San Francisco Sexual Babylon

This program contains sexually explicit content. This program is 18+ and will require ID.

This program celebrates the San Francisco Bay Area as an epicenter of sexual liberation and erotic representation. Through avant-garde film and performance, sex education and porn, San Francisco has long been the place not only to imagine but to test out new social and sexual possibilities. In this deeply queer city, clear lines of generational influence can be drawn over the decades: people who created sexual images as part of a liberatory ethos or queer politics taught in local art schools and inspired others to create in turn. Focusing on the explosion of sexually explicit representation in the 1970s—while looking ahead to the Bay Area sex radicalism of the 1990s, an avant-garde for lesbian, trans and S/M erotica— this program offers a hot-blooded history of San Francisco sex on film and video, a noble tradition invested in the belief that sex can liberate and teach as well as provide pleasure.

Program:

Alice Anne Parker, Riverbody, 1970, 7 min

A continuous dissolve of 87 male and female nudes.

Barbara Hammer, Multiple Orgasm, 1976, 5 min

A sensual, explicit film that says just what it is plus visual overlays of erotic rock and cave formations.

Curt McDowell, Confessions, 1971, 11 min

Then a graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute, Curt McDowell opens his film with a confession to his mother and father, listing in exhausting detail his sins of the flesh.

Michael Wallin, The Place Between Our Bodies, 1975, 33 min

“[The film] seems to come from another planet, another epoch, in its frank and tender extrapolation of gay sexual hunger and the kindling of a first relationship. The film is stridently pre-AIDS—much more so than any mid-70s porno. This is partly because it is a personal film that discusses sex and love in a context that endows them with transcendent powers. […] Its most beautiful moments become its most painful.” – Todd Haynes

Azian Nurudin, Bitter Strength: Sadistic Response Version, 1992, 2 min

This work is a response to those who think that S/M is part of violence against women.

Azian Nurudin, Nancy’s Nightmare, 1988, 5 min

This work is a stylized depiction of lesbian S/M, with the audio (two versions of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”) providing underpinnings of humour to the scenes.