlier. I’ll call him Frank. Frank was in town for the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta, and he mentioned seeing Buck Angel, who was a featured guest at the conference that year. This is when I decided to make what I thought was good point: “But Buck Angel still has a vagina. Would ‘he’ even count as a trans man?”

Yes, I said that. Aloud.

Buck Angel is poised and ready to blow narrow minds.

It was a stupid comment. I know this now. It was uttered in ignorance, not malice. This probably doesn’t make it better, but I kind of meant it as a joke. Frank, however, didn’t take it that way. “Why should that even matter!?” he asked angrily, and a bit too loudly for my comfort. I, in turn, reacted like a Boomer comedian told his rape joke was offensive and tried to justify my wrong-headed observation (i.e., that unless a person got top and bottom surgery, they were merely transvestites), which only made Frank more indignant. I recall someone else at the table—not my husband, BTW—making a clumsy attempt to defend me, but all that did was draw fire until someone else mercifully changed the subject.

My ignorant comment was a teachable moment. If society is grappling with the concept of nonbinary identities now, they weren’t even acknowledged in 2012. We didn’t even know the word nonbinary existed. Even within the LGBTQ+ community there was a reluctance to embrace the “Ts.” Unfortunately, instead of explaining the dynamics of gender identity, Frank chose to dress me down for being a transphobe. The lesson I learned that day? Don’t talk to trans people.

I didn’t say much for the remainder of that lunch, and I was the first to announce our departure (my husband had to leave with me; I was his ride). Months later, when there was another get-together occasioned by Frank being in town, I declined to attend. In fact, a full year passed before I agreed to be in the same room as Frank, and while he didn’t appear to have any hard feelings—our previous interaction was never even brought up—I was still wary, and chose my words carefully in his presence, if I spoke at all.

MTF performer Wendy Williams and
FTM performer Buck Angel are about to
fuck with viewers’ minds in Buck Fever.

That humiliating lunch with Frank was very much on my mind when I decided to watch Mr. Angel the first time. Consequently, I was less interested in being educated than vindicated. And I thought I was. Early in the documentary, MTF porn performer Wendy Williams (not the beleaguered former talk show host) comments that even she was perplexed by Buck Angel. “I was doing all the things that make me mad,” she admits, like using the wrong pronouns. I took Wendy’s admission as absolution. I wasn’t the bad guy! Even other trans people questioned whether Buck Angel really “counted” as a man.

Except, that’s not what Wendy said. Wendy herself hasn’t had bottom surgery. It wasn’t until I rewatched the documentary for this review that I realized her shock had nothing to do with Buck’s identity. She just hadn’t seen “a man with a pussy” before watching one of Buck’s videos. Today there are entire websites dedicated to FTM performers; they were still an anomaly in the early 2010s. 

My repeat viewing of Mr. Angel made me reassess that cringey lunch in 2012. I had to face the fact that Frank might have been unfair, but he wasn’t wrong. I was the asshole.

It would be nice to say that I’ve since reached out to Frank with my belated understanding, but it’s too late for such tidy closure. Frank died of a heart attack in 2018.

Transitioning from Porn to Activism

If I had trouble wrapping my head around Buck’s gender identity, it was doubly so for his family. “It’s easier for me to deal with the transgender side than it is the porn side,” his sister Tracey says. “I almost feel it’s like you hit people once with being transgender, now you smack them again because you’re in porn.”

Buck Angel and his then-wife Elayne on Tyra Banks’ show.

His father Bill, whom Buck describes as a man’s man, had an especially hard time accepting Buck for who he is. Though Buck appears to have a good relationship with his parents at the time this documentary was shot, you can still see his father struggling to accept his son. Bill’s a good sport when they watch Buck being interviewed on Tyra, laughing when Buck tells Tyra Banks that he loves his vagina. But when Buck complains about the interview being on an episode focused on “sexual oddities,” Bill doesn’t understand the objection. “But you are…. ‘Oddity’ means you’re not with the norm.”

Selections from Buck’s 1980s modeling portfolio.

Angel-in-progress.

But while his family may not entirely understand Buck, they are grateful he’s still with them. He attempted suicide in his teens, which led to an extended stay in a psychiatric ward, during which his father never came to visit. As a young adult Buck found some success in the 1980s as a model, but the money from that also gave him the means to get drugs and alcohol. Addiction led to the end of the modeling career. Self-harm, homelessness and sex work quickly followed. His parents realized they were going to lose their daughter one way or another. Gaining a trans son was preferrable.

Buck’s mother Patty visits him during his recovery
from a hysterectomy.

“There are a lot of people like me,” Buck explains to his father. “I consider myself very normal. …I don’t want the world to go around thinking people like us aren’t normal.”

This is a hard sell now, and it was a hard sell then. Here’s a sampling from Buck’s inbox:

• You are one mixed-up individual. You need help, and bad.
• Well, I can’t really be nasty to you because you’re a girl, but people like you should be put to death.
• I hope you die of AIDS, you freak of society. You’re so arrogant and disgusting you have to change your sex trying to play God. I swear if I ever cross paths with you, I will have a gun and it’s going in your face.

Offsetting the hate mail are the messages from trans youth. Though many of them are asking for money to pay for their surgery, their messages also emphasize Buck’s position as a role model, something he embraces. He speaks on a panel at Yale (“It’s totally weird being here. I didn’t even fucking graduate high school.”) and posts videos about trans issues on his website, which he still does today.

Buck, his future ex-wife and their dogs relax at their home in Mexico.

The documentary itself serves as an extension of Buck Angel’s outreach. Buck may not be ordinary, but his day-to-day life appears perfectly normal, especially the scenes of him with his then-wife, body piercer Elayne, at their home in Mexico, where the couple moved after marrying in New Orleans. She seems wonderfully supportive (“That’s not a small cock, it’s a huge clit,” she helpfully explains to one middle-aged attendee at the Venus Show)—that is, until the cameras stopped rolling. A year after this documentary was released, Buck and Elayne divorced, very messily. Though she said in Mr. Angel that Buck was “the man of [her] dreams,” Elayne was suddenly a TERF in court, claiming their marriage wasn’t legal under Louisiana law because Buck never got bottom surgery, and therefore not a man, and not entitled to spousal support. The judge ruled against her.

Buck Angel, circa 2023.

Buck is still going strong. Now in his early 60s, he’s become a motivational speaker, hosts a podcast (saw that coming), and sells his own brand of sex toys. He’s still quick to laugh, still thoughtfully outspoken, and still just a dude.

Buck also sells merch, like this “Tranpa” mug.

Double Takes: ‘Nighthawks’ (1978) ★★★ / ‘Strip Jack Naked: Nighthawks 2’ (1991) ★★★

Being gay sure seemed sexier when I was in the closet. Not that I regret coming out—Lord knows, I stayed in the closet far longer than I should have—but I when I finally did it seemed, I dunno, anticlimactic. Oh, there were tears shed by my family, with assurances that they would love me “even if you were a child molester.” (Pro tip: if someone comes out to you, please don’t ever tell them this, no matter how well meaning.) This I was prepared for and considered it the price of entry. Having paid it, I was ready for all the sexy fun. Instead, I discovered that living as an out gay man was not, as I’d hoped, like living in a Falcon or Kristen Bjorn video, but instead just as mundane as living as a straight man.

I might have been better prepared if I had watched Ron Peck’s 1978 film Nighthawks instead of all those Falcon and Kristen Bjorn videos. The movie follows Jim (Ken Robertson, delivering the film’s most natural performance), a young-ish schoolteacher who spends his nights prowling London’s gay clubs for fresh cock. That lurid premise is amplified by the film’s grainy cinematography and unpolished acting that gives Nighthawks the aesthetics of a ’70s porno flick.  

The well-built Robertson's nude scenes notwithstanding, Nighthawks isn’t all that lurid or sexy. Peck and his collaborator Paul Hallam are more concerned with capturing the awkward moments before and after Jim’s hookups, how in each instance either Jim or his Mr. Right Now make it plain that they hope this one night might lead to something more, even as they have an eye peeled for Mr. More Right. The movie perfectly captures the quiet desperation of being rejected, as when Jim waits hours in a pub for his cutest hookup to arrive for a second date, refusing to believe he’s been stood up. Yet Jim is shown to be equally callous when the hard-on is in the other man’s pants.

The film also nicely captures the delicate dance gay men of the time had to maintain between their private and professional lives. Jim is careful to drop his tricks off a block away from their jobs the next morning. Even though several of his colleagues know he’s gay, Jim tries to be discreet at his job—until near the film’s end, when one of his students asks if he is “bent.” Jim, fed up with having to hide his true self, tells the student he is, then proceeds to answer all his students’ follow-up questions, no matter how offensive. Surprisingly, he is not fired for doing so, only reprimanded, suggesting that 1978 London was still better than present-day Florida.

Nighthawks may be a significant movie, but it is not exactly an entertaining one. At nearly two-hours, this plotless film often rambles and is frequently boring, with several scenes that left me wondering if the movie had a point. There are scenes of Jim just standing in nightclubs, his eyes darting around, scoping out potential tricks, that go on for several minutes—minutes made more excruciating by Nighthawks’ atrocious ersatz disco soundtrack. 

Peck’s 1991 follow-up Strip Jack Naked: Nighthawks 2 isn’t a sequel so much as a personal essay mixed with a making-of documentary, with some bonus footage of naked men wandering around for no apparent reason other than shoehorning in some prurient content. The movie features several scenes cut from the original film (among Peck’s revelations is that the initial cut of Nighthawks was nearly three and a half hours long), and in showing them you begin to see the potential for a better edit than what was ultimately released. I, for one, would’ve gladly sacrificed one of Jim’s morning after scenes for the scene in which he goes home with a man who wants to play rough as the scene illustrates the darker side of hooking up. Then again, since this scene is explicitly sexual it may have been cut for censorship reasons. 

More compelling are Peck’s reflections on growing up queer, including a schoolboy crush gone wrong, coming out, and navigating gay life in the 1970s, when he was always on the hunt for sex but secretly hoping to find Mr. Right. “And when I thought I came close, I saw another who I thought would take me closer, and another, and another. And many a time he’d give me the slip after one night…or turn down the offer of a drink or a cigarette with a smile before walking away, as [I] did [myself] to so many others.”

Perhaps more relatable to today’s audiences are Peck’s recounting of the election of Margaret Thatcher and her government’s attack against civil liberties, specifically those regarding the LGBTQ community. The emergence of HIV-AIDS in the 1980s only added fuel to the homophobic fire. “Across the media, gay now equaled AIDS,” Peck observes. He does end Strip Jack Naked on a hopeful note, because one had reason to be hopeful in the 1990s. Not so sure about 2024.

‘A Good Gay Item’

I remember when I first saw a copy of an International Male catalog. It was in the mid-1980s, when I was a senior in high school. My mother, a librarian, found a copy in the library’s catalog bin and brought it home. Most of the family—save my dad, who has no interest in fashion and dresses accordingly—flipped through the catalog, making fun of the clothes, though no one made fun of them more loudly than me. Yet inside I couldn’t wait to get the catalog alone, in the privacy of my room, so I could fully appreciate its contents.

But it wasn’t meant to be. After we all had a laugh at International Male’s expense, my mother promptly tucked the catalog back into her tote bag and returned it to the library the next morning. It was a good decade before I came out, but in retrospect it was clear that even then she had her suspicions. Her allowing only a limited, supervised viewing of that International Male catalog confirmed it. She also inadvertently elevated it from a mere clothing catalog to pornography in my mind.

The 2022 documentary ALL MAN: THE INTERNATIONAL MALE STORY isn’t perfect, but it perfectly encapsulates the clothing brand’s importance to, in the words of the late David Rakoff, “a certain kind of boy,” specifically those who came of age between the latter days of disco and the height of grunge.

Directors Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed, with narrator Matt Bomer’s help, give us a (mostly) breezy tour of International Male’s founding, subsequent success and slow decline, as well as commentary on IM’s cultural impact, which means of course Carson Kressley and Simon Doonan are on hand to give their two cents, with an un-needed assist from stylist and “influencer”🙄 William Graper, to appeal to the kids, I guess. It’s like an episode of VH-1: Behind the Music, except instead of the pressures of recording a new hit single and touring relentlessly while battling drug addition, it’s about the pressures of selling Buns™ underwear and trying to look butch while modeling gold lamé thongs. Call it Behind the Baskets.

Fitness wear or fetish gear? The California Splits shorts allow for easy access when you go to Probe, while the handles of the digital jump rope could easily double as butt plugs. And exactly who was wearing that jock strap pendant on the lower right page? No straight (or gay) man that I know.

Luckily, Darling and Reed were able to get on-camera interviews with IM founder Gene Burkard before his death in December 2020. After a stint in the Air Force during the Korean war, Burkard took a job as a European sales rep for a liquor distributor selling exclusively to American military bases. The job afforded Burkhard, who was gay, an opportunity to not only experience the queer bars of Europe, but European culture as well (“I was always on the prowl,” he says, adding wryly: “learning, of course.”) Though the documentary makes special mention of the fact that men’s underwear design was becoming more daring in 1960s Europe, it was an item spotted in the display window of a medical supply store in London that inspired Burkard.

From left: Gene Burkard in the Air Force in the 1950s; on an appearance on the game show
What’s My Line? in 1974; and being interviewed for All Man: The International Male Story.

“There was this strange garment there. It was called a suspensory,” Burkard recalls. “I said, ‘You know, this would make a good gay item.’ So, I went and bought one.”

It wasn’t until Burkhard returned to the U.S. in the early 1970s, settling in San Diego, Calif., that a lightbulb went off. After reading How to Make $1,000,000 in Mail Order, he designed, with the help of a pattern maker, the product that would ultimately lead to the creation of International Male: the Jock Sock.

From medical garment to sexy underwear to fashion (?) empire: the Jock Sock.

As described by IM’s former Senior Art Director Dennis Mori, the Jock Sock “is a waist band with a cup in front that hooks around your balls.” Or, as a friend of mine described it: a bag for your balls. The initial advertising for the item was restricted to publications like The Advocate (“They’d take any ad,” Burkard says), but Burkard wanted to expand his reach, so he borrowed money from a friend to place an ad in Playboy. That’s when, Burkard says, all hell broke loose. “We had so many orders, and I had one guy helping me, and he was stoned half the time.”

The timing couldn’t have been better. The recent sexual revolution had relaxed attitudes, and Playgirl was sexualizing men for women’s enjoyment (sure). Burkard decided he wanted to launch a clothing company that would, ironically, butch up how it presented men’s sexy fashions, and its catalog would be like a magazine. And so, International Male was born.

The cover and inside pages of an early issue—possibly the debut issue—of the International
Male catalog.

‘PG-13 Porn’ vs. ‘a Fag Magazine’

As portrayed by All Man, International Male, staffed with gay men and a few straight women, was a fun, if disorganized, place to work. None of the former employees have any dirt to dish on Gene, and it’s inspiring to hear how this group of people, almost all learning on the job, were able to create such a successful company—so successful that it opened brick and mortar stores in San Diego and West Hollywood. The clientele was predominantly, but not exclusively, gay. Even superstars Cher and Barbra Streisand shopped there (that tracks).

Another one of International Male's signature items, Buns™ underwear.

Yet the patronage divas wanting something sexy for their boyfriends did little to earn International Male much respect. The IM catalog was alternately dismissed as selling sex or, per one former employee, a “fag magazine.” Burkard saw it as neither. The catalog was for all men. As for sex: “You never saw the words ‘hot’ or ‘sexy.’ I didn’t want that emphasis on sex.”

But sex was certainly on the minds of many of us who got the catalog. “The day the International Male catalog would come was on par with the Sears Christmas catalog coming when you were a kid,” says writer, comedian and one-time Daily Show correspondent Frank DeCaro. “You were going to be transported into this gay fantasy. And then you were going to spank one out.”

The Undergear section (later spun off into a separate catalog) was likely a highlight for many
a horny homosexual. This section here is notable for featuring an Asian model.

Scissor Sisters’ lead singer Jake Shears details his baffling IM jack-off ritual of tearing off tiny bits of toilet paper to cover up the models’ crotches to better imagine them naked. Not judging, but this extra work seems unnecessary, given that one of the appealing aspects of the IM catalog was the models’ bulging crotches, often with the outlines of their junk plainly visible. Well, whatever works for you, Jake. (Also, the strappy bodysuit Jake wears in Scissor Sisters’ “Any Which Way” video looks like it was inspired by one of IM’s creations, if not purchased directly from the company itself.)

Actor Parvesh Cheena recalls the catalog just showing up in the mail one day. “I never signed up for it. I was never that bold. I was never, like, ‘Please, send me PG-13 porn.’”

As, um, inspiring as the models could be, few of the people featured in the documentary were taking style cues from the International Male catalog. Says actor Drew Doerge: “I’d feel ridiculous wearing this stuff, but there’s something really sexy about a model who doesn’t feel ridiculous wearing it.”

To be fair, Dalmatian print boxers with matching robe aren’t the silliest of
International Male’s fashions.

Except, they did. Frequent IM model Brian Buzzini (who also posed for Playgirl) describes IM clothing as “clothes you had to be paid to wear.” Another former model, Robert Goold, says models would often try to trade assigned outfits and describes trying to affect a masculine pose while wearing them as “a professional challenge.” And those smiles on the models’ faces? That was laughter over the silly outfits they were asked to wear. Even the people putting the catalog together express astonishment that people were buying what IM is selling.

Brian Buzzini, then and now, looking just as good.

AIDS, Selling Out and the Puffy Shirt

International Male’s success continued from the hedonistic ’70s into the 1980s, when Miami Vice and MTV dominated pop culture, and people were getting into shape, and paradoxically, cocaine. The ’80s also saw the emergence of HIV and AIDS, and its impact on IM was substantial. The frothy tone of All Man turns bleak as it includes a slide show of all the staff members the company lost to the virus. I counted at least 16 who died. And as the death toll from AIDS increased, so did homophobia, making it more difficult to market IM to straight men.

It was during this time that Burkard, no longer finding the business he started fun, sold the company to Hanover Direct for $25 million. (The specific year of the sale was 1987, something I had to Google as All Man isn’t big on providing specific dates.) The sale to Hanover made IM employees nervous, with good reason. “There was a terrible day in the office where they fired almost everybody,” former Art Director Maureen Dalton-Wolf recalls.

“One day I was walking past the vice president’s door, and one of the people from Hanover was there,” says Mori. “I heard this gentleman say, ‘So, what are we going to do about the gay problem?’” Mori says he confronted them, asking, “What do you mean, ‘the gay problem?’” Unfortunately, the VP and the Hanover rep’s response is not shared on camera, though it’s clear Mori wasn’t with the company much longer.

IM’s new creative director, Peter Karoll. brought in a straight photographer and support crew for the catalog shoots to put the models, most of whom were straight, at ease. “There was a big gay crew who worked there, and it made me uncomfortable—it made me uncomfortable for the models.”

David Knight says he was one of two openly gay models when he worked for International Male. Goddamn, do these guys not age like normal people?

I’ll admit I found Karoll’s concern for the straight dudes’ comfort a punchable offense, especially in an age when “Don’t Say Gay” laws are a thing. My gay rage was tempered a bit when the documentary points out that Karoll employed more diverse models (including, per Wikipedia, Shemar Moore). 

Dennis Mori admits that in the six years he was art director for International Male, he only
  used two Black models. The reason: clothes modeled by POC supposedly didn’t sell as well.

As the 1990s progressed, IM faced a more competitive marketplace. The cheesiness of IM’s colorful prints, Baroque designs and synthetic fabrics was amplified when compared to Abercrombie & Fitch and Calvin Klein’s more sophisticated designs and artful marketing. Not helping was the Seinfeld episode, “The Puffy Shirt” (sold as “The Ultimate Poet’s Shirt” in the IM catalog), and the 2001 male modeling spoof Zoolander. Having entered the mainstream, IM became a laughingstock. And yet, as All Man makes plain, so many of us (i.e., gay Boomers and Gen X’ers, with possibly a few older queer Millennials) still have a certain nostalgia for the days when we got a new edition of the catalog. Yeah, we laughed at the clothes, but the bodies that filled them we took very seriously. It wasn’t just PG-13 porn, it was starter porn.

These days, of course, kids have the Internet, so they don't need to bother imagining what treasures are stuffed in an Aussie Rower or what they’d do with the guy modeling the Brawn Bikini. They certainly can’t imagine ordering clothing from a printed catalog that arrives in the mail (what is mail?) It’s a fact that International Male, like so many retailers in the early days of the Internet, was slow to realize, and had to play catch-up when it finally started selling online. Today, the only remnant of the company is online, at undergear.com. The clothes are still cheesy (or just plain hideous), but its PG-13 porn days are clearly far behind it, the company now going for a more intense rating.

Consider Undergear when deciding what to wear to your next sex party: the Male Power Hose Thong, the Wicked Web Thong, or the Male Power Mesh Thong. Incidentally, these photos show more dick than you’ll see in All Man, yet the documentary does include full-frontal footage of a nude woman, as well as several pictorials from Playboy, presumably so all the straight guys watching (it’s a possibility!) don’t get too uncomfortable.

Short Takes: ‘Jobriath A.D.’ (2012) ★★★ 1/2

I first learned about Jobriath in the 1980s, when I checked out the book Kitsch from my local library. One of the chapters featured the cover to Jobriath’s failed self-titled debut album, which depicted the singer in profile, face down on the ground, nude, with his legs crumbling away like he was a classic sculpture being chipped away by the ravages of time. The book presented the album cover as an example of bad taste, but I thought it was cool. From what I recall, author Gillo Dorfles’ accompanying text about Jobriath was kind of dismissive: he was an openly gay David Bowie wannabe who never lived up to his hype.

However, Jobriath was more than a glam rock no hit wonder, as director Kieran Turner’s 2012 documentary Jobriath A.D. proves, with interviews from people who knew him as Bruce Wayne Campbell, a child prodigy growing up in Pennsylvania; as Jobriath Salisbury, the wildly talented (and just plain wild) cast member of the Los Angeles production of Hair; and, of course, as his most famous incarnation, Jobriath Boone—or simply Jobriath—“the true fairy of rock and roll.”

One thing that becomes clear as Jobriath A.D. goes along is that as badly as the musician wanted to be famous, he did not want to be known, making an intimate portrait a bit of a challenge. Most of the people interviewed are people who worked with him, or who are fans, like Ann Magnuson, who released a Jobriath tribute EP the same year as this doc, and Scissor Sisters’ lead singer Jake Shears. The recollections shared by Jobriath’s younger brother, Willie Fogle, give us a sense of what life with their emotionally distant mother was like, but he hardly knew his brother any better than anyone else. 

Much of the documentary is dedicated to exploring how this musician who, per Rolling Stone, had “talent to burn,” failed to make a spark on the 1970s music scene. Homophobia is brought up, but fingers are also pointed at the gay community, which at the time, according to Jayne County, “was very, very negative against the whole androgynous, gender-glitter movement of the ’70s.” Most of the blame for fucking up Jobriath’s career is directed toward his manager, promoter and club owner Jerry Brandt, who once upon a time also managed Carly Simon. Brandt has a lot to say on the subject of Jobriath in the documentary, which isn't surprising. One of the criticisms lobbed at Brandt is that he often commandeered interviews with Jobriath, with the singer barely given a chance to answer a question, and Turner provides the receipts. (Brandt argues that Jobriath wasn't comfortable giving answers, and some of the clips showing a somewhat stiff Jobriath responding to an interviewer’s questions suggest there’s some truth to that, as well.) What comes out is that Brandt seemed more enthusiastic about promoting the persona Jobriath had created than building an audience for his music, so by the time his debut album dropped people were more familiar with its cover than the music contained therein. It was like Jobriath was a vanity project, only it was Brandt’s vanity being served.

For all the finger pointing, I think timing might have been Jobriath’s biggest enemy. I don’t think he’d have fared much better if he had beat Bowie to the punch, but maybe, with some tweaking of his sound, he could’ve made a bigger splash in the New Wave era. Instead, Jobriath found success in the Manhattan cabaret scene, performing as Cole Berlin or Bryce Campbell, though he did sex work on the side when money was tight. But his second act was short-lived: Jobriath died from AIDS complications August 3, 1983. Singer Will Sheff summarizes Jobriath's career—and the arc of this documentary—thusly: “He got to be the mega star, then he got to be the joke, and then he got to be forgotten. And now he gets to be the beacon for so many great artists out there who didn’t get their due.” 

A Woman of (Four) Letters

Jackie Collins was the Lady Boss of
trash fiction in the 1970s and ’80s.

One of the many depressing aspects about the success of Fifty Shades of Grey was that it highlighted how adult fiction had become so tame by 2011 that E.L. James’ rape-y Twilight fan fic could not only became a pop culture phenomenon but also be discussed by the amnesiac media as if smut had never before dirtied the New York Times Best Seller list.

The NYT Best Sellers had been sullied long before James came along, and on a monthly basis, too. Among those regularly defiling popular literature in the 1970s and ’80s were Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins. Though Rosemary Rogers and Judith Krantz gave them a run for their money, Robbins and Collins had succeeded in making their names synonymous with raunch. Rogers and Krantz wrote racy romances; Robbins and Collins wrote trash.

I was more of a fan of Harold Robbins’ books, but Jackie always seemed a far more likable person, and watching the 2021 documentary LADY BOSS: THE JACKIE COLLINS STORY, currently streaming on Netflix in the U.S., confirmed the late author’s likability. She’s so likable, in fact, that no fewer than four women interviewed identify themselves as Jackie’s best friend.

Jackie’s story is told through interviews with her older sister (you know who), her three daughters, Tracy, Tiffany and Rory, and numerous friends and business associates. Director Laura Fairrie’s best source, however, is Jackie herself, not only from archive footage but from a treasure trove of diary entries, journals and an unfinished autobiography, Reform School or Hollywood.

Teen-aged Joan and Jackie Collins.

Jackie failed to make a
splash in the 1957
movie All at Sea.

Of course, much of Jackie’s story has likely already found its way into her novels in one way or another as her life could be the basis of a Jackie Collins book. It’s a life that includes a domineering father (Joe Collins was temperamental theater agent prone to flying into rages at the dinner table), sibling rivalry (Jackie struggled to establish an identity beyond “Joan Collins’ little sister”), an ugly duckling-to-swan transformation (Jackie matured into a shapely young woman, helping things along with a nose job in 1959), wild times in Hollywood (including a fling with Marlon Brando, whom Jackie describes in a diary entry as “kind of fat”), an acting career that goes nowhere (appearing in the Alec Guinness film All at Sea and a guest spot on TV show The Saint are her more notable credits), and an unhappy marriage (Jackie’s first husband Wallace Austin was a bipolar drug addict who committed suicide a year after their divorce in 1964).

Look back in leopard print: Jackie with her first born, Tracy,
and Jackie’s mother, Elsa Collins.

It’s not until Jackie’s second husband, nightclub owner Oscar Lerman, encourages Jackie to finish a novel she’s all but given up on that Jackie pursues writing with any real ambition. “I’d been writing all my life,” Jackie recalls. “I’d written a lot of half-books that I never finished, and he was the first person that said to me, ‘It’s absolutely terrific and you can do it’.”

That book was The World is Full of Married Men, and Jackie sold it to a publisher for £400 ($536 U.S.). To say that the publisher got a huge return on its investment is an understatement. The book’s mix of strong women and sizzling sex made it an instant—and controversial—best seller in 1968.

Jackie at work, exactly as you imagine.

As the documentary details Jackie’s ascension on the best seller lists, it focuses more on Jackie as a celebrity than a writer. Even her former agent Morton Janklow puts more stock in Jackie’s TV appearances than her prose: “It was one of the reasons she was so successful. She could go out there and promote those books and not be embarrassed.” Her Mob Wives aesthetic—big hair, big shoulder pads, lots of leopard print—was just another aspect of her branding. She looked like a character from one of her books, making her their ideal spokesperson. Lady Boss is peppered with clips of Jackie promoting her work, including a 1980s TV ad in which Jackie urges readers to “get Lucky.” (The voice heard at the end of the clip below is Jackie’s oldest daughter, Tracy.)

Two aspects where I feel Lady Boss drops the ball is that it fails to give viewers a sense of the book market of the 1970s and ’80s (timing plays a role in Jackie’s success as much as her storytelling talent) or acknowledge those who came before her. It’s admirable that Jackie was an active participant in the marketing of her books, but she was hardly the first author—or the first Jackie—to do so. That the documentary fails to pick up on the many similarities between Jackie’s and Jacqueline Susann’s lives and careers is Lady Boss’s biggest oversight. 

Jackie looms over Hollywood.

Lady Boss makes it abundantly clear that Jackie took a lot of shit for her books. The documentary tries to attribute this as mere sexism, i.e., people disapproved of a woman writing bluntly described sex scenes (Fairrie includes plenty of footage of Jackie being scolded and/or belittled by male talk show hosts). Lady Boss even tries to frame Jackie as some sort of feminist icon. Though the author did self-identify as a feminist, her brand of feminism didn’t seem to go beyond speaking out against the double standard. Women should be permitted to be as shitty as men, while true, is not the sort of rallying cry that would land her on the cover of Ms. magazine. 

The 1980s, when Jackie ruled trash fiction and Joan ruled
Prime Time.

The documentary also touches on the rivalry between Jackie and her older sister. Joan says that Jackie hated a couple men in her life (she doesn’t name names), and that these men also hated Jackie, and so things were a bit chilly between the sisters during these relationships. Though they teamed up to adapt one of Jackie’s bestsellers, The Stud, into a movie vehicle for Joan in 1978, and its sequel The Bitch in 1979, things were again reportedly tense in the 1980s when Joan, at the peak of her Dynasty career revival, tried her hand at trash fiction, starting with her 1988 debut novel Prime Time. Jackie was none too happy that Joan was trespassing in her territory, so it’s not surprising she felt some schadenfreude when Joan’s subsequent books for Random House were deemed “unpublishable.” 

On the subject of Joan—excuse me, Dame Joan—I did not always believe she was speaking candidly. Though she doesn’t appear to view her and Jackie’s relationship through rose-colored glasses, she’s careful to present herself as the ever-supportive older sister. (People without siblings might believe that, but rest of us aren’t buying it, Joan.) I also got the idea—through tone of voice and body language—that a few people interviewed didn’t have particularly high opinions of Jackie’s famous sibling. When Joan’s anecdote about Jackie’s spirit inhabiting a persistent fruit fly (seriously) is referenced, Jackie’s former assistant all but rolls her eyes and says her former boss’s sister is full of shit.

From the Lost Years: A Supplemental Book Review

Jackie’s 2009 novel Poor Little Bitch
Girl. Love the title, hate the book.

Jackie’s life wasn’t as rosy during the 1990s and 2000s. In 1992 her husband Oscar died of prostate cancer. And though it’s only briefly touched on, Jackie was also losing her mojo as an author. Her books in the latter half of her career, while still best sellers, weren’t selling as well as they once had. “We changed as a world,” says Jackie’s publicist Melody Korenbrot, adding that Jackie tried to change with it. “She sat down and wrote, but eventually she became completely confused and lost.”

Judging by her 2009 novel, POOR LITTLE BITCH GIRL, Jackie was still lost in the late 2000s.

I’ve enjoyed a few of Jackie’s books, including The Hollywood Zoo, the 1975 a.k.a. of Sunday Simmons & Charlie Brick (the title later changed again to Sinners) and her 1983 mega-hit Hollywood Wives, perhaps the best thing she’s ever written (but still trash). Unlike grump Harold Robbins, Jackie didn’t take herself too seriously, her writing giving the impression she was chuckling right along with the reader.

Reading Poor Little Bitch Girl, you still get the impression she’s not taking herself too seriously, only this time the tone is less a conspiratorial chuckle and more of a “Whatever,” sighed under her breath.   

Poor Little Bitch Girl is the ninth installment in the Lucky Santangelo series, but the story pretty much stands on its own. Lucky herself is hardly in the thing. Instead, the novel revolves around four separate main characters: Annabelle Maestro, the estranged daughter of movie star parents, now running an escort service in New York with her cokehead boyfriend Frankie; Denver Jones (these names...), a one-time classmate of Annabelle’s, now a lawyer for an elite L.A. firm; Carolyn Henderson, a longtime friend of Denver’s, working in Washington, D.C. as Sen. Stoneman’s assistant (and his mistress); and Lucky’s son Bobby Santangelo Stanislopoulos, who runs a successful NYC nightclub and who was also once a classmate of Annabelle’s and Denver’s. None of these characters are older than 26, all of them are hot, and they all have the emotional maturity of junior high students.

The murder of Annabelle’s mother, Gemma Summer, is what sets the book’s story in motion, with Denver—whose firm is representing Annabelle’s father, the prime suspect—sent to New York to retrieve the titular poor little bitch girl. Denver hates the assignment, until she runs into Bobby. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Carolyn is kidnapped just days after telling Sen. Stoneman that she’s pregnant with his baby. It’s a good thing Bobby, who is just as smitten with Denver, has a private plane and thinks nothing of using it to fly her to D.C. to look for her missing friend.

If you read the above paragraph and asked yourself, Wait, shouldn’t the driver of the story be Denver trying to solve Gemma Summer’s murder? then you clearly aren’t in the right headspace for a Jackie Collins novel. That murder is merely incidental. What matters is that Denver bangs a hunky journalist in L.A., then a sensitive screenwriter in New York, and then falls for Bobby Santangelo Stanislopoulos (though she has trouble forgiving him getting a b.j. from pop singer Zeena, a Cher/Madonna hybrid who speaks of herself in the third person). Even Carolyn’s disappearance is secondary to Denver finding a man. Why waste time cutting into the meat of the story when you can eat Reddi-Wip directly from the can?

Worse than the book’s mishandled plot is its one-note characterizations. Annabelle is selfish and bitchy; Frankie is an asshole; Bobby is charming; Denver is headstrong and kind of kooky (and evidently meant to be a Julia Roberts-type character as Denver is compared to Julia in more than once instance); Carolyn is a hopeless romantic. Jackie, preferring to tell rather than show, often assigns labels for her characters, declaring that Denver and Carolyn are independent and smart, yet Denver is always getting rescued by men and Carolyn just wants Sen. Stoneman to leave his wife for her, and the idea that either of these women have more than a high school education strains credulity. You’d have an easier time believing Denver, whose chapters are written in the first person, is a 16-year-old inhabiting the body of her attorney older sister, Freaky Friday-style, than buy her as a member of the bar. 

Why waste time cutting into the meat of the story when you can eat Reddi-Wip directly from the can?

But, hey, at least there’s all that graphic sex Jackie is known for, except, nope, not in Poor Little Bitch Girl. Sex may be at the forefront of every character’s mind—second only to money—but Jackie backs away from detailing any bedroom activity, preferring to just have her characters give generalized postmortems instead (“I liked that he took his time, kissing me everywhere—and I do mean everywhere”). Considering the first Lucky Santangelo novel, 1981’s Chances, includes a scene in which Lucky’s father, Gino, slurps his spooge out of the pussy he’s freshly plowed—and described about as delicately—Poor Little Bitch Girl is practically PG-13. But then, we didn’t have PornHub in 1981, so maybe by the 2000s Jackie figured she’d just let the Internet fuel the horny imaginations of her readers.

In the book’s defense, it does have an awesome title. Also, it’s fairly well-paced and I was invested in the story enough to want to keep reading. Except, by the time I reached the end I regretted wasting my time with it. Jackie never pretended to be a great writer, but she wasn’t even trying here. This wasn’t the work of an author trying to push herself to be better than her last book; this was a brand name trying to fill enough pages to get a new hardcover on shelves before her previous best-seller landed in the remainder bin. It’s not a novel, it’s product.

Admire Her Spirit if Not Her Books

After her husband’s death Jackie eventually took up with businessman Frank Calcagnini for a very long engagement (the pair never married). If Lady Boss interviewees can’t say enough good things about Oscar Lerman, they struggle to say anything nice about Calcagnini. The way Tita Cahn, one of Jackie’s many best friends, describes him, he could well have been the inspiration for the character of Frankie in Poor Little Bitch Girl: “He was a gambler, a drugger [sic], an alcoholic and an abuser.” About the kindest words anyone can muster for Calcagnini is that he could be charming. When Calcagnini died of a brain tumor in 1998 few people—other than Jackie—mourned his passing.

Jackie Collins in a British TV appearance
shortly before her death.

Unlike her late fiancée, Jackie’s passing was deeply felt by all who knew her. Jackie had been diagnosed with breast cancer years before her death, but like her mother before her, she kept her illness a secret, and like her late-husband Oscar, chose to keep working until the very end. Lady Boss includes a clip of Jackie on the British talk show Loose Women made during her final days and her appearance is startling. She looks gaunt, frail, a good ten years older than her older sister. Still, she never lets on that she’s sick. Nine days after this TV appearance, on Sept. 15, 2015, Jackie Collins died. She was 77.

In watching Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story I came to see Jackie as an entertainer, just one who wrote tawdry beach reads instead of performing live at Caesar’s Palace. The documentary also strengthened my appreciation of her as a person. I just wish I could like her books as much as I like her. Still, I’d read Jackie over E.L. James any day.