On Alejandro Jodorowsky, El Topo
commercialized surrealism, avant-garde devices that fascinated a small bohemian group, is now a direct pipeline to the occult, mass youth. Counterculture was popularized, updated, and mass-produced surrealism.
Variety described Flaming Creatures as a 58-minute montage of a trasvestite orgy.
Tomkins Mekas: “The public, which had been largely oblivious of the underground’s existence, assumed that ‘underground’ was synonymous with dirty pictures.” March 1964
Andy Warhol and the breakout of the underground as a political movement to general cinema. A sexual liberation seemed tolerable, maybe even fashionable.
Pop art and camp were contextually associated by opposition to the dominant, and so too were op art and sexual diversity. Vivian Gornick wrote in Village Voice, “Popular culture is now in the hands of the homosexuals. It is homosexual taste that determines largely style, story, and statement in painting, literature, dance…” She argues that camp was not, as Sontag (UW flashback) described it, “tender” but rather a “raging put-on of the middle classes”
The underground cinema was not the only early 1960s space for gat play, but it was one that endorsed and even rewarded resistance. It was a scene that “‘flew in the face’ of the prevailing representation of homosexuals in the 1950s as ‘isolated perverts,’ as subjects ‘gone awry'”–or at least the subjects gone awry were having fun going threre! Watching underground movies in New York City in the early 1960s was the beginning of a participation in a movemenet; it was building a community that would later erupt into a revoltuion.