From Jess Saldaña’s contribution to the article “The Greatest Films You’ll Never See, Volume III” for the Brooklyn Rail:

This 1971 experimental art film drips with lush saturation and shimmers with an 8 mm analog quality. The general arc of the abstracted story follows the fantasies of a gay male sex worker. Stunningly vibrant, it deals with young queer sexuality and images of the self as a worker. The title Pink Narcissus serves as a softening of the Greek figure, which reflects back a queer narcissism that comes into play as a means of self-sustaining. Rendered pre-AIDS pandemic, this film is largely overlooked because of the time it was made and its genre; it is told from the perspective of a gay prostitute. The lines between dreaming and waking life are blurred, as the theatrical sets unfold in the rose-colored twilight. In the surreal erotic poem, the main character repeats gestures that bleed over into different contexts, from fucking the land, to a bathroom sex scene, to him laying alone in bed spinning a globe. The film doesn’t hold back and has a raw, introspective quality to it. Originally released anonymously, it was erroneously credited to Andy Warhol, but was later revealed to be the work of James Bidgood, who removed his name after a producer dispute. It wears namelessness like a relic of a sexual freedom that could only exist in the 1960s–70s homo-underground, before illness and bereavement shaped the community forever.

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Browse all of James Bidgood’s work at CLAMP