From Meg Shield’s article for Film School Rejects:
A statuesque sex worker (Bobby Kendall) daydreams of tactile erotic encounters from the seclusion of his sequenced apartment. Through a fuchsia fog of fantastical escapism, the young man’s interlocked, narcissistic dream-life begins to subsume the sleaze of his day-to-day. Pert matadors, leather-clad bikers, and all manner of imagined lovers traipse through the young man’s apartment.
Directed by James Bidgood, who long-disowned his labor of love due to conflicts with the producing brass, 1971’s Pink Narcissus is a kitsch cacophony of intimacy and one of the most influential and culturally significant pieces of queer experimental filmmaking. In its terse 65-minute runtime, Pink Narcissus muses on the interlocking intricacies of homoeroticism, loneliness, and fantasies within fantasies. Unabashedly risqué and unapologetically campy, the film has proved an influential aesthetic touchstone of queer escapism. As Oliver Basciano writes for The Guardian, in commemoration of Bidgood’s recent passing, the influence of Pink Narcissus can be felt in the works of everyone from Pierre et Gilles to Lil Nas X.