Diary of a Thought Criminal
In 1990, Mark I Chester photographed Robert Chesley, his former partner and friend, in the nude, with his dick erect and KS lesions showing. These celebrated portraits, titled “Robert Chesley, KS Portraits with Harddick and Superman Spandex”, have been exhibited around the US.
Here, he talks to Alastair Curtis about his memories of Robert, how sex and fetish influenced his playwriting, and the story behind this ground-breaking series of portraits.
Article
published by The AIDS Plays Project in March 2024.
Thanks for talking to me today, Mark.
Thank you! It was very difficult losing Robert to AIDS and thinking about what he might have written in the intervening years. I think it’s great you are paying attention to him and his work, and this play in particular, which caused a lot of controversy.
How did you meet Robert?
I had a series of my photographs published in Drummer Magazine. He got drunk and wrote me this wonderful mash note. I’d never had a mash note before.
Sorry, what is a mash note?
Someone who is expressing great desire and appreciation for you. I know we don’t speak the same language!
No, I like mash note. I don’t send enough.
It was very charming. He was bicoastal, spending some time in New York and some time in San Francisco, and we had an overlapping group of friends. We first met around the time that one of his plays was being produced in the downstairs theatre at Studio Rhinoceros [San Francisco’s oldest gay theatre]. That was ‘Stray Dog Story’, in 1982. We immediately got on.
After ‘Stray Dog Story’, did you see many more of his plays?
I saw whatever was produced in San Francisco. But towards the end of his career, Theatre Rhinoceros wasn’t particularly supportive of Robert and what he was doing. They were so afraid of the sexuality in ‘Jerker’ that they didn’t have it as a regular play during the subscription season. It turned out to be a smash. Considering what Robert did for Rhino, they weren't very nice to him.
Was sex the reason his relationship with Theatre Rhinoceros soured?
There was this whole thing about the NEA [America’s National Endowment of Arts], where rules were passed saying you couldn’t do anything sexual, or homosexual, or radically sexual on stage. Robert was so incensed he got a box of tomatoes and suggested that people going into the theatre take them and throw them at whatever play was going on. For a gay theatre to sign a statement saying they wouldn’t produce any work involving sexuality felt like a total betrayal.
I can imagine, particularly considering how important sexuality and fetish is to Robert’s writing. There’s watersports, fraternal incest and bondage in Jerker, to name but a few fetishes. Could you talk about the relationship between kink and Robert’s writing?
It was the times. We were all trying to deconstruct the walls that had been built up so that we could be sexual without shame. Many of us South of Market were involved in that kind of deconstruction. It wasn’t that sex was in one place and art was in another. There were no walls between them. We tore them down so that sex was everywhere. All of us had grown up with shame and had it put upon us. Being queer meant there was something wrong with you. My mother believed that it was a mental illness. We wanted to put sex everywhere, so that we were living full and authentic lives, rather than constantly having to worry that we couldn’t say that here, or do that here, and behave. We weren’t very good at behaving!
Robert tried to include an on-stage sex act in every plays. That was his finger to the uptight world. Even though you don’t always see it, like the cock-sucking scene in ‘Stray Dog Story’, where it happens behind something. It’s more fetishistic in ‘Nocturnes’ and ‘Jerker’.
I don’t know much about Nocturnes, his performance piece from 1983. It’s not published.
Do you know about 544 Natoma?
Not at all.
It was San Francisco’s first openly gay performance space, run by Peter Hartmann, an artist who'd been involved in experimental theatre in New York. He moved out to San Francisco, found a place South of Market, and opened this gallery. The San Francisco Jacks had their first sex party on its stage. Peter brought in a whole range of things: music, theatre, dance.
Robert got together with Christopher Beck in 1983 around the point people had started dying. Robert did the writing and Christopher the movement. 'Nocturnes’ was very sexual. It got an incredible response. Things were happening in San Francisco in the 80s, but there was no such thing as ‘gay theater.’ Each time someone did something, it really was ground-breaking.
‘Jerker’ was also ground-breaking when it premiered in 1986.
It’s hard for queer men today to understand how terrible things were. You can read numbers, but that doesn’t describe what at the time felt like our entire world burning down around us. A lot of anti-sex messages were coming out because people didn’t yet understand what was going on: ‘you people are bad’, ‘you did it to yourselves’, ‘it’s because you are obsessed with sex’.
Many of us still believed that we had a right to be sexual. We weren’t going to lose that aspect of our lives. Robert once said gay liberation saved his life. He’d entered into a marriage before he knew he was gay. It saved him from a life that would have been extremely unhappy.
Robert, like many people who became HIV-positive, didn’t regret his sexuality. In ‘Jerker’ he wanted to show we still have the right to be sexual, even if we change how we are sexual with one another.
You famously photographed Robert in the series “Robert Chesley, KS Portraits with Harddick and Superman Spandex”. Could you talk to me about how that came about.
[He laughs] Sure! A lot of people were dying and I just felt that we should celebrate people why they were here. Do you know who Scott O’Hara was?
I don’t, no.
He was a gay porn-star. His moniker was ‘the biggest dick in San Francisco’. I’m not sure it was the biggest, but it was prodigious! He was a sex activist like Robert. After he came down with AIDS, I did an exhibition about him. Why wait until someone is dead to say we appreciate you and love you? I was sort of doing the same to Robert. I had enough photographs of him over the years. But I thought, how could I put a show together when he had KS and we don’t address it?
So he came over and we took a series of photographs of him sitting on a stool without his shirt. It was pretty shocking. Robert didn’t have a lot of facial lesions. They were mostly on his torso and his arms. I had not really seen them before. So it was very difficult and emotional to see him in that state and try to photograph him.
This is a very Robert Chesley story. When we were done, I thought that would the the end of it but he asked: are you willing to continue? What, I thought! Then, he brought out this spandex Superman outfit. This was combining two of his main fetishes, skintight spandex with superheroes. I wasn’t going to pass on that opportunity. And then, as he started getting dressed, his dick got hard. Like many people who were dealing with HIV drugs, he had a hard time getting hard, but he didn’t seem to have any trouble in front of my camera! Maybe the only point of contention, as a true spandex fetishist, is that everything has to be covered! But I said no! No, we can’t! We have to show your dick!
The overriding feeling at the time was that if you were gay and had HIV, you stopped having sex. And so, the very idea that somebody who is not only HIV-positive but showing signs of KS lesions, would be proudly sexual! The idea that HIV was not a total death sentence and we must live until the day we die, as opposed to dying until the day we die! It was groundbreaking. People who look at them now must think it was all planned out, but it wasn’t. It was Robert being Robert. To give him a symbol of power, not just power but an invincible super-power, and when he was already HIV-positive and showing signs of KS-lesions! It was a total mind-flick.
The series provides such a powerful contrast to the work of, say, Nicholas Nixon. He photographed People With AIDS laying sick in hospital-beds for The New York Times. Your portraits of Robert, by contrast, are defiant, courageous and de-stigmatising.
I hope so! They were shown in an exhibition called ‘Art AIDS America’ [in 2016]. Originally they were only going to take two of the six pieces. I said no. The series is all about evolution. Because Robert didn’t have lesions on his face, once he was fully clothed you couldn’t see his KS anymore, but if you look at the first two photographs it’s so obviously there. To only show those portraits of him would be like someone doing just Act 1 of a play.
‘Art AIDS America’ marked the first time the series of portraits had ever been shown together in public. I heard they once caused an upset at the New College of California in the mid 1990s.
That’s a cute story. These people had a show called “Rated X - Works that Dare Censorship”. I was tired of people being upset by my work so I had a long talk with them. I didn’t want any controversy because these were photographs of someone I loved and cared about it. They told me to show up at a certain time to install it. When they saw the photos, they were so upset that they took them down — at a show called ‘Works that Dare Censorship’!
These portraits were also printed in the SF Bay Times, the gay newspaper of San Francisco, in 1989.
The Bay Times was so fucking uptight. They’d published a photograph of a performance I did featuring a young man with multiple piercings and Robert’s leather gloved hand pulling at them. When they published it, they cut off Robert’s hand, which they said was too far. And so, when they agreed to print this portrait, which was not just gay sexual material but something with a fucking hard dick and KS lesions… They’d never done anything like that before!
What was the reaction like?
Errr… [He laughs] It caused some controversy! The whole idea of gay men having HIV and being sexual was hugely controversial. Nicholas Nixon's photographs are all about death, disease and destruction. My photographs of Robert don’t try to hide the fact he has AIDS. It’s a voice that says life is worth living. We want it to be about life and living, not about death and dying.
Mark I Chester is a photographer, writer, performer and curator, who has been living in San Francisco for over 30 years. His publications, including “Diary of a Thought Criminal” (1996), “City of Wounded Boys & Sexual Warriors” (2015), and “Street Sex Photos” (2021), provide a candid, titillating glimpse into the city’s gay and leather sexual sub-cultures.