Kenneth Anger, Influential Queer Filmmaker and Hollywood Babylon Author, Dead at 96

[icymist]

Gay filmmaker and author Kenneth Anger, known for his experimental and homoerotic movies and his wildly gossipy Hollywood Babylon books, has died at age 96.

Anger died May 11, but his death was just widely reported this week. He died at an assisted-living facility in Yucca Valley, Calif., Spencer Glesby, a spokesman for Sprüth Magers, an art gallery that represented Anger, told national media outlets.

Anger, sometimes called the godfather of queer film, grew up in the Los Angeles area and began making movies in his youth. He was 20 when he made Fireworks, shot in his parents’ Beverly Hills home when they were out of town. Anger appears in the 14-minute film having “a sadomasochistic encounter with a group of musclebound sailors, one of whom undoes his pants to reveal a Roman candle,” as The New York Times describes the movie in its Anger obituary.

https://www.advocate.com/obituaries/kenneth-anger-obituary

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Oh man! This bums me out. Think I'll watch some of his movies tonight I have on VHS. (Yes, I still have a working VCR)

[kimbutgar]

1. I read both of his Hollywood Babylon books

A lot of hanky panky went on that was so shocking.

I was looking at that book and another Hollywood Babylon book revisited by two other authors. I was shocked by some of the stuff I read in those books and surprised how LGTBQ was so prominent in Hollywood. Stars I would have never suspected had gay/ lesbian tendencies or used it to get ahead!

[Dalton555]

2. I came to love his short films

I didn't like them much at first because I didn't like the look of his occult films. I am very fond of a occult philosophy in general but I've never liked the combination of hippie culture with golden dawn regalia.

However, they grew on me.

As an interesting side note, one of the actresses in one of Anger's films was the woman that was with Jack Parsons in Los Angeles until L Ron Hubbard persuaded her to leave with him. Jack and Hubbard had engaged in sex magic rituals, sometimes just the two of them, sometimes with Marjorie. She spent the final decades of her life in an artistic cabin in the LA suburbs.