Peter Berlin

He was done already more than 30 years ago.

I don’t care if you call me this way or that way.

Very rarely. Look at the view.

I’ve lived in San Francisco since 1970. I’ve had five apartments. I’m here since 1989.

They’re from my friend, Bryce. He was in jail and he asked me to buy him colouring books. He coloured those. When he died in 2005, I cut them out and framed them. I’m very sentimental. This is Bryce here in this photo. A great guy. He was living with me for a while. He appreciated me; the current one doesn’t. Reggie is drug addicted. Still, I take good care of him. I wash his clothes and cook for us. I have a mother instinct.

I cook quite well, as much as I do everything quite well. My cooking is done in 30 minutes. I bake potatoes and then I do my piece of fish, usually red snapper or whatever’s on sale. It doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s my whole life idea. I describe my approach as that of a dilettante; I do things well enough. If I compare my photographs with Mapplethorpe’s, with his big studio and all the lights, the perfect image was so important for him, but for me it was never perfect, and that’s fine. But with Reggie, it’s such a drama.

I painted that in the ‘80s. See those black marks? When Bryce was angry he took black paint and completely covered the entire painting. I scraped it off the figure and left those abstract marks. I don’t know why he got angry. He painted the television black, too. He lost his mind.

Jochen Labriola taught me to paint. He was the man that took me out of Germany before I became Peter Berlin. We lived all around the world: Rome, Paris, New York. He got sick in 1988. When he died my life went from colour to black and white because he was the greatest.

There’s a German word for ‘comrade’. It covers every different gradation. It can mean acquaintance, friend, or lover. Comrade is kinship. It doesn’t really have to do with sex, just great fun, great humour, great understanding. He was always smiling and laughing.

Yes, the only one that survived. I’m on the boardwalk on Fire Island. I could have shot it myself, but it’s a Mapplethorpe. Actually, these square frames are from an exhibition that Mapplethorpe curated in New York. He asked me to participate, and he bought one behind my back. Meaning, he just paid the full price and never said a word to me. I always found that very telling about him.

I hardly ever showed it in galleries. My stuff falls through the cracks; it’s not seen as art. I don’t even use the word. I never saw myself as a photographer; I saw myself as just chronicling the moments in my life when I felt the best. I said, ‘You know what? I had a good night’, and I’d be looking good still in the morning. I’d say, ‘Let’s freeze it’. That’s all. It’s not a picture where I could make an appointment with a photographer: ‘OK, get hard now’. No, I just made a record, a very honest, real picture. It was not a fake. Whenever I took my picture, I felt great. Peter Berlin is the epitome of, ‘I looked in the mirror, I love myself’. I say, ‘OK, let’s have a good time’, but I think what is more intense with me is not the so-called narcissism, it’s the exhibitionism.

One day someone gave me a name tag for some event, and it said, ‘Peter Berlin: artist’. I asked,‘What makes one an artist?’ Especially when you’re not connected to the art world and the business side of it. Now rich people see artwork as something to invest their money in. In my case, unfortunately, nobody sees the potential.

Both, you hit it right on the head.

You know how many years ahead of my time I am? I figured it out. In 50 years my stuff will be expensive, but usually one has to die first. I entertain myself by thinking about this stuff. I’m very bored by people. I’d rather be here with my cat.

They’ve diminished sex to a transaction, like going to a bank. Do you want to have a loan of $1,000 or $2,000? The question these days is always, ‘What are you into?’ Top? Bottom? Whenever I get that question it’s already over for me. That beautiful, colourful array of possibility is gone. I realised early on that for many people sex was not as important as it was for me. They do it between 5.30pm and 6.00pm, get it out of the way: ‘OK, now we can go out for dinner’. For me, it was my whole life: my photographs, the films, the daily cruising. At the time it never felt abnormal. I was exactly like all my friends. We all went out looking, night after night. I’ve had so much time in my life to think about these things; most people can’t, because they are too busy with work and family.

I’ve asked thousands of men, ‘What’s your dream? What’s your fantasy?’ You know what I immediately realised? People don’t have any. I say, ‘What do you want in life?’ They don’t know. We don’t live in a world where your parents tell you, ‘Whatever you do in life, just have a great time’. No. You have to go to school and then do well at university. You have to earn a degree and then you have to get a good—I said, ‘Oh, fuck’. This is when people waste their most precious time: their youth. Now I’m old. I agree with Katharine Hepburn: there’s nothing good about old age.

Wisdom is something that is also embedded in young people. Old age doesn’t mean that you get wise. Am I wiser now than when I was Peter Berlin? No. Maybe I have a more definite impression about certain things. You can be stupid as a young person and you can die stupid. Already you see it in nations. After the Second World War in Europe, I said, ‘OK, it’s over. This will be the last war’. Boy, was I mistaken.

That I’m stupid. Our culture looks at young, pretty, blonde girls. ‘Look at her, she must be stupid’. Same with me: ‘He looks good, he does pornography, he is stupid’. Have you heard the expression, ‘Dumb fucks good’?

There you are. I have enjoyed my life. So, really, who is the stupid one?

If they want something from me and I don’t give it to them, people change how they feel about me in a split second.

It’s not traumatic. Trauma is great; it’s heavy, it’s important.

If you’re sexually rejected, I would ask you why you put yourself in a position to get rejected. I was never rejected in my life. Why? Not because I’m so cute, but because I never in my life went up to anybody and said, ‘I want you’. Now, I had a lot of people that I ended up having a good time with. At some point I’ve asked myself, ‘Why did I choose that person? They’re not really that attractive, not really this, not really that’. The first thing that comes to mind is respect. They never put me in the position to reject them. I don’t want to reject anything. But when you push me, I can do it in a split second.

The art of living in a community where you don’t create something like rejection. There are hundreds of guys over the years who have seen me and said, ‘You’re not my type’. Not everybody wanted me. That’s fine. Although in my case there was a very broad variety that were attracted. It’s something interesting about Peter Berlin; I had a universal look. Not too big, not too small, not too butch, not too femme, just right.

I think the word ‘androgynous’ fits me.

No! Oh my god. Go to the internet and look at some other guys. My dick is just proportional. If someone approached me in a bar because they wanted a huge dick, that would be the end for me and that person. A big dick, for me, is no different than if you have a big ear or if you have a big thumb. It doesn’t matter to me. There is something else to that: Peter Berlin is from head to toe. When you think about my image, you visualise the whole picture. It always has to be harmonious, top to bottom. You mention Prince and Bowie; the main thing with those people was that they were authentic.

When you stand on this planet and you’re not insecure. Insecurity is very unsexy. Authenticity means you’re saying, ‘This is me, take me or leave me’. I used my body as best as I could. Even at my height, my body was never perfect, my face was not photogenic. Maybe that’s where the art came in. I made myself look good. The dick was a part of it: ‘By the way, I have a dick’. I didn’t hide it. It was part of the legs, the face, the head, and the boots. That made me stand out more than many other people. When I was Peter Berlin I never thought I was so special. I now look back and say, ‘Oh my god, it was special’.

Not really. I used to dress Reggie when we first met. I think that’s why we remain together. I was like a little girl playing with a doll. I have hundreds of pictures of him. I’m like a child; I’d take you and say, ‘Let’s stop you from dressing so boring’.

Yes, of course! Ordinary. You’re running around blending into that vast picture of boredom and nothingness.

Then I would say I want to get high with you. That’s how I did it with Reggie. For me, the dressing-up thing needs a certain level of intimacy.

She didn’t come into my thought process until 30 years later, when I realised there was this very iconic thing with Marilyn. Then I thought ‘There is no one but me as the male version’. I said, ‘My god, she created herself, and I created myself’. Nobody told me, ‘Wear this, wear that’. I knew exactly what I wanted to project. So, yes, I’m the male Marilyn Monroe. I wish I could have talked to her, because she would have understood what I was talking about. She couldn’t bear it though. She died that fragile Norma Jean, because she couldn’t separate: they wanted Marilyn, they didn’t want Norma, and she broke. Now, in my case, because it is not that man–woman thing, it’s a man–man thing, I realised quickly I had to separate Armin Baron Hagen Freiherr von Hoyningen-Huene from Peter Berlin. I haven’t met one person who’s said, ‘Yes, you are exactly how I thought you’d be’. They’ve always said, ‘You’re so different to what I thought’. What that tells me: you’re stupid.

I made it easy for you to feel sexual, especially gay men. That’s fine. That’s beautiful. I did a great job. I have a lot of letters telling me how great I was. Boys, when they were 14 years old, have seen my picture and got off to it. They write to me, saying, ‘Peter, thank you so much. It helped me to feel good about my own sexuality’. I never felt shame about my homosexuality. I loved it from day one. I’ve never had that feeling, ‘Poor me, I’m gay and I’m so discriminated against’.

No. My mother was traumatised. How do I feel about that? I was sorry that I hurt her, but I moved out of the house. Today, I have a good relationship with my mother, with my sister, with all three of my nephews who are grown men, all straight as hell with families, babies. They all love me, ‘There’s Armin. Yes, he was Peter Berlin’. They’re intrigued because I’m the only one in the family who did something outside of the norm. When I look back, my intent wasn’t to be some iconic symbol; the only thing I wanted was to get laid. That was my whole intent.

It created a great feeling in me. It couldn’t be topped by a visit to the museum or a trip to Italy, by swimming in the ocean or jumping from an airplane. I said, ‘I know this can’t be topped’. Maintaining that feeling of sexual arousal, staying in that place where you’re just about to cum but don’t. When you cum, it’s over. After you cum, you say, ‘Leave me alone. I want to go to sleep’. The climax is like dying. So what did I do? I maintained it.

I love the state when the mind and body are in such great harmony. Some people go to the movies; I was out in the morning at the beach, and at the bars in the evening, sexually vibrating. For me, the art of cruising is about maintaining the good times for as long as possible.

This whole thing with Facebook and Instagram, people show pictures and receive comments: ‘Awesome, great’. Something incredible has happened in my lifetime. Time-wise, I was very well born. After the war in Berlin, gay life was incredible and it was all underground. Nobody talked about it. It took place in speakeasies. You’d knock on the door, and if you belonged you’d be invited into this fabulous shared reality. But now with the computerisation of social life, with Instagram and Facebook, the young generation say, ‘Look, I have 5,000 friends’. Everyone thinks they’re Michael Jackson, that millions of people love them. Guess what? Nobody loves you. They live in this illusion of life. There will be something awful coming when these young people grow up. When they are a little bit sensitive they’ll break. They’ll say, ‘My god, where are all those friends?’ The friends I had in my life, I met the old-fashioned way. The people who wrote Peter Berlin fan mail, I had a very good sense of what was real and what was not. Real for me is when I walk the streets and you pass me, I look at you, you look at me, we pass each other, and then I look back, and you look back, and then you stop. That’s real! That will never happen inside a computer.