When I try to imagine what other people think we do all day over here at SFR, or what our offices look like I imagine the scene in
High Fidelity
where John Cusack is on the phone with the cute reporter from the Chicago reader. She's sitting on her desk on a phone that's covered in cute scribbly artsy writing, the walls covered with fliers and such. That's kind of right. Not only are we a pretty damn attractive staff we've also got fun decorations everywhere, be they the cute boys we've cut out of various publications, an installation of art show announcement cards that we got more than a half dozen of once or the overflowing basket of crap CDs that threatens to kill me on a daily basis (actually, yeah, if my shelves collapse I'm a goner, oh well, they seem sturdy enough).
My point is that it is kind of like that but also very office-y. For every bunny rabbit Pez dispenser or hockey hall of fame puck that kicks around there's a dirty coffee cup and a cubicle wall. But sometimes I get an email that reminds me that I work in the best place in the universe. Today, I got just that email. Now, it is a little sad because it announces the death from lung disease of an artist but that his PR company wanted me to know makes it pretty cool. So, not be insensitive, but thank you
, for letting me know you exist.
For those of you who aren't "in the know," as the kids say, Wrangler was an iconic gay porn star. I did not know this either until 2:46 pm today when the announcement showed up. But, of course, curiosity got the best of me (notice that there's no image on this post, yeah, I am a little afraid of the old Google image search on this one since my computer is visible to anyone who walks by---though I'm posting this on the internet so I'm not sure what the problem is). Some of Wrangler's flicks include
New York Construction Co.
,
A Night At The Adonis
and
Guess Who's Coming?
God porn has the best names!
But what makes Wrangler really interesting is that he was involved in gay porn during the '70s, the "golden age" of gay porn as it were, but was married to a woman and also did some straight porn---he quit getting in on, onscreen when he married.
Recently Dan Savage came to town and spoke with a small group of us and talked about the fluidity of female sexuality and how different it is from men. (Savage called it a superpower, which is pretty sweet.) But it seems like Wrangler had a bit of that fluidity to him. According to the announcement of his death Wrangler and his wife, Margaret Whiting, were deeply involved in HIV/AIDS activism and there never seemed to be any pressure of Wrangler to declare anything about his sexuality.
Go Jack. I've never seen any of your films and probably won't but I bet there are some fans out there tonight that will be missing you.