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 Kate O’Halloran asks whether Joe Dallesandro’s gay icon status is based on a genuine sexual orientation or gay men’s wishful thinking.
In February this year, Joe Dallesandro received a Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival for his “achievements as underground film star, gay icon and actor”. While Dallesandro claims to be bisexual, and has a real background of hustling, his homoerotic roles in Andy Warhol’s films seem to be more a product of Warhol’s penchant for the found-object than the actor’s own desire for queer representation. Expanding on his sexuality, Dallesandro explains, “it wasn't that I was sexually attracted to men per se, but you know, if you do something for a while you can acquire a taste for it.” Dallesandro’s ‘queerness’ then seems more a product of circumstance than any genuine identification and investment in non-straight sexuality. Plucked from obscurity, Dallesandro was guaranteed instant fame upon being unofficially anointed a Warhol ‘Superstar’; an individual whose troubled past and desire for stardom provided Warhol with fodder for his art, and in turn, gave the aspiring actor the fame he craved. Beginning with his infamous soup cans and a continual influence on his films, Warhol sought to put what was ‘out-there’ into his work. This prompted some to describe Warhol as the ‘anti-director’; attempting not to control what was on screen, but rather to capture untapped trends and desires in the world around him. It was not that Warhol tapped into the homoerotic desires of Dallesandro, rather Warhol accessed what he saw as an emerging queer force in underground culture about to spill over into the mainstream, and Dallesandro provided an androgynously attractive figure through which this vision could be enacted on-screen. In films such as Flesh (directed by Paul Morrissey), after all, sex between men is not merely an acquired taste for the protagonist, (a young male hustler) but appears to be the result of genuine attraction between men. There’s no denying Dallesandro’s status as a gay icon, nor is there any denying that Dallesandro’s appearance in the Warhol films contributed to a growing instability in perceptions of masculinity and clearly defined sexuality. He has been described as “a gay man’s fantasy fuck with no peer”, and Andy Warhol himself commented that in his films, “everyone’s in love with Joe Dallesandro”, ‘everyone’ presumably implying that Dallesandro brought a charm and pure sex appeal capable of traversing age-old divisions between genders and sexualities. Nonetheless, what disturbs me about Dallesandro’s claim to queerness is his own frank admission that his bisexuality is ‘acquired’ out of habit or repetition rather than a more innate passion or desire for the same sex. To me, this rather disappointing follow-up to what appears initially as a welcomingly open admission of non-straight sexuality serves, eventually, only to reinscribe a traditional barrier between the public and private, fiction and reality. Dallesandro’s rise as sex symbol of the gay underground was premised on this very divide. His demure, passively enchanting on-screen demeanour paved the way for gay fantasies of – especially in Flesh – a (seemingly) straight man who could sleep with, and enjoy sleeping with, men. Nonetheless, it seems a tired truth that once the curtain falls (and in Dallesandro’s case, once the Warhol days ended) queerness is again relegated to fiction, a moment in time rather than a lifetime reality. It is unclear whether Dallesandro’s legacy for queers was simply a product of Warhol’s lifetime commitment to underground and minority culture brought radically to the mainstream. If his contribution to queerness is relegated to fantasy, is this enough; or have we had enough of queer idols reinforcing the divides between fiction and fact, reality and fantasy? www.joedallesandro.com
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Little Joe never once gave it away
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