In his short films “Fireworks” and “Scorpio Rising,” Kenneth Anger helped to establish leather-boy gay iconography.

Strange Bedfellows

Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s studies of human sexuality required many eager test subjects. One—the cult writer and filmmaker Kenneth Anger—became an unlikely lifelong friend

By Legs McNeil

Photo illustration by Chop Choppish Shop

Kenneth Anger, who died last month, inspired everyone from the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin to Martin Scorsese and Donald Cammell, as well as thousands of readers who delighted in the unsubstantiated gossip of his books, Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II. But perhaps his greatest contribution to American culture, besides his dozens of short films, was the effect he had on the sex researcher Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, the Father of the Sexual Revolution, and a lifelong friend of Anger’s.

They met after the premiere of Anger’s short erotic film “Fireworks,” which Anger made when he was 17. “‘Fireworks’ was a 15-minute psychodrama, quite advanced for my age, dealing with a dream of adolescent sex and sadomasochism and all those things,” Anger told me in 1997. In the film, a dreamer (played by Anger) wakes and has an erotic S&M scene with a gang of sailors.