Chuck Arnett: His Life/Our Times

ARTIST CHUCK ARNETT: HIS LIFE/OUR TIMES

by Jack Fritscher, PhD

Author’s Foreword

.This Fin de Siecle being what it is, a word of caution, leading to healing, must be spoken to those “politically correct” persons who resent essays and stories about our gay past which was a different country where we lived differently. To understand Chuck Arnett, it is necessary to exchange the judgmental Nineties’ attitude for some cathartic open-hearted examination of the gay Sixties and Seventies when gay white men opened up American sexuality when no one else would dare.

I broach this problem because, in the context of this collection, some readers, jealous of a more free gay past, may not be able to accept the way we were. I write of the past, so that it will not be forgotten, to provide some catharsis for those who were there and lost it and for those who were not there and are jealous of it.

Men who experienced the Golden Age of the Sixties and the Seventies are bonded together the way soldiers bonded in Vietnam. If you were there, you know. If you were not in-country, if you were not there, do not indulge the post-AIDS righteousness of judging that joyous time and those liberated mores by post-postmodern, “politically correct” standards, because those who follow next century will find you did not respect your own history which began long before you ever thought of coming out.

Just because the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of disorders, doesn’t mean fags and lesbos can’t be mentally ill.

What collector of gay art can forget the famous 1970 Red Star Saloon poster of one man fisting another on a toilet? Over their heads, written like graffiti in the sky with diamonds, hangs the purposely misspelled challenge: “IF YOUR MAN ENOUGH!”

The Red Star was the bar fronting the Barracks on Folsom at Hallam. Men, who were man enough, drank 25-cent beer, kicked sawdust, cracked peanuts from barrels, and cruised waiting for their acid to come on. The back door of the Red Star led straight into the Barracks. The year was 1972 and the Golden Age of Gay Liberation was celebrating sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll!

Tourists to SFO, one summer, were residents by the next. Golden Age sex put many a midwestern career in law, medicine, teaching, and business on hold. Man-to-man sex was a siren call. Scott McKenzie singing “If You’re Goin’ to San Francisco, Wear Flowers in Your Hair” was the mild side. Chuck Arnett, with the seductive agit-prop art of his “recruiting” posters, was the wild side. He inked, chalked, and painted men’s wildest fantasies. He gave men the raw images of their Ids at play.

.POSTERS OF REVOLUTION

.The brightest and best could hardly have known that the Golden Age, 1969-1982, would last little more than a decade. Few of the innocents living the golden life asked any more questions than Auntie Mame. “Be here now” was the correct philosophy: seizing the day and inventing the nights of sportfucking, handballing, and leather-fetish SM. Sexual revolution uncloseted more than the horizontal hula.

Every revolution has its graphic art and artists.

The reclusive Tom of Finland fine-lined idealized dream images of polite romance. Sex-activist Chuck Arnett posterized a militant edge to hardballing sleaze. Arnett, though less prolific than the venerable Tom, called sex-warriors to the fisted front lines of masculine liberation. His action-art, literally propagandizing “DO IT!”, was the raw style usually scrawled with anonymous honesty on toilet walls. Like the later Keith Haring, Arnett’s style looked deceptively like graffiti anyone could do.

.ART VERSUS PREJUDICE

Arnett was Rousseau’s noble savage set on destroying prejudicial stereotypes of male, masculine-identified homosexuals. (The uncloseting of lesbians was ticking on a different clock in the Sixties and early Seventies.) Born south of the Manson/Mason/Dixon/Nixon line in Lousiana, February 15, 1928, Arnett grew up in a world far different from the world post-Stonewall. When he painted on the Lascaux stone wall of The Tool Box the pioneer mural that was a photo-op pop-shot heard round the world, he liberated homosexuals into a new image. LIFE magazine could neither ignore nor resist the butch gauntlet Arnett threw down.

.THAT WATERSHED ISSUE OF LIFE

.Arnett threw a party and LIFE sent out the invitations. On June 21, 1964, LIFE magazine published an image-liberating historical issue that was read across the nation as an invitation to come to San Francisco and be a man’s man.

Thousands of queers in small towns, who thought that they were the only faggots in the world, and, worse, thought that the only way faggots were was queenly–having taken into their souls the Sex-Barbie stereotype straights had crammed down their throats–suddenly saw, compliments of LIFE, that there was an alternative homomasculine style.

Non-nelly faggots breated a sight of relief. In that one provocative issue of LIFE was an “Emancipation Proclamation” for the genuinely masculine-identified homosexual. Queers are like toupees. “For every obvious homosexual,” LIFE drooled, “there are probably nine nearly impossible to detect.”

Long before the gay press was “legal,” and even longer before a leather press was conceived, LIFE had discovered the Art and Lifestyle boom that something butch this way comes demanding civil rights. What a shock to American culture: sissies weren’t the only fags. The respectable LIFE tried to clear away myths and misconceptions about homosexuality.

How the straight media interprets us influences our perceptions of ourselves.

“San Francisco,” LIFE proclaimed, “is the gay capital.” That capital life pivoted around thirty bars and cocktail lounges. Many young men, raised in families who never frequented bars, at first found the barstyle a negative entry to gay life. The bars, fiercely competitive, with a life expectancy of eighteen months, had to offer more than alcohol and drag shows.

Some bars were built around the cult of personality such as Jose Sarria, the operatic drag, who was the self-styled Dowager Queen of the City. Sarria ran for supervisor in 1961 and polled 6,000 votes. Arnett, responsive to diversity, created a high-concept alternative for men who preferred men masculine. He was a hit. Without naming the formidable Arnett as a singular cult personality, LIFE panted on about Arnett’s environmental sculpture, The Tool Box.

The Tool Box was more than a bar in San Francisco.

It was “Temple One” in Mecca.

No longer did men have to use the cruising code one-liner, “Are you a friend of Dorothy’s?” to figure out if a masculine man was queer. Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco in 1961. LIFE by 1964 announced that San Francisco was Oz, and tin men and cowardly men and scaredy cats knew where they could go to find their hearts, their smarts, and their courage.

.LIFE LEVITATES ART

.“On another far-out fringe of the ‘gay’ world are the so-called S&M bars,” LIFE oozed. “One of the most dramatic examples, The Tool Box, is in the warehouse district of San Francisco. Outside the entrance stand a few brightly polished motorcycles, including an occasional lavender (sic!) model. Inside the bar, the accent is on leather and sadistic symbolism. The walls are covered with murals of masculine-looking men in black leather jackets. A metal collage of motorcycle parts hangs on one wall. A cluster of tennis shoes–favorite footwear for many homosexuals with feminine traits–dangles from the ceiling. Behind it a derisive sign reads: ‘Down with sneakers!’

“‘This is the anti-feminine side of homosexuality,’ says Bill Ruquy, part owner of the bar. ‘We throw out anybody who is too swishy. If one is going to be homosexual, why have anything to do with women of either sex? We don’t go for giddy kids.'”

Ruquy, politically correct for his time, demonstrates how fickle PC-ness is.

“Metal is much in evidence in the room: chains on the wall, the bunches of keys hanging from the customers’ leather belts. ‘That’s part of the sadistic business,’ Ruquy explains. ‘We used to wear chains on our shoulders. Now the keys are in.'”

As women know, to end oppression, the oppressed must initially appear strong, tough, and militant to scare the oppressors’ horses.

“The effort of these homosexuals,” LIFE judged, “to appear manly is obsessive–in the rakish angle of the caps, in the thumbs boldly hooked in belts. Ruquy says, ‘This is a place for men, a place without all those screaming faggots, fuzzy sweaters, and sneakers. Those guys–the ones you see in the other bars–are afraid of us. They’re afraid to come here because everything looks tough. But we’re probably the most genteel bar in town.'”

LIFE: “The hostility of the minority ‘leather’ crowd toward the rest of the ‘gay’ world is exceeded by the bitterness of individual homosexuals toward the ‘straight’ public.” From such publicity came strength in numbers. LIFE warned straight up that homos were ready to explode in a fight for civil rights.

From LIFE to Stonewall was only five years, almost to the exact day and date: June 21, 1964 to June 29, 1969.

Arnett, the former New York stage designer, had done something right creating the set of The Tool Box. The LIFE article, for all its hissy rectitude, sensing something politically fresh, seethes with as much approving lust as it thinks its readers, still reeling from JFK’s assassination six months earlier, would tolerate.

.KINSEY, McCARTHY, AND ARNETT

.In 1948, when Chuck Arnett was 20, the anti-Freudian Kinsey Report, thanks to the input of Sam Steward/Phil Andros, shocked the US: 50 percent of boys engage in homosexual activity, and the more masculine and aggressive the boy the more likely he is to experiment with homosexuality.

When Arnett was 25, and already a dancer and choreographer in New York, Senator Joe McCarthy had teamed with Dick Nixon and the House Un-American Activities to blacklist as commie-pinkos everyone who was anyone in Hollywood, and Republican Prez Ike Eisenhower, mixing church with state, had signed an executive order (1953) legislating morality: homosexuality was an absolute bar to any federal security clearance.

The Department of Defense rejected homosexuals “because of a weakness of moral fiber.” The American Civil Liberties Union said the DOD was “acting like Big Brother.” The ACLU had been called in to defend the Mattachine Society which, founded in 1950, was the first homosexual group in America, the land of personal liberty and free choice, to seek gay rights in federal agencies.

One Incorporated, founded in 1952, published One Magazine, the first periodical of the modern American gay press.

The sexual-preference situation comedy was not lost on Arnett who knew Theater of the Absurd when he saw it.

In 1957, many legal and religious groups sought tolerance for homosexuals based on the findings of the British Wolfenden Report.

In 1963, a pamphlet called “Toward a Quaker View of Sex” said that society “should no more deplore homosexuality than lefthandedness…Homosexual affection can be as selfless as heterosexual affection and therefore we cannot see that it is in some way morally worse.” Gay Seventies’ lives proved that. Gay Eighties lives validated it again.

Catholics, mais oui, in the book Counseling the Catholic, said, along with the American Psychiatric Association (which changed its view in 1972), that homosexuals are sick.

One should note, especially in the fractious Nineties, that just because the American Psychiatric Association declared that homosexuality itself was not a sickness doesn’t mean that individual homosexuals or lesbians can’t be mentally ill, emotionally disturbed, or socially dysfunctional–just like straight people.

Arnett, frolicking about in the Beatnik Bongo Years, knew homosexuals were “sick” and he celebrated “sickness” in an era when to be “sick” was to be cool, clever, brash, insulting, and outrageous. In 1957, the first of the “sick” greeting cards and stand-up comedians appeared, shocking America with their insults and “sick” jokes.

Until 1964, when Dade County, Florida (where else?) passed laws against homosexuality, there were no laws in the US against being homosexual per se. What sex laws there were proscribed only specific acts which do not result in procreating. (Can you say “procreational chauvinism,” boys and girls?) Dade County justified its laws because “homosexuals are hungry for youth.” (Actually, the US military is hungry for youth.) In 1961, Illinois took a major progressive stand, legislating that private acts between consenting adults were legal.

Against such social and moral debate, Chuck Arnett, mature enough to be among the first of the Founding Daddies, bridled at the absurdity of consenting-adult homosexuals being convicted as sex offenders the same as rapists.

In 1963, undercover LA cops in neo-Keystone tight pants, sneakers, and sweaters entrapped and arrested 3,069 men who were, according to LA Police Inspector James Fisk, only a “token number” of deviates.

In 1975, these same LA cops, under Police Chief Ed Davis, attacked the freedom of the gay press. They busted the Drummer “Slave Auction,” a fund-raising charity event they believed was a ring of white slavery run by the then brand-new leather magazine which became Arnett’s chief champion.

The cops, shopping for their 1963 Entrapment-a-Go-Go drag, obviously thought all homosexuals were swishes in sweaters. In the first summer of the Beatles and the last summer of Camelot, Arnett, mad in the way all artists are mad with vision, set out to liberate the homomasculine image.

When he created The Tool Box, he was a man ahead of his time. Hippies were yet to come to flower in the Haight-Ashbury, from which neighborhood, shortly, the smell of incense and pot would be blowin’ in the Sixties’ wind down toward Folsom Street where peace, love, and granola would mix with hard leather, hard drugs, and hard sex.

.BYE-BYE, BIRDIE

.Chuck Arnett was a true eclectic. In his life, he absorbed with a voracious sexual-esthetic appetite everything he had seen and everyone he had met. He had the artist’s visionary ability to challenge the “received taste” of straight prejudice and sissy myth. His art, celebratory of primal male sex, is, like the Theater of Cruelty which flourished in the early Sixties, Art of Assault. After all, if art doesn’t liberate and change you, it isn’t art; it’s entertainment.

Arnett is to leather nightlife on Folsom what Harvey Milk is to daytime politics: one of those persons who generously sums up everything for nearly everyone in the free expression of his own stunning identity.

In 1962, Arnett arrived in San Francisco as the lead dancer in the touring company of Bye-Bye, Birdie. He saw San Francisco for what it is: a wide-open fishing village with an opera. Like Harvey Milk, Arnett was an attuned New Yorker blown out west like Dotty to Oz. Both men took hold of the laid-back California style and kicked it into Manhattanized high gear–something native San Franciscans can never forgive either of them.

But kick-ass visionaries don’t ask for, or need, forgiveness when, visionary and obsessed, they decide to act up and act out their truth. Gays of the Seventies, in the clarity of their decade, should not be judged by retro-revisionists who want to re-codify history according to their current PC norms, which, next decade, next century, will appear equally retro.

Arnett, dancer and choreographer, stage designer, and painter was foremost a creature of the night. A born exhibitionist, his nights at the baths where he appeared as “The Man Parents Warn Kids About” were performance art.

We met a deux in May 1970.

Chuck Arnett was a personage, a star, an icon.

Fame-Fuckers sought him out.

He was the Candy Man.

Arnett was the man who introduced the needle to Folsom Street.

He was seductive with drugs, but he was cool enough to understand no without ending the friendship.

Post-Nancy moralizing aside, the Golden Age of Liberation was a time when recreational, mind-expanding drugs were de rigueur. He was what he was when we were all the way we were: a revolutionary character. His lifelines, like the lines of his art, were jagged, speedy, hallucinatorily impressionistic, yet awash with a sensuality of masculine form and sweaty color.

.PIONEER SOMA ARTIST

.Arnett, as performance artist, thrived on the seduction of eager players into his performances. Born in the rebel South, he came to from the New York of Broadway, Warhol, the Velvet Underground, and the experimental films of the Kuchar brothers and Kenneth Anger, by way of the Hollywood imprint of the wild one, Marlon Brando. Arnett was a master manipulator of media: incoming and outgoing. He was the master sex performer in person. He was What-Was-Happening in the Drop-Out/Turn-On/

Be-In happenings staged nightly at the psychedelic baths.

At a heated point in the civil rights of male erotic history, Arnett brought, through his art and personality, what was simmering in the sexual-esthetic of the masculine American homosexual up to boil. When Brando pulled on a leather jacket and when Arnett created his sexually outrageous art, men suddenly saw the masculine-identified way they had to be, because in their secret hearts they recognized they already were that way.

Theatrical through and through, Arnett made South of Market his studio back lot. He was the Pioneer Artist, the first to exhibit his art, in the then-rough SOMA. He led the way for REX, Tom of Finland, and Mapplethorpe to show at 1975’s Academy Awards Streaker Robert Opel’s Fey Way Gallery. Arnett, with a social consciousness honed in the 1930s, and sophisticated in the 1950s, was, by the 1960s, ready, willing, and able to turn the high beam of his talent on his Archetypal Leather Bar project.

If an artist can objectify his own personality within his creation, then The Tool Box was, in fact, Chuck Arnett, not himself singly, but himself as an amalgam of many men thinking and feeling similarly, but less able in those queer-bashing times to express themselves graphically. If gay men are their own best creation, then, without Arnett’s leading the way, and opening the door of The Tool Box, they may have wandered, guideless, all dressed up with no place to go, and the glorious decade of the Seventies in San Francisco might not have been so different from New York and Los Angeles.

But it was, Blanche. But it was.

Too bad AIDS paranoia in the reactive Eighties so bashed the High Gay Culture of the Seventies which bonded men the way serving in-country in Vietnam bonded soldiers. Arnett in 1986 spoke for many Seventies’ veterans of the sexual liberation front when he said about the young turks of the Eighties: “They’re so fucking righteous. They’re ingrates. We created them. Fuck ’em.”

.MURAL AS POLITICS

.Muralists tend to be political, and muralist Arnett was political according to his time. His painting was a radical act created before anyone ever dared imagine gays as a political force. Masculine homosexuals? Even in the 1990s such a concept strikes chords of terror and disbelief in the male-bashing KVeens of Divadom. Arnett’s New Sex Icons broke the prejudicial stereotype. With paint brush in hand, he powered up his fist against homophobia and endorsed the Jungian animus.

In that one grand sweep, he set the radical, rebellious tone South of Market. He changed the way faggots looked at themselves. He changed Marlon Brando and James Dean into archetypal black silhouettes, new Rorshach images of bikers and musclemen and athletes and construction workers, against which men, standing, cruising, beer bottle in hand, could re-assess and validate animus-images of themselves and their multiple, polymorphously perverse partners.

Arnett, a gentleman from the American South, never glamourized rednecks or redneckerie. His homomasculine men were not stereotypes of the worst of what males do when males act their stereotypical worst. Arnett made it possible to be manly, even “crude,” without being insensitive or rude.

Arnett’s clarion mural, double-trucked across two LIFE pages, signaled a new image of male homosexuals. Arnett was, in fact, a fan of Walt Whitman’s variety of males celebrated in Leaves of Grass. That classic Tool Box issue of LIFE started the migration to San Francisco that caused both South of Market and Castro to happen. Arnett, like some lusty Moses, parted the Red Sea and wandering, isolated homosexual refugees from all across the US came in from the cold diaspora to the warmth of a community being born.

That’s American pop culture. A movie yesterday. A mural today. A lifestyle tomorrow.

.LEGEND AND LEGACY

.Chuck Arnett lived lowlife to the hilt. Once he had set his Folsom Juggernaut in motion, he turned his awesome primitive talent to sketching gutwrenching sex scenes. His disciplined genius, more inspired than impaired by drugs, evinced immediate response with each new creation.

He was in demand as a commercial artist for new bars and baths. His poster work was immediately collectible. Magazines, particularly Drummer, sought his illustrations. His acid-abstract style suggested worlds of wonder.

The man knew sex.

The artist illustrated it.

Arnett was a celebrity on the set of the Folsom movie he had storyboarded on the wall of The Tool Box.

Where the private Arnett fuses into the public Arnett, reality converges with myth. Arnett, personally, was quiet, unassuming, anonymous. In his later years, he was a grizzled man of stark flesh and bone, who sat oftentimes alone in the nonworking sauna at the Barracks. To a new generation in the late Seventies, to whom he had given a New-Sex world, he was no longer a famous face. His fabled reputation grew ironically larger as he shrunk physically with time. His fame had turned his name into an image larger than any human person could maintain.

His art was the stuff of glorious sketches on Pompeiian ruins. He suffered the fate of all great artists who don’t share with Byron, Shelley, Keats, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, James Dean, Marilyn, Mapplethorpe, and Keith Haring, the romantic luxury of death at an early age.

His legend and legacy, even in his life, much the same as Presley, were larger than he was himself. His wired scrawls had prompted and caught the high-wire life of the Golden Age. He was the artist and iconographer extraordinaire of holy shrines: The Tool Box (1964), the Stud (1968), the Red Star Saloon (1972), the No Name (1973), and the Ambush (1974).

.LUST IN THE DUST

.There’s a miniseries in Chuck Arnett just as there is in the rise and decline of the Golden Age of Sexual Liberation. The man who had thrilled Broadway show audiences retired to relative personal obscurity, haunting nightspots, seeking new visions for his pen and brush, searching for the tough men who populated his art.

He was a teacher of homomasculinity. His vision was of the ideal raw-sex moment, of sweaty penetration, of attitude, of submission/domination fixed forever in the single frame of his minimalist drawings. That vision, what he drew, was the single, golden orgasmic moment. His work aches with the hardcore romance of the ironically existential searcher who wishes to transcend time so that the orgasmic moment, celebrated between men, can last forever.

In the late Seventies, The Tool Box, long deserted, was torn down by the the City for urban renewal. Somehow, though, the wrecker’s ball failed to knock down the stone wall with Arnett’s mural of urban aboriginal men in leather made famous by LIFE.

For two years, at the corner of 4th and Harrison, drivers coming down the offramp from the freeway were greeted by Arnett’s somber dark shadows, those Lascaux cave drawings of Neanderthal, primal, kick-ass leathermen.

The Black Cat begat the Tool Box, and in the begatting lies an historical tale of one man’s tough vision of masculine homosexuals. Just as Tony Tavarosi had helped nurture the spontaneous combustion of the leather bar in its first spark, San Francisco’s first masculine visionary recognized by the media was Chuck Arnett.

Hippies were yet to come into flower in the Haight-Ashbury, from which neighborhood, shortly, the smell of incense and pot would be blowin’ in the 60’s wind down toward Folsom Street where peace, love, and granola would mix with hard leather, hard drugs, and hard sex.

.BYE-BYE, BIRDIE

.Chuck Arnett had all the gifts of the true eclectic. In his life, he absorbed with voracious sexual-esthetic appetite everything he had seen and everyone he had met. Arnett is to leather nightlife on Folsom what Harvey Milk is to politics: one of those men who sums up everything for everyone in the free expression of his own stunning identity.

In 1962, Arnett arrived in San Francisco as the lead dancer in the touring company of Bye-Bye, Birdie. He saw San Francisco for what it is: a wide-open fishing village with an opera. Like Harvey Milk, Arnett was an attuned New Yorker blown out West like Dotty to Oz. Both men took hold of the laidback California “far-out, man” evolution of things and kicked them into East Coast high gear, something some San Franciscans can never forgive either of them for, but forgiveness is not a part of history when men, visionary and obsessed, decide to put the peddle to the metal.

Arnett, dancer and choreographer, was also a stage designer, a painter, and a creature of the night. He was a born exhibitionist. His nights at the baths were performance art. They were the logical sexual extension of the bath house subculture that grew out of the leather bars, specifically the seminal bar he designed, The Tool Box.

Marlon Brando had ridden out of the 50’s in The Wild One as a leather-bike icon who struck the lost chord of a generation of rebels with very definite causes. Brando as icon vibrated Arnett’s creative genesis as much as Brando supercharged International Leather’s first underground filmmaker, Kenneth Anger; his Scorpio Rising is the first and best gay bike-and-blasphemy leather film ever made. Sam Steward, the Grandfather of Leather Literature, wrote under the name “Phil Andros” and tattooed under the name “Phil Sparrow.” As “Phil Sparrow,” Sam, friend and intimate of Gertrude and Alice, tattooed Kenneth Anger and James Dean, and advised a young Chicago tattooist to change his name to “Cliff Raven.”

.A CHARMED LEATHER CIRCLE

.These men, strikingly individual, came together at a heated point in male history. Something was simmering up to boil in the sexual-esthetic of the masculine American homosexual. When Brando pulled on a leather jacket and careened his bike across a thousand drive-in movie screens, men like Arnett and Anger, like thousands of other guys suddenly saw the way they had to be, because in their secret hearts they recognized they already were that way.

Arnett, as are most Americans, was MGMothered and Warner-Brothered. The mise en scene which Arnett saw suggested in The Wild One was one, he knew, if it didn’t exist, he could make it exist if he could only find the right place and the right time. In San Francisco he found in real dimension what he had seen in two-dimension at the drive-in. Theatrical through and through, Arnett made South of Market his studio back lot. He was the Pioneer Artist, the first to exhibit his art, in the then-rough and now punk-yuppie SOMA. He seduced through artful bar-ambience the wandering crowd of leathermen bikers and marshalled them together as important extras in the crowd scene he was about to create in his brainchild, The Tool Box.

Rarely, if ever, comes the information as to the financial backers of a particular bar. Even more rarely do the customers care. The cash is not as important as the cachet of mystique. The convergence of erotic-esthetic energy is. Arnett, having absorbed a hyper-dose of hyper-male American popular culture, turned, as a true artist, the high beam of his talent on his Archetypal Leather Bar project with as much intensity as C. B. de Mille contemplating any Pharoah contemplating a pyramid. If an artist can objectify his own personality within his creation, then The Tool Box was, in fact, Chuck Arnett, not himself singly, but himself as an amalgam of many men thinking and feeling similarly but less able to express themselves graphically. If gay men are their own best creation, then, without Arnett’s leading the way, and opening the doors of The Tool Box, they would have been all dressed up with no place to go.

.ARNETT’S GRAFITTI ICONS

.Arnett, adapting movie images from The Wild One and Scorpio Rising, painted a gigantic mural on the inside wall of The Tool Box. His oversized message of the supposedly menacing side of masculine homosexuality that was emerging, of course, brought LIFE magazine, always eager with its prurient Catholic interest in titillating “horrors of torture” material, sniffing around for the special something that was happening with a special breed of men in San Francisco.

Masculine homosexuals?

Arnett’s nouveux Icons broke the prejudicial stereotype.

Omigod! If homosexuals aren’t all sissies in dresses, then what ambiguous reflection did Arnett’s dark vision throw on the straight male image? If straights thought they themselves were tough “real” men, Arnett, doing what artists are meant to do, gutpunched straight “reality” by showing homosexual men were just as tough and maybe more “real.”

.MURAL AS POLITICS

. Muralists tend to be political, and muralist Arnett was political before his time. His painting was a radical act created before anyone ever dared imagine gays as a political force. With paint brush in hand, he put his fist up against fag-bashing with as much bravado as Molly Pitcher hanging out the flag as the British marched past. In that one grand sweep, he set the radical, rebellious tone South of Market. He changed the way faggots looked at themselves. He changed Marlon Brando and James Dean into archetypal black silhouettes, new Rohrshach images of bikers and musclemen and athletes and construction workers, against which men, standing, cruising, beer bottle in hand, measured themselves and their tricks.

Arnett’s clarion mural, doubletrucked across two LIFE pages, signaled across America a new image of homosexuals. That classic Tool Box issue of LIFE started the migration to San Francisco that caused both South of Market and Castro to happen. Arnett, like some lusty Moses, parted the Red Sea and wandering, isolated homosexual refugees from all across the U.S. came in from the cold diaspora to the warmth of a community being born.

That’s pop culture. A movie today. A lifestyle tomorrow.

.END OF ARNETT

.Chuck Arnett lived lowlife to the hilt. Once his Folsom universe was set in motion, he turned his awesome primitive talent to sketching gutwrenching sex scenes. His genius, as often inspired as impaired by drugs, evinced immediate response. He was in demand as a commercial artist for new bars and baths. His poster work was immediately a collectible. Magazines, particularly Drummer, sought his illustrations. His acid-abstract style suggested worlds of wonder. The man knew sex. The artist illustrated it. Arnett was a fixture at the baths. He lived on the set of the Folsom movie he had storyboarded on the wall of the Tool Box. One informant alledges that “Arnett introduced the needle to leather in the 70’s.” If so, reality converges with myth. Arnett was quiet, anonymous, a man of stark flesh and bone, who sat oftentimes alone in the nonworking sauna at the Barracks. His was not a famous face, but everyone knew his name. His art was the stuff of grafitti. His wired scrawls caught the high-wire life of the times. He was the artist extraordinaire of The Tool Box (1964), the Stud (1968), the Red Star Saloon (1972), the No Name, and the Ambush.

There’s a miniseries in Chuck Arnett just as there is in the rise and decline of the Golden Age. The man who had thrilled Broadway show audiences retired to relative personal obscurity, haunting nightspots, seeking new visions for his pen and brush, searching for the tough men who populated his posters. His vision was of the ideal raw-sex moment, of sweaty penetration, of attitude, of submission/domination fixed forever in the single frame of his drawings. That vision, what he drew, was the single, golden orgasmic moment. His work aches with the hardcore romance of the searcher who wishes to transcend time so that the orgasmic moment can last forever.

On March 2, 1988, at 12:45 pm, Chuck Arnett, artist, peacefully transcended sixty years of his visionary life.

.PEOPLE LIKES US

.On the generically gay side, PEOPLE has become spokesmag for gay topics, extremely empathic issue after issue, featuring gay men and women in their variety of political, arts, and sports accomplishments. Even the homosexual sauna exploits of the Reverend Jim Bakker were presented without nasty judgment as just the sex fun of a few good ol’ southern boys while Tammy Faye pounded on the door screaming, “Jim! I know you’re in there!”

Luce’s wife, Clare Booth Luce, championed the lighter side of Catholic gaiety. Clare Loose Booth, as some called her, was US ambassador to the Vatican, largely a social appointment, and was best known as the author of the Broadway play and Hollywood classic, The Women, which set the screen standard for bitchy dish and Roz Russell’s fluttering limp wrists. Meld the two together and America has a major publishing company constantly provocative, and surprisingly sympathetic to homosexuality, especially where arts and SM are concerned.”SHOCKING” REPORTS

LIFE’s fascination with Arnett, and what Arnett . symbolized, is the Catholic obsession with the ideals and ordeals of submission and domination. This is apparent both to the longtime reader and to the skeptical scholar who checks out generic SM topics in The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. Always gilded with social responsibility, TIME/LIFE, to illustrate its subtle bent, likes rough stuff: 1) SERE survival training in which Navy Seals, under the guise of POW training, are tied to bondage boards with their heads wrapped in T-shirts soaked with buckets of water, forced into swallowing while a trainer straddles their hips and kneads their swollen guts, finally, to be shoved, kneeling and hooded, in wooden boxes the size of a luggage locker, until finally, broken, under command of US officers they are made to urinate on, defecate on, and masturbate on an American flag; 2) USMC brig-bondage and head-taping in “The Hog-Tied Brig Rats of Camp Pendleton,” complete with former prisoners’ raw sketches; 3)

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