“Pink Narcissus” grew out of these fanciful soft-core tableaux. Most of the film was shot in his apartment near Times Square, between 1963 and 1970. Neighborhood prostitutes made up the cast. Bidgood designed the sets and costumes and did the makeup. In the editing stage, a now-defunct production company that had invested in the project took over. “One of the props in my apartment was an ax,” he recalls. “I was going to edit their bodies.” Bidgood replaced his name in the credits with Anonymous. The film was released but ignored. Bidgood took a decade-long break from his art.

“No one lives in squalor out of caprice,” Bidgood said when I met with him in the cramped fourth-floor walk-up where he now lives and works. Shelves holding paint and glitter line the walls. The toaster oven contains miniature golden cherubs for a photo project commissioned by the shoe designer Christian Louboutin.

Bidgood works continuously, but his output is small; much of his recent work was financed by a grant from Creative Capital. “Had it not been about what it was about,” he said of “Pink Narcissus,” “this person might have gotten a call from Hollywood.”