Peter Berlin – Filmmaker & Artist
Peter Berlin (Armin Hagen Freiherr von Hoyningen-Huene), filmmaker and photographer, created his self-styled persona in the early 1970s on San Francisco’s Polk Street, writing, directing, and starring in Nights in Black Leather (1973) and That Boy (1974), two of the era’s most influential gay films. A friend of Robert Mapplethorpe, who photographed him on Fire Island and in his New York studio, Berlin was profiled by Jack Fritscher in “Peter Berlin Today” (Skin, Vol. 2, No. 6, 1981) and, decades later, in the long-form interview “Afternoon Tea with ‘The Lion in Winter,'” conducted for Berlin’s 80th birthday and collected in Fritscher’s Inventing the Gay Gaze (2022). Berlin also appears in the HBO documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016) and is the subject of Jim Tushinski’s 2005 documentary That Man: Peter Berlin.