BALLAD OF THE OSCAR STREAKER

 

 

What happened to the man who ran across the screen naked in 1974?

 
BY MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Late in the evening on April 2, 1974, the forty-sixth Academy Awards had already secured their place in the history books. At ten years old, Tatum O’Neal had become the youngest person ever to win an Oscar, for “Paper Moon.” Katharine Hepburn had attended the ceremony for the first time, to present an award. David Niven, sharing hosting duties with Burt Reynolds, Diana Ross, and John Huston, introduced Hepburn with the line “To conceal the identity of our next presenter has called for a security operation of truly royal proportions.”

A little royalty—and a little decorum—was what the Academy desperately craved. As in recent years, with such surprise sideshows as the Best Picture envelope mixup (“Moonlight” or “La La Land”?) and Will Smith smacking Chris Rock, the Oscars of the early seventies had been bumpy: George C. Scott refusing his award for “Patton,” Marlon Brando sending Sacheen Littlefeather to decline his for “The Godfather.” When Niven introduced the final presenter, he said, “If one reads the newspapers or listens to the news, it is quite obvious that the whole world is having a nervous breakdown.” But in Hollywood, he went on, “we turn out entertainment.”

That was how Hollywood wanted to see itself: as the unifier of a country fractured by Vietnam and Watergate. Niven, a stiff-upper-lip charmer, could glide above America’s political paroxysms, and he might have gone on talking were it not for his friend Elizabeth Taylor, whom he was introducing. “Hurry up, David,” she had told him backstage. “Get me out of there fast.” And so Niven moved on to introduce the Best Picture presenter, whom he called a “very important contributor to world entertainment, and someone quite likely—”

But before he could finish he was interrupted by a squall of screams. It took Niven a moment to realize what the commotion was. Glancing to his right, he saw a man with floppy brown hair and a bushy mustache, flashing a peace sign as he ran across the stage—naked.

The audience, which included Jack Nicholson, Liza Minnelli, Paul McCartney, and Groucho Marx, along with sixty-four million viewers at home, watched in disbelief. Pam Grier, who had been given the ceremonial job of “Oscar guardian,” saw it all from backstage. “I was standing in the wings and saw this flash—I have great peripheral vision,” she later told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Taylor, Grier said, was backstage fixing her hair: “When the streaker went across the stage, she just started laughing.”

The man disappeared stage right, and the gasps turned to chatter. Niven did a double take as the orchestra struck up a jaunty tune. He adjusted his bow tie and shrugged. “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” he said coolly. “That was almost bound to happen.” As the crowd’s murmuring gave way to tentative laughter, Niven rode the moment like a surfer. “But isn’t it fascinating,” he continued, “to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?”

The audience roared. Niven had taken a would-be nervous breakdown and turned it into entertainment. With that, he brought out Taylor to hand the final prize to “The Sting.”

The streaker was taken not to the authorities but to the pressroom, where he appeared in a blue jumpsuit unzipped to the waist and posed alongside a jumbo Oscar. He identified himself as Robert Opel, an advertising man. What he didn’t say was that he actually worked for the Los Angeles school system, and that he was gay. “It just occurred to me that it might be an educative thing to do,” he said. “You know, people shouldn’t be ashamed of being nude in public. Besides, it’s a hell of a way to launch a career.”

Nearly half a century later, the “Oscar streak” is remembered as a blip of seventies counterculture amid the Hollywood glitz. But who was Robert Opel, and why did he do what he did? Conspiracy theories surfaced immediately. Had Opel been a plant to get ratings? How had he circumvented the “security operation of truly royal proportions”? And how did Niven have such a well-crafted zinger ready?

Niven’s crack that this was “almost bound to happen” was no exaggeration. About four months earlier, a Van Nuys housewife had run nude through the streets of the San Fernando Valley. Time reported on the “growing Los Angeles-area fad,” and a d.j. at KMET set up a tip line that locals could call with “streaker alerts.” By March, the trend had gone national. A streaker ran across a basketball court during halftime at a game between the University of Florida and the University of Alabama. In Lansing, a man wearing only boots and a ski mask darted through the Michigan House of Representatives. Nudists appeared on bicycles or floating with parachutes. At the University of Georgia, the student body set a record when fifteen hundred and forty-three people streaked across campus. As Time wrote, “Probably not since the days of the ancient Greeks have so many exposed so much to so many.”

Psychologists theorized about the craze. Streaking was an irreverent attack on social mores, or an escape from the stresses of Watergate and inflation. Or it was a fun-house mirror of the guerrilla warfare in Vietnam: spontaneous, low-tech, and disruptive. Or maybe it was just a fun thing for college kids to do.

The idea that someone might streak the Oscars had been inevitable enough that an alternate theory emerged: that the show’s writers had pre-written a line on an “idiot card,” to be used in the event of a streak, which was then held up for Niven. Years later, his son David Niven, Jr., posited that his father would have been “prepared with a line.” But Niven’s other son, Jamie, told me, “No, no. That was spontaneous.” Watching at home in New York, Jamie had seen a flash of anger in his father’s eyes, which reminded him of the look he had gotten when he brought home a bad report card. The incursion, he could tell, “pissed him off.”

The show’s producer, Jack Haley, Jr., was close with the Niven family, and Jamie later asked him if the streak was planned. “No way,” Haley answered, adding, “David wouldn’t have stood for that.” The telecast’s director, Marty Pasetta—who had to divert the cameras so as not to catch Opel’s manhood onscreen—claimed that Niven had pre-written the line himself. “I imagine David Niven told Marty that, if somebody was going to streak the show, he had a line prepared,” Pasetta’s widow, Elise, told me.

Opel always maintained that he had acted alone. Days after the Oscars, he was flown to Philadelphia to appear on “The Mike Douglas Show,” where he sat, wearing a cowboy hat, next to Bea Arthur. Douglas asked him, “Was this a setup?”

“The press keeps asking that,” Opel replied. “Nobody believes that it wasn’t set up.”

Opel’s version of events went like this: He had sneaked through the security checkpoint in his jumpsuit with a press pass that he had borrowed from a friend. Backstage, he acted cool, lending a hand to anyone who needed it. When the show started, he hid in the scenery and shed his jumpsuit. There were so many cables underfoot that he worried about getting electrocuted, but he stuck to his plan—to wait for the final envelope, for maximum drama. When the time came, he broke through the cyclorama.

The moment passed in a blur. “I expected that they would seize me,” he told Douglas. But when he got to the other side of the stage everyone was too stunned to do anything. He circled back to where he’d left his clothes and got dressed. Just as two security guards were heading toward him, an Academy official intercepted him and brought him to the press. “I thought it was very interesting that Elizabeth Taylor could be flustered by the sight of a nude man in any context,” Opel told the Los Angeles gay newspaper the Advocate, where he had been contributing as a man-on-the-street photographer.

Hollywood embraced its new overnight star—for a time. The manager Allan Carr, known for his blowout house parties in Benedict Canyon, hired Opel to appear at a party for Rudolf Nureyev. Carr wore a striped caftan; Opel wore a stiff collar and tie and nothing else. He streaked the party, then returned in a silver-and-black cape and bikini briefs, and announced that he was going into comedy, because “the possibilities as a streaker are very limited.” A few days later, at Philadelphia’s Café Erlanger, he made his standup début, in a (clothed) performance titled “Letting It All Hang Out.” In the middle of his set—described by one reviewer as a “rambling string of observations”—a man wearing only an earring walked onstage and gave him a kiss. The streaker had been streaked.

Opel told Mike Douglas that the ultimate streak would be to run through a White House press conference while the President was saying, “I have nothing to hide.” (“You wouldn’t dare!” Bea Arthur brayed.) Six years after Andy Warhol made his fifteen-minutes-of-fame prophecy, and decades before “going viral” entered the lexicon, Opel epitomized both. He was famous for being shameless, and had found the perfect foil in Niven, whose dry deadpan matched Opel’s bawdy exhibitionism. Hollywood had been trying for years to keep up with the counterculture, and now it had crashed the town’s most sacred ritual.

Even as Opel’s fifteen minutes ticked down, his quest for exposure was just getting started. The Oscars were not his first or his last brush with history, and five years later he’d be dead.

Robert Oppel, as his name was originally spelled, was born in 1939 and raised in an “intact, Catholic, loving, middle-class family,” his younger sister, Mary, recalled. As a child, he barely survived scarlet fever. His mother, Hilda, worked as a bank teller and drove church car pools. His father, Robert, Sr., worked as a surveyor for a New Jersey township, and eventually moved the family to Kentucky, where he worked for the Atomic Energy Commission.

Robert joined the Boy Scouts and obtained the rank of Eagle Scout and membership in the Order of the Arrow. (Years later, because of the organization’s attitude toward homosexual boys, he returned his medal.) In high school in Pittsburgh, where the Oppels finally settled, Robert joined the debate team, which won so many contests that the school had to buy a bigger trophy case. His family assumed that he would go into politics. At his freshman orientation at Providence College, in Rhode Island, where he double-majored in English and political science, he whispered to his sister, “Mary, see that boy onstage? He’s the president of the student body, and in four years that will be me.” He was right.

But his ambition was cut short by his sexuality. After getting a master’s degree in linguistics, he joined the Peace Corps and studied Thai. Just before his scheduled departure for Thailand, he was told that he could not go, because he “couldn’t get along well with others,” according to Mary. “We knew this was a horrible lie,” she said. “Somehow they determined he was homosexual, and he was denied the opportunity to represent his country and teach English to the Thai people.”

Defeated, he left for California, which he thought would be more accepting, and dropped a “p” from his last name. In 1966, he was hired as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan in his gubernatorial campaign. As the law-and-order candidate, Reagan opposed the rise of campus radicalism. There was dissension among the campaign’s writers, and “it was leaked to the news media that Reagan had homosexuals on his staff,” Mary said. “Bob lost his job.”

Had he not been fired for being who he was, he might have continued down a conservative path. Instead, Opel transformed into a hippie prankster, a misfit child of the sexual revolution. After the Stonewall riots, in 1969, being gay was no longer a mark of shame but a movement, one that gave Opel a place in the world. In the early seventies, he did a regular photo feature for the Advocate called “Around Town . . . by Robert Opel.” He’d snap a long-haired hitchhiker in snug bell-bottoms, or a guy getting a lion tattoo on his ass, or a hippie lounging naked under the Hollywood sign. “I feel closer to being able to accept myself for who I am—no pretense, no bullshit, a lot less fear,” he wrote to his sister.

By early 1974, as he plotted his Oscar streak, he was working as a curriculum consultant for the L.A. school district, helping to develop a new method of teaching English to foreign students. “There is a revolution going on in linguistics education,” he told the Van Nuys Valley News, three weeks before the Academy Awards. The day after his streak, the school district informed him by letter, “Your services will no longer be needed.”

He returned to the Advocate a conquering hero. “I felt quite exhilarated really. I recommend it,” he told a reporter for the paper. “It was a challenge. I don’t know why that turns me on, but it does.”

In July, he made a second streak. The L.A. City Council had been debating a ban on nudity in public areas, including a Venice Beach spot beloved by skinny-dippers. Four hundred people packed the council chamber. As a councilwoman spoke, Opel strode up the aisle, stripped off his jumpsuit, leaped over a rope, and stood next to the stunned police chief, Ed Davis. He made a peace sign with his fingers and asked, “Is this lewd?” He was booked for indecent exposure and disturbing a public meeting. The nudity ban passed, 12–1.

His trial, at which he dressed as Uncle Sam, kept his name in the papers. “Indecent exposure generally means there was something sexual about it,” his lawyer argued. “We’re quite sure in this case that Opel didn’t come there to make love to the city councilmen.” On the witness stand, Opel testified, “I wanted to give the council an example of what a live nude person looked like, and to show them that there were no reasons to conclude that simply being nude was being lewd.” The jury found him guilty only of disturbing the meeting (“OPEL NOT LEWD,” the Advocate declared on its front page), and he received a four-month sentence.

Opel rarely spoke of his time in jail. Undaunted, he embraced his new role as “unemployed propagandist.” That September, in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation, he announced his candidacy, with his newly formed Nude Lib Party, for President of the United States, on a platform of complete disclosure. “I’ve got nothing to hide,” he said at his first press conference, to which he wore only his mustache, “and I want to give everyone a chance to look over my qualifications.” His campaign bore the slogan “Not Just Another Crooked Dick.”

When his candidacy failed, he became the editor of the magazine Finger, which ran raunchy photos and stories sent in by real couples. By 1975, the streaking fad had petered out, but Opel published an editor’s manifesto laying out his philosophy of nudity:

The thrust of my message is: undress. As long as cover-up is part of anyone’s mental set, he or she will be diminished in his efforts to be totally self-actualized. Undress goes far beyond simply urging one to remove the clothes from one’s physical person. But that can be a start; a visual statement of innocence; an external sign of one’s intent to exorcize hypocrisy.

He was ready to go beyond nudity. He launched a write-in campaign for City Council, sponsored by a committee called Fags for Unseating Civic Knuckleheads, or F.U.C.K. His platform was centered on removing Ed Davis, the L.A. police chief, whom he described as “a pterodactyl preying on the minds and bodies of anyone who has had an original thought since the Stone Age.” He débuted a character called Mr. Penis, a cousin of Mr. Peanut, originally devised as a sculpture for a gallery show. (Mr. Penis had a partner, Virginia Vagina, whom Opel also dressed up as from time to time.) Opel appeared as Mr. Penis at the Christopher Street West parade, which had banned sexually oriented costumes, a move that one gay magazine called “Uncle Tomism attempts to win heterosexual acceptance.” The parade committee ejected Opel, and, after he confronted the chairperson, he was handcuffed and jailed for three hours.

Opel had stepped into a rift in the gay movement. Whereas some waved the banner of in-your-face sexual liberation, others wanted to act respectably and assimilate into the straight world. Opel stood on the wild-and-free side, but L.A. seemed to be squeezing him out. The Advocate, under new ownership, was going national, and Opel’s cheeky “Around Town” photos were discontinued. He had also been contributing photography and features to Drummer, a magazine for the gay leather community (including a Halloween cover story on “Cycle Sluts”). After the L.A.P.D. raided Drummer’s charity S & M “slave auction”—Davis ludicrously tried to prosecute the publisher on charges of slavery—the magazine moved its operations to San Francisco. “Leaving L.A. and going to San Francisco was like leaving East Berlin for West Berlin,” Jack Fritscher, who became Drummer’s new editor-in-chief, recalled.

In 1977, Fritscher invited Opel to his office, in a Victorian building on Divisadero Street; long-haired and svelte, Opel struck him as a “sybaritic Pan.” Fritscher thought they could make beautiful, kinky work together. Opel bid farewell to Hollywood. His future, and his freedom, lay in San Francisco.

The city had earned its reputation as “Sodom by the Bay.” In Eureka Valley, formerly an Irish Catholic enclave, gay men bought up Victorian houses on the main drag, Castro Street, turning the neighborhood into a gay mecca. By one police estimate, from 1976, some eighty gay men were arriving every week, and about a hundred and forty thousand of the city’s residents were gay—more than a fifth of the population. In “The Mayor of Castro Street,” the journalist Randy Shilts described the well-honed mating ritual: “Eye contact first, maybe a slight nod, and, if all goes well, the right strut over to the intended with an appropriately cool grunt of greeting.” The bars and bathhouses thumped to Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, and T-Connection, whose 1977 hit “Do What You Wanna Do” doubled as an anthem of liberation.

Opel splashed into the round-the-clock bacchanal in the spring of 1977. He set his sights on South of Market, the home of the gay leather scene, raunchier than the Castro. SoMa, as it came to be called, was an old industrial neighborhood, and the burly leatherfolk blended in among the scrap-metal workers and the hash-slingers at Hamburger Mary’s. One such resident was Jim Stewart, who ran an erotic-photography business called Keyhole Studios out of his apartment. In his memoir, “Folsom Street Blues,” Stewart wrote of finding a man with long dark hair and a trimmed beard at his door one day. He looked familiar. “Why do I think I know you?” Stewart asked him. “Have we fucked?”

“I streaked the Academy Awards,” Opel said. He explained that he was opening an art gallery nearby, on Howard Street, and he told Stewart, “I need hot artists to hang.” Gay artists had been showing their work mostly at bars, and Opel was turning a storefront into a gallery that would embody his boundary-pushing aesthetic. He’d live in an apartment in the back. He called it Fey-Way Studios—a play on “fey,” in the limp-wrist sense, and a nod to the “King Kong” starlet Fay Wray.

Fey-Way opened on March 10, 1978, with an invitation-only preview of a show called “X: Pornographic Art.” Among the artists on display was a little-known thirty-one-year-old named Robert Mapplethorpe, who had been documenting New York’s gay demimonde to scant notice. He had come to the city to see Jack Fritscher, the Drummer editor, with whom he was having an affair.

Fritscher had introduced the two Roberts at his house. People had already been confusing the two, fusing them into a person named Robert Oplethorpe. In Fritscher’s kitchen, as he recalled in his book “Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera,” the two Roberts sized each other up over a joint and some beers. Opel needed artists, and Mapplethorpe needed venues that would show his racy photos.

Opel had been toying with new ideas for magazines, one called Cocksucker and another National Pornographic (“The Magazine That Puts Filth Back Where It Belongs”). He had asked Fritscher to submit a dirty story. At the kitchen table, Fritscher handed Opel seven typed pages. “I want you to read it to me,” Opel said.

 

Fritscher demurred, saying, “Erotica is best read privately at home.”

“Come on, Jack,” Mapplethorpe interjected. “You’re talking to a performance artist.”

“O.K.” As Fritscher read aloud, Opel unzipped his jeans. Mapplethorpe giggled from the sidelines as he watched what happened next. When Fritscher got to the end, Opel, satisfied, zipped up and took out his checkbook. “Will a hundred and twenty-five dollars do?” he said.

“I thought I had to work hard to sell a piece of art,” Mapplethorpe said.

Opel replied, “You should see my rejection slip.”

As Opel was preparing to open Fey-Way Studios, Anita Bryant, the singer and citrus spokeswoman turned anti-gay crusader, was campaigning to repeal a Florida ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. In San Francisco, conservatives who had held their noses through the Summer of Love now believed that gays were defiling their city. The San Francisco Police Department had a record of harassing gays; on weekends, they’d round up barhoppers in the Castro and beat them with nightsticks. Graffiti urged passersby to “Save San Francisco—Kill a Fag.”

The Castro had its own self-styled hero. In some ways, Harvey Milk was a mirror image of Opel. Both had conservative beginnings—Milk had campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964—and became radicalized in the late sixties; Milk fell in with the gay Greenwich Village crowd and started going to antiwar rallies. Both had come to San Francisco and opened storefront businesses: Opel at Fey-Way Studios, and Milk at Castro Camera. But, while Opel embraced his wildness, Milk bought a three-piece suit and ran for office, using his shop as his campaign headquarters. Opel wanted to undermine the establishment; Milk wanted to infiltrate it.

One day, Opel walked into Castro Camera. Behind the counter sat one of Milk’s young acolytes, Danny Nicoletta. Opel wanted to submit to Milk a campaign poster he’d made: a surly-looking woman exposing her left breast, with a “Harvey Milk for Supervisor” pin piercing her nipple. “Ooh, creepy,” Nicoletta recalled thinking. The campaign declined to use it.

On Election Day, the mostly white, conservative District 8 elected to the Board of Supervisors a former police officer named Dan White, who had campaigned to restore traditional values to a city besieged by “radicals, social deviates, and incorrigibles.” But the headlines belonged to Milk, in District 5, who became the first openly gay elected official in California and celebrated his win by leading an impromptu parade down Market Street, with trolleys ringing their bells in celebration.

Rebuffed by the Milk campaign, Opel focussed on Fey-Way, a party hub for the SoMa scene. Opel’s friend Lee Mentley said, “There’d be everyone from drag queens and S & M leather boys and girls to matrons from Pacific Heights and upper-class people who could afford to buy the art.” When people found out that Opel was the Oscar streaker, he’d brag, “No one even remembers who won the Oscar that year!”

Opel exhibited underground artists from around the world, such as the Japanese fetish artist Go Mishima and Tom of Finland, a cult figure known for his drawings of men with rippling muscles and bulging groins. To the straight world—and much of the gay world—the leather scene was the unseemly underbelly of gay liberation. Dianne Feinstein, Harvey Milk’s colleague on the Board of Supervisors, fretted, “One of the uncomfortable parts of San Francisco’s liberalism has been the encouragement of sadism and masochism.” But the S & M fantasies that Opel showed offered an escape. “We allowed terrified people to act out counter-phobic rituals that helped them deal with the stress and tension caused by the persecution everybody was suffering,” Fritscher recalled.

In California, the spectre of persecution was acute. Anita Bryant’s success in Florida inspired John Briggs, a state legislator from Orange County, to sponsor a bill that would ban gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools, singling out San Francisco as a “moral garbage dump.” Proposition 6, or the Briggs Initiative, sparked a counter-operation to sway public opinion, with Milk at the forefront. For Opel, who had been fired from education jobs, the Briggs Initiative hit a nerve. Prop 6 went down in a landslide vote, owing in part to bipartisan opposition from both former Governor Reagan and President Jimmy Carter. A brass band preceded Milk’s victory speech in the Castro, in which he urged gays everywhere to come out of the closet and “smash the myths once and for all.” The celebrations in the streets lasted until 4 a.m.

Then it all unravelled. Eleven days later came news from Jonestown, the Guyana outpost of the Peoples Temple, the cult led by Jim Jones, which had been headquartered in San Francisco. On one Saturday, more than nine hundred people died in a mass murder-suicide, after drinking cyanide-spiked Flavor Aid. Grieving families wandered San Francisco, and scandal loomed for the mayor, George Moscone, who had received critical support from the Peoples Temple. The city was still absorbing the news when, on November 27th, a gunman climbed through a basement window into City Hall and assassinated both Moscone and Milk in their offices. It fell to Feinstein, Milk’s fellow-supervisor, to announce that the murderer was their colleague Dan White.

Within a week, police and firemen were rumored to have raised a hundred thousand dollars for White’s defense fund. Graffiti appeared around town saying “Kill Fags: Dan White for Mayor.” In the gay community, theories swirled: Had Milk been set up? How did White get into City Hall with a gun? Opel began collecting clues. Since the Oscars, his life had been one big dirty joke, but the explosion of political violence gave him a new sense of purpose. He believed that a conspiracy was at work, and he was planning to write a play about what had really happened to Harvey Milk.

Just after Thanksgiving in 1978, a woman in a biker jacket landed in San Francisco. A punk diva with a penchant for mysticism, Camille O’Grady was the creative partner Opel didn’t know he was missing. At the Pratt Institute, in New York, she’d made huge drawings that she would burn in public; people thought she was a witch. One day, a classmate complimented a drawing, saying, “Wow, you’re really good for a girl.” It was Robert Mapplethorpe.

O’Grady and Mapplethorpe began sleeping together—they liked trading underwear—although he was seeing men on the side. He had been living and collaborating with Patti Smith, with whom O’Grady formed a rivalry. O’Grady’s band, Leather Secrets, played at CBGB before Smith did, and, according to O’Grady, Smith didn’t think there was room for the both of them. (Smith doesn’t recall any of this and maintains that she “would not have been intimidated by her.”)

So, in late 1978, O’Grady moved west, with a hundred dollars in her pocket. Mapplethorpe had told her to look up Opel. When she got to his gallery, they had a four-hour mind meld. He asked her to perform at Fey-Way on New Year’s Eve, and they became lovers.

Opel’s friends weren’t fazed by his bisexuality. “Camille O’Grady was to Robert Opel what Patti Smith was to Robert Mapplethorpe,” Fritscher said. Opel would send her on romantic scavenger hunts and sing her the Kinks’ “Celluloid Heroes.” “He was an eternal kid,” O’Grady told me. “Sometimes when he got really loaded he did a perfect Jimmy Stewart. The thing that he did not suffer gladly was shitheads in government. He hated them.” At a midnight show at Fey-Way called “Christmas Fix,” O’Grady sang and Opel premièred his film “Fuck You Santa Claus.” Soon afterward, O’Grady moved in.

As 1979 began, Opel was looking to get his own cable station, which could be accomplished with five hundred dollars and eighteen hours of footage. He videotaped himself interviewing such acquaintances as John Waters and Divine. To make ends meet, he was selling speed and angel dust, or PCP. O’Grady didn’t like the unsavory types who hung around Fey-Way, particularly a guy named Dana Challman, who sold Opel quaaludes. She worried about Opel, who would run down the street naked in a drugged-out frenzy and have to be escorted home. She would videotape his sprees and show him the next day. “You think this stuff is so great?” she’d say. “You curl up in a ball and scream.”

In May, Dan White was convicted of two counts of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to seven years and eight months in prison—a shockingly light sentence. An expert witness had suggested that junk food could have affected his behavior; the press dubbed it the “Twinkie defense.” The gay community was enraged. On Castro Street, hundreds of protesters marched, chanting “Out of the bars and into the streets!” and “Avenge Harvey Milk!” Police deployed nightsticks and tear gas, and protesters torched police cars. One man turned from a flaming car and yelled at a reporter, “Make sure you put in the paper that I ate too many Twinkies.” As night fell, police invaded the Castro, smashing windows and skulls.

Soon after the White Night riots, as they were called, Opel appeared, in a red bandanna, at a benefit for protesters who had been arrested, and advocated for an end to the “cycle of violence.” But he was fired up. When Feinstein officially announced that she would run to succeed Moscone as mayor, Opel crashed the event in leather and a Nazi emblem. Before he was shown out, he shouted at Feinstein about a new idea. At the upcoming Gay Freedom Day Parade, he said, he planned to stage a “pseudo-event” called “The Execution of Dan White.” Later, he made a poster with a shirtless leather man brandishing a gun, out of which exploded the words “WHAT WOULD HAPPEN if a QUEER gay homosexual pervert cocksucker faggot shot and killed an ex-cop. . . . Would he get away with murder?”

It was a good question: Would justice have been served if someone like Opel had shot someone like White? The phone at Fey-Way rang with death threats, but Opel was unperturbed. He borrowed a prop gun from his friend Jim Stewart and found a policeman outfit, telling friends that he wanted to “dress a man up like Dan White and shoot him” at the parade. Opel sent a letter to Feinstein at City Hall, trying to enlist her in a faux trial. “Such a ‘show trial,’ which would attract worldwide media attention, could prove to be a great cathartic event,” he wrote. She presumably did not respond.

The day of the parade was overcast, the festivity undergirded by angst. “It was like donning a frivolous mask to visit a dying friend’s sickroom,” the Bay Area Reporter observed. Amid the flag twirlers, Opel, on a float that he had put together, made his way down the parade route. At United Nations Plaza, the float paused in front of a crowd of reporters. Opel introduced himself as Gay Justice. Then, with his prop gun, he “executed” a Dan White look-alike. The performance made the evening news.

Opel returned to the gallery. Fey-Way was finally in the black, and he had plans to buy the whole building. Dizzy with ambition, he wrote his sister Mary, “I like the life I lead and I think it will become more interesting as I become more visible. I’m very determined and have long range plans.” He went on, “A lot of the struggles are over—internal and external. The rewards are starting to happen.”

Two weeks later, on July 8, 1979, O’Grady went out to a club called the Plunge, which had a plexiglass dance floor over a swimming pool. Opel was sick in bed, so O’Grady took a friend named Anthony Rogers, an ex-lover of Opel’s. At the club, she had a premonition. “Anthony,” she said, “we’ve got to go back to the house.”

Around 9 p.m., they were hanging out with Opel in the back of the gallery when the front buzzer rang. Opel answered the door and found two “Tenderloin types,” O’Grady said, strung out on speed. The first, who wore a fedora and a crystal stickpin in his jacket, made his way inside and pulled out a .38 handgun. O’Grady listened from the back. According to court testimony, the man said either “This is for Dana” or “This is from Dana.” She recognized the name. Dana Challman, the dealer, had been there the night before, and O’Grady had berated Opel for letting him in.

“I don’t want to see that,” Opel said, backing away from the gun. “Put it away.” The man demanded drugs or money. Opel pleaded, “There’s nothing here.” The second man pulled out a sawed-off shotgun. He was a biker type: bleached-denim clothes, weathered face. O’Grady and Rogers came out from the back.

“Camille, call the police,” Rogers told her. But the second man planted the shotgun muzzle on her neck.

“Give us the money or I’ll kill her,” he said.

“You’ll have to kill us all,” Opel insisted. “There’s no money.”

The first man told the second to march O’Grady and Rogers to the back and “take them out.” He led them to the kitchen and sat them on the floor.

Out in the gallery, the first man barked at Opel, “I’ll blow your head off.” Then he fired a warning shot at the ceiling.

“I want you out of my space,” Opel snarled. “Get out.” From the kitchen, O’Grady heard a second shot. “I am not giving you nothing,” Opel said. “You are going to have to shoot me.” Then O’Grady heard a third shot. Then a thud.

The second man ripped the phone from the wall and used the cord to tie up O’Grady and Rogers, and the intruders fled. O’Grady and Rogers freed themselves and ran out to see Opel lying in a pool of blood, taking his final breaths. He’d been shot above the left eye. At 10:40 p.m., he was pronounced dead at San Francisco General Hospital.

“Gay militant slain in porn art gallery,” the San Francisco Examiner reported the next day. Opel’s friends mourned the outrageous yet thoughtful man they knew. “Opel taught us that sexual freedom is political above all else,” one told the Examiner. Drummer printed a portrait by Jim Stewart of Opel holding a skull, Hamlet style, alongside a declaration that Opel had written:

I am Robert Opel. I am an artist, a cocksucker and an anarchist. My life is my art. Sometimes I use a camera. Sometimes I have trouble disseminating images I record because people seem to be frightened of sexual imagery. Men like myself have been feared and persecuted because of our sexual preference. But I persist. Eventually, I believe, I will receive wider attention.

Coming so soon after Opel’s antics at the parade, the murder struck the gay community as more than a random stickup. “Robert Opel was a dangerous man because he said things no one wanted to hear, did things no one wanted to see,” the Bay Area Reporter wrote. He “was not the victim of just an attempted robbery.” Two days after the murder, signs appeared around San Francisco announcing a memorial service. Across one of them, someone wrote, “ASSASSINATED ARTIST.” Mapplethorpe joked, “I think Opel was shot by critics disguised as gunmen.”

Camille O’Grady drew sketches of the two gunmen, and they were picked up at the airport and identified as Maurice Keenan and Robert Kelly. O’Grady was wary of the police, and aspects of the investigation unnerved her. At the homicide unit, she’d noticed a box of evidence labelled “HOMOCIDE.” Dana Challman, she told me, emerged from the detectives’ office and knelt next to her. He told her that he had given Keenan and Kelly their guns. “I burned them in front of your house,” he said, meaning that he’d sold them bad drugs, and blamed it on Opel. O’Grady wondered: Was this connected to the death threats Opel had received about the Dan White performance? Was Challman working with the cops?

The trial of Maurice Keenan began in November, 1982. In pretrial proceedings, he was belligerent, high on smuggled LSD. His wife was into black magic, and she would sit in court and cast spells on the jurors. The day before Opel’s murder, Keenan had shot one of his dealers, paranoid that he was working for “the Man.” He was convinced that Fey-Way Studios was loaded with drugs and cash. A psychologist testified that Keenan had a “rather severe paranoid personality disorder.” The jury found him guilty. The penalty was death.

In 1990, at a San Francisco leather-man cocktail party, a stranger told Jack Fritscher that Opel had been shot by rogue cops who were carrying on the “queer extermination work” of Dan White. Opel’s name had been on a “homo hit list.” It wasn’t clear whether this was new inside information or the decade-old urban legend coming full circle. By then, “queer extermination” was more than a metaphor. Almost two years to the day after Opel was killed, the Times ran the headline “RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS.” The AIDS epidemic decimated the gay community in San Francisco and beyond; among its victims would be Robert Mapplethorpe and Anthony Rogers. As President Reagan and the Moral Majority came to power, the freewheeling gay culture of the seventies receded. Opel’s death had foreshadowed the end of the party.

After Keenan spent twenty years on death row, his sentence was commuted to life without parole. Evidence of jury misconduct had come to light. One juror, a sheet-metal worker, had argued during deliberations, “If the victim had been a nun or my daughter, I’d be for the death penalty, but since the victim was a fag it doesn’t matter.”

Opel’s dash across the Academy Awards stage has been memorialized as one of the Oscars’ weirdest moments, an act of delightful disobedience. “Robert was dream fulfillment to Oscar viewers,” Fritscher said. “Every year, his memory puts an edge of suspense on the Oscars, like a promise that something unscripted and exciting and sexy might happen.”

Weeks before Opel was shot, he and O’Grady were sitting around Fey-Way with a joint, as Fritscher recorded their musings for Drummer. The streak came up. “It’s like a Möbius,” Opel said. “I’m destined to be always running nude past the TV screen forever and ever and ever.” ♦

 

 

NEW YORKER