The Dark Side: Interview with Charles Gatewood

DAVID: I want to talk to you about your work, and about the issues you have gotten into through your work.

CHARLES: Well, we can use my newest book as a springboard. I’ve just published a retrospective monograph of my favorite pictures about the body, Charles Gatewood Photographs: The Body and Beyond. Here’s what A.D. Coleman, the critic, says about it. He says, “When Charles Gatewood began photographing America’s sexual underground in the mid-1960’s, he was considered by many to be an obsessed eccentric whose concerns were extremely marginal. Today, however, as public nudity, blatant exhibitionism, full body tattooing and piercing, and various forms of sadomasochistic excess have entered mainstream culture, Gatewood’s photographs appear not only historically significant, but also uncannily prophetic.”

DAVID: Do you feel prophetic?

CHARLES: Sure. When I started photographing all this material, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just following my own fascinations. A number of people told me quite pointedly that I shouldn’t spend my time on such unimportant subject matter. Now that all this material is coming into the public eye, it validates me to a certain extent.

DAVID: What was the fascination for you when you began photographing this material? What was the original impulse you were following?

CHARLES: Intoxication. Doing this kind of photography makes me high. It makes me jump out of time and out of space into a magical world where everything flows, where I’m excited and intoxicated and doing creative work at the same time. So, the real attraction for me, aside from making art, is getting intoxicated and transcending myself.

DAVID: But there are particular subjects that intrigue you in this way.

CHARLES: Sure. Certain subjects make me high — tattooing, piercing, Harley Davidsons, anything sexual, any kind of fetish stuff. I also get high on scenes — Mardi Gras, for example — the costumes and the posturing, the energy of the crowds.

DAVID: Is it the collective excitement of the group that gets to you?

CHARLES: At Mardi Gras there are a million drunk people in the streets, all masked and laughing. The energy really gets me going. It’s not just the subject matter; it’s also the energy of the event.

DAVID: What is it about these particular subjects and events? Many of your videos have titles like “Weird San Francisco,” “Weird Amsterdam,” “Weird Mardi Gras.” Is it the weirdness of things that interests you?

CHARLES: Well, if you’re looking for a common thread you could say that these are all transcendental events and subjects. The people who interest me are looking to transcend themselves one way or another. When I try to document them with my camera, I transcend myself as well. I go to another place. Time stands still. I’m totally into the moment. There’s a flow, a feeling of wholeness that’s fantastically incredible when I get it right. For a little while, I’m gone.

DAVID: Is it the act of photographing, or is it the subject that’s transcendent for you? Could you, say, be photographing landscapes and get to that transcendent place?

CHARLES: Well, I lived in the woods in Woodstock [New York] for ten years. I found that nature doesn’t do that for me. My subject matter has always been strange, unusual people. That’s what gets me off.

DAVID: Why is that?

CHARLES: It’s probably because I’m an addict. I come from a family of addicts and there are certain things that give me a fix, give me a buzz, give me a high. Photographing certain subjects is like taking a drug, what they call a mood-altering sensation.

DAVID: You’re not just talking about photographing bodies.

CHARLES: It’s not the body itself; it’s usually the body in relation to some behavior. Usually it’s the body manipulated, the body decorated, the body played with, the body deified, or vilified, or transformed, or made magical. That’s why my new book is subtitled The Body and Beyond. But almost all my best work goes back to the body in one way or another. This is the core of what I do.

DAVID: Would you say that the body is the medium, the path, through which some kinds of discoveries happen?

CHARLES: Yes, the body is the vehicle. My last book was called Primitives. The subtitle was Tribal Body Art and the Left Hand Path. Just the idea of a “path” implies that there’s some goal, some destination. The destination is transcendence, enlightenment, transformation.

Now there are plenty of examples of traditional or right-hand paths to transformation. The left-hand path is the path through the woods, the dark side. Most of my subjects are using the body as their vehicle and taking the left-hand path of suffering or mutilation or pain or some kind of self-denial to achieve transformation and transcendence.

DAVID: A particular kind of transformation.

CHARLES: Transformation through the body.

I don’t believe in original sin. I don’t believe the body is inherently evil, as some of the Christians tell us. I think the body is a beautiful thing; I think sexuality is a beautiful thing. People who use their bodies to transcend are doing wonderful work. Some of them, like Fakir Musafar, may be doing things that look dangerous or forbidden to the average person, but once you understand what he’s doing, it makes sense. He’s using the body as a vehicle in the same way that a lot of Indian fakirs have.

DAVID: Can you say more about what you mean by the “left-hand” path?

CHARLES: There’s a whole spiritual tradition of people who take the left-hand path. It involves going into the parts of the mind/body/spirit that are negative — the parts that are heavy, or dark, or black, or dangerous. People who follow the left-hand path believe in balancing dark and light, good and evil. A lot of new age people don’t believe in exploring the dark side. They talk about living in the light. Many of them are in denial about their dark sides.

We all have light and dark in us. If you’re brave enough, it’s good to explore both, to integrate them, rather than just trying to have sweetness and light all the time. It’s good to acknowledge and know something about darkness, what people are calling the shadow.

DAVID: All the feelings and desires we don’t like to admit we have.

CHARLES: Right. The normal range of emotions includes anger and hate and jealousy and rage and revenge and a lot of feelings that people would rather not deal with. The left-hand path assumes it’s good to go into those negative spaces, to get to know them and integrate them with the “positive” side. I ran this down in the text I wrote for Primitives as well as I could.

DAVID: How does sex fit into all this? Do you see your work as sex-related? Your work incorporates a lot of sexual energy, and yet you haven’t published much photography of people actually being sexual.

CHARLES: Well, as you know, sex is about a lot more than putting the peg in the hole. Most of my work deals with sexual energy in one way or another. It might simply be the energy you feel when you see a certain fetish look — leather or piercings or tattoos or spike-heeled boots. It might be a certain kind of sexual posturing, a certain sexual magnetism or attraction that’s hard to put into words. But there’s a sexual chemistry that I try to capture in my pictures.

DAVID: What is it that makes these particular looks, these presentations of self, sexual?

CHARLES: These looks and stances and decorations say, “Hi there; I’m alive and I’m erotic. I’m hot, I’m sizzling, I’m vibrating in a certain way, and it makes you excited, doesn’t it, to see that?”

I’m a visual artist. I get most of my kicks through my eyes. I see erotic vibrations all over the place, all the time.

DAVID: Are you saying that everything, everywhere, has a sexual dimension to it? Are some things that are more specifically sexual than others?

CHARLES: I just know that if I go out to photograph Mardi Gras and hit Bourbon Street, I’ll get a certain kind of picture and a certain kind of buzz. My work is not about theory, it’s about immediate experience. It may be explicitly sexual; it may be implicitly sexual. It may just be getting into a good crowd during the Folsom Street Fair and rubbing up against some leather or smelling some sweat. I can get intensely turned on by things that wouldn’t turn most people on at all.

We’re into the fetish area now: spike-heeled boots, chains, bare skin, piercings and tattoos, tight clothes, leather. There’s also watching people be sexual. And there’s looking at other people’s photos or videos or films, about people being erotic. That’s also an intense turn-on to me, especially amateur photos and videos.

DAVID: Are you calling whatever puts you in that turned on state “sexual”?

CHARLES: Well, I’m talking specifically about sex now. Sometimes when I’m in nature, and the sun’s setting on the river, and I’m in a really relaxed frame of mind, I’ll start to feel a union that’s very much like what the mystics call transcendental experiences. Now, you might call that sexual, too. There’s a definite union there. It doesn’t mean I have a hard on necessarily, but it means I feel totally plugged in and at one with everything. I guess you could say I’m being sexual with the universe then.

But I get the same kind of transcendental zing photographing a wet t-shirt contest. Time stands still. I feel one with it all, excited, creative. I feel union. You can get just as intoxicated on a disco floor as you can at a prayer meeting, maybe even more so. I suspect that more people get transcendental kicks in the vernacular way than in the sacred way. It’s just as valid to get transcendent at a wet t-shirt contest as it is to do that at a prayer meeting.

DAVID: Do you see your work as sexual?

CHARLES: No, sex is just one of the things I deal with. Calling my work forbidden would cover the waterfront a little better. Almost everything I do is somehow against the rules.

I started doing photography when the 60’s were exploding. It was obvious to me that that was meant to be my life’s work. It never occurred to me to photograph anything else.

I was drawn to people who were breaking the rules and behaving in ways that nobody had ever tried before. All sorts of revolutions were going down: the black revolution, the women’s revolution, the sexual revolution, the drug revolution. Everything was changing. People were behaving in wonderful new ways that were illegal, supposedly immoral, or both. That’s still what I photograph. There’s a straight line from 1964, when I bought my first camera, to now. I’ve spent 30 years photographing people who have decided to break the rules.

I don’t think of myself as an erotic photographer. I don’t think about taking great sexual pictures, although I’m really drawn to erotica. I do think of myself as a photographer of the forbidden, a photographer of the underground, where people are encouraged to drop their masks or change their identities to get out of their heads and transcend themselves.

DAVID: In that sense your work is about madness — madness in the sense of going beyond the boundaries of what’s considered normal or sane or rational.

CHARLES: Definitely. Before I decided to call my first book Sidetripping, I called it A Gentle Madness. I wanted to show all the different faces of transcendence — the wise ones, the crazy ones, the weird ones, the new ones, the old ones. I was trying to compare and contrast the craziness of the hippies with the craziness of what they were rebelling against, letting the viewer make up his mind…

DAVID: …where the real craziness was.

CHARLES: Exactly. On one page would be hippies tripping out at Carnival; on the opposite page, their parents doing something just as bizarre. So, yes, I guess madness and deviance have always been my real subjects.

My academic background is in anthropology. I’ve always asked, “Why are these people behaving this way?” But normal behavior — the right-hand path — doesn’t interest me. There are, for example, lots of body modifications besides tattooing and piercing and dressing up in leather. There’s body-building and liposuction and plastic surgery. I leave it for other people to study the Good Housekeeping path. I study and follow the left-hand path, which implies deviance and darkness, pain and danger.

DAVID: How is your interest in strangeness different from thrill-seeking sensationalism? Are you out to simply shock people, or is there more to it than that?

CHARLES: Well, I came into this work on the level of kicks and thrill-seeking. I started photographing tattoos, and through the tattoo underground I found out about piercing. Those subjects had a fetish interest for me that made me very hot. But then a surprising thing happened: I started finding other levels of meaning in what was going on.

Before long, I was doing more than just taking pictures. I started getting involved with my subjects. I started participating. I started experiencing things I’d never experienced before. I made changes in my lifestyle, and that’s continued to this day. You could say that my photography is changing my whole life now. I’m not just taking pictures any more; I’m living a lifestyle.

DAVID: Is your photography anthropological, like Robert Mapplethorpe’s? Are you saying, “Let me show you what people do.”

CHARLES: Yes, very much. I still have a lot of naivety that comes from growing up in a radically different time and different place. I’m still shocked and amazed and delighted by a lot of what I see, to the point that I’ll go running down the street after it with my camera. Something like the Folsom Street Fair is fascinating and wonderful to me. Or a big biker convention in Daytona Beach. Or Mardi Gras, or New Year’s Eve at Times Square. Many people would run away from these sorts of scenes, but my excitement is as strong as ever. They make me intoxicated.

DAVID: Would it intoxicate you the same way to be at, say, a Nazi gathering? That’s also a bunch of people breaking out of the mold.

CHARLES: It might. Any time people do something forbidden, a lot of energy is released, and that’s the energy that gets me going. I think I probably could get just as high at a Nazi rally or a Klan rally. It would just be a different twist on the same thing, the sense of being in the middle of something that’s forbidden.

DAVID: So your work announces that there all these groups of people collectively encouraging each other to discover creative, elaborate ways to break out of The Way It’s Spozed to Be. Your work is itself part of that process of change. Turning something into art offers people mind-opening possibilities they wouldn’t otherwise have. Once the word is out that what’s going on is rich and complex, new people are going to get fascinated. It seems to me that art has a unique way of breaking through stereotypes and speaking about the complexities of otherness.

CHARLES: You’ve hit on something that’s really central about what I’m doing. My work has always been about documenting incredible subcultures — like 100,000 Harley Davidson guys at Bike Week; or what’s really happening on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras that they don’t show you on television; or what it’s like to go to be naked with a bunch of nudists in the middle of some sexploitational beauty contest; or going to a piercing party in a gay underground club.

Mainstream totally ignores the real stuff going on in these scenes. Cameras shoot acceptable pictures for Channel 7, but never the good stuff, and a lot of events are completely blacked out by the media, either because they don’t think there’s popular interest in them, or because the people who decide these things don’t want people to know what’s going on.

Take the Folsom Street Fair, the biggest street fair in San Francisco. It’s attended by tens of thousands of people, but there’s not one word written about it in establishment newspapers. Why is such an important event blacked out? Scenes like this are incredibly fascinating, but until recently the average person hasn’t been told about them and hasn’t wanted to know.

Recently a lot of these scenes have begun to percolate into the mainstream. Somebody in the establishment has figured out that they can make money marketing the underground — turning underground events into trends, selling products and services. Now, all of a sudden, you turn on MTV and you have tattooed and pierced guys in Harley Davidson drag talking about the scene they did with three other people last night. It’s all there — the sexual underground, the bikers, the s&m crowd, the exhibitionist factor, the kinky sex people — zooming its way into the mainstream.

DAVID: Why is that happening now?

CHARLES: The public is finally getting what it wants. Sooner or later, if the public wants something, somebody’s going to serve it up to them.

DAVID: What does the public want?

CHARLES: People want to be titillated in new ways, amused and entertained in new ways. People are bored with formula, and they’re bored with control. When you turn on television, even today, everything is packaged and shaped and plastic. There’s very little on tv that’s real. Anything that’s fresh and different and real is being gobbled up.

DAVID: You mention control. Is going out of control part of what makes all this interesting to the public? Take all the fascination with modern primitivism, or Robert Bly’s wild man. Is the current interest in wildness a reaction against being overcivilized and self-controlled all the time? Is there a fascination with going out of control, which gets back to madness?

CHARLES: Definitely. Burroughs talks a lot about the control machine. Control is a central idea in his work, and it’s a central idea in my work too.

The hippies were the first to say, “Let’s throw off a lot of this civilization and conformity, let’s throw off this nonsense about our bodies being evil. Let’s celebrate, let’s dance, let’s fuck, let’s live with a big L, let’s experience, let’s wear bright colors and bells and beads, let’s explore mystical and magical paths. People think that 60’s energy is gone, but it’s still going on in many ways.

The Deadheads are alive and well; there are hundreds of thousands of them. They have their look and their ideas, their communication system, their music, their belief system, their rituals. You could say the same for the gays, for blacks, for bikers, for the psychedelic underground, the artistic and literary underground, the sexual underground, s&m. Everybody’s getting really good at what they do, at being who they are.

Each group has gotten its shit together and become a well-organized tribe. Each tribe has become more complete, self-supporting, and full-blown. The subcultures are becoming full-blown cultures. They’re still outside the establishment, but each one is full-blown.

Take a look at the film, The Piano. The main guy is a primitive; he’s got a tattooed face. It’s come to the point that the public can accept a feature film where a credible leading man has a tattooed face. And part of the current fascination with primitivism is the idea that there’s eroticism that’s over the edge, that’s more than modern society allows, that’s dangerous.

DAVID: Primitives have always been seen as embodying forbidden sexuality. I think people sense a wildness that has been lost and needs to be reclaimed.

CHARLES: Yes. You could include people like Robert Bly and Joseph Campbell for sure. All the men going into sweat lodges and drumming groups — expressing their feelings, passing the talking stick, beating on drums, sobbing and hugging each other. There was no tradition for white men to do this. There’s also a huge rise in neo-pagan activities. Wicca people are looking at the old religions. Spiritual communities are popping up all over the place. It’s the same story: People are tired of the control of the church hierarchy. They want to get back to the original spark, the feeling and the emotion. They want something more moving and more authentic than the tired old dogmas of a bunch of old white guys.

DAVID: Do you see your work as spiritual?

CHARLES: When I started photographing these kinds of behavior, I didn’t think of it as spiritual at all, but now I do. Of course, some people get pierced as a fashion statement. Some people get tattooed because everybody else is doing it and it’s a way to fit in. Some people join pagan groups because they think they’re going to meet sexy girls. But I think most people who are drawn to these movements have some transcendental purpose, whether they know it or not.

DAVID: Do you try, specifically, to show the deeper meanings in the behaviors you photograph?

CHARLES: I want to show that there’s a lot more going on than people might think at first. People think my subjects are stupid, or that what they do really has no meaning aside from rebellion. I like to break the stereotypes and show that many of my subjects are smart, articulate, conscious people who are going somewhere, growing in ways they couldn’t grow in their straight lives.

DAVID: As you said, a number of fringe phenomena — piercing, tattooing, the sexual underground — are now moving into mainstream American culture. Does all this simply get co-opted into the American mania? I think work like your photography helps people think about body modification, tattooing, piercing in richer ways than they would otherwise.

CHARLES: Just this week in The New York Times fashion supplement, there was a model wearing a gold clip-on navel ring, trying to look like she had a pierced navel. That’s what The New York Times wants to show us — piercing as the latest fashion. Playboy, which is now very much an establishment magazine, has finally gotten around to reporting that people are getting pierced, and piercing more than just their ears.

On the other hand, anybody who’s really interested in the subject can find their way to Modern Primitives, the Re/Search book. If you sit down and spend some time with that book, it’s going to change your thinking in real ways. It’s fun knowing that my work has changed a lot of people’s thinking and behavior. That’s not just photography for photography’s sake; that’s affecting cultural change. Because I followed my fascination, some guy in Ohio is getting his dick pierced.

I feel good about that, but sometimes it’s also a little scary because once you let the toothpaste out of the tube you can’t put it back in. What if this keeps going? What if everybody gets his dick pierced? The point is that we don’t know what it might lead to. I’m not sure I want to be responsible for all that, but it’s too late.

DAVID: You’ve said that people who used to consider your photos weird aren’t shocked by them in the same way these days. Do you miss being the total renegade?

CHARLES: Yeah, in a way. When the establishment takes something really vital and sells it to Middle America, they take a lot of the magic out of it. People look at some of my strongest pictures and say, “Oh, I saw something like that on tv last week.” But what they saw was a watered down version of what I’m showing.

DAVID: What didn’t they see?

CHARLES: They didn’t see the real thing. In my videos of body art people in the Bay Area, for example, I ask people why they do what they do. 99 out of a hundred talk about totem animals, or regaining personal power through rediscovery of their bodies, or rebalancing and rebirthing and reclaiming, or confirmational magic. These things are way more than skin deep, but you don’t get that from what you see on tv.

DAVID: Are other photographers doing bogus versions of the work you do? Are there people cashing in on the phenomenon without really understanding it?

CHARLES: Nobody is doing what I’m doing. If you want information on body piercing, you’ve got to go underground. You’ve got to go to the sources, to somebody like me who’s been studying it for 15 years, to find out what’s happening.

I get a lot of calls from media types who want to exploit both me and the phenomenon. I get calls from people who say, “We have a tv talk show and we want you to line up several beautiful tattooed women so that we can do our talk show based on a conversation with them.” Usually I tell them to get lost because I’m not interested in sharing what I know on that level. The media is always looking for a cheap shot to exploit, make some money, and get on to the next thing. They’re usually not interested in any depth coverage.

At the same time that all these people are clamoring to get what I’ve got for their purposes, nobody wants to publish my work. I still publish my own books. No commercial publisher will touch what I’ve got, with the exception of Re/Search.

DAVID: Having done this for 30 years, is it getting old?

CHARLES: No, it’s as fresh as ever. What I’m doing is photographing basic 60’s energy that keeps coming around in different forms. The girl on the cover of Primitives is a flower child 30 years later. Her armband is a tattooed band of dolphins now; she’s got a crystal hanging from a pierced nipple. Some of her costume is 90’s, but she’s still basically a 60’s flower child hippie girl. Because I’m learning from it all on deeper and deeper levels, personally the revelations are more and more satisfying over time, to the point where a lot of times now when I put the camera away and just join the dance.

In social scientific research, you’re never supposed to join the dance. An LSD researcher could never take the drug because that would compromise the study. But until you take the drug you’re never going to know what people are talking about. The insider may not be objective any more, but he can show you the textures and richness and levels of experience much more deeply than a voyeur.

DAVID: When you compare your more recent work to your older photos, what difference do you see between the outsider’s and the insider’s pictures?

CHARLES: My subjects are much more relaxed with me. I’ve worked really hard to put my subjects at ease. To do that I have to be able to speak their language and know their references. I have to be able to assure them that I’m not threatening, that I understand, that I’m sympathetic to what they’re doing, that I’m excited and interested in what they’re doing, that I think they’re important and fascinating, that I’m there to celebrate them.

Being able to put them at ease so that they’re not defensive is the most important part of what I do. Anybody can push the button and take a portrait. The work before pushing is the really hard thing.

DAVID: How do you find people to photograph?

CHARLES: People call me, believe it or not. Every week somebody calls, saying, “I’m a friend of so and so or, “I’m doing so and so.” Strange things come in the mail; strange invitations come over the phone. People want to work with me who haven’t even met me. That’s gratifying.

DAVID: Don’t you have a desire to go do something entirely different?

CHARLES: What would I do? No, this is my turf. I’m going to keep studying American subcultures.

I’ve been doing a lot of nudes, portraits, and erotica lately, things that are a bit more sexually explicit, a bit more forbidden, I guess. I’ve always drawn a line and excluded erotica. I’ve only photographed people having sex a few times. My work is strange enough; I didn’t want it mixed up with porn. But now I’m kind of interested in that interface.

I sell about 5000 videos a year; mostly tattoo and piercing videos. Most people who buy my videos are interested in piercing as a new kind of kink, I think. Most of these are horny men in small towns.

DAVID: Jacking off to people getting pierced?

CHARLES: Well, that’s what they think they’re doing. That’s the entry level. But my videos are kind of educational, actually — people talking about what they’re doing and why. Most buyers order several tapes at once, so by the time they finish watching them all, they’ve been educated a little bit. They probably still jerk off, which is fine.

People are bored with the standard forms of sexual video expression. They’re looking for something new and different — something hot, kinky, fun, exciting. They’re not satisfied with what’s being served up to them. There’s a hunger out there. It’s more than an erotic hunger — it’s a spiritual hunger. There’s kind of a free-floating anxiety, a sense that something’s not right, that something’s missing.

DAVID: Are your videos pagan porn?

CHARLES: (Laughs) Pagan erotica, yes. We have a new generation of seekers. They may come to these subjects on a really profane level and find something sacred in them.

DAVID: So you’re being subversive, in a way.

CHARLES: Well, maybe I’m opening some new possibilities to them. Maybe something magical will happen that they didn’t expect. I would feel really good about that. There’s a reason that most people are doing this and it goes way beyond fashion. It’s about rediscovery, rebirth, change, growth, personal development, and magical transformation.

[For more information about Charles Gatewood’s books (Sidetripping with William S. Burroughs, Primitives, Charles Gatewood Photographs) and videos (30 titles, including Erotic Tattooing and Body Piercing, Painless Steel, Heavenly Bodies, Weird Amsterdam, Weird Thailand), send name, address, and an age statement to Flash Productions, Box 410052, San Francisco, CA 94141.]

Spectator, August 4-11, 1995

Copyright © 1995 David Steinberg