THE WORLD knows him as Peter Berlin, but his real name is Armin Hagen Freiherr von Hoyningen-Heune. “Peter Berlin” was a stage name that he adopted upon arriving in San Francisco from Berlin, Germany, in the early 1970s—just in time to take advantage of the sexual revolution that was sweeping America. Acting as his own photographer, model, and fashion designer, his erotic self-portraits—rarely nude but instead wearing form-fitting leather, denim, or the like, dramatically posed—were widely published, and Berlin became an iconic sex symbol and masturbation fantasy of the Gay Liberation era. He starred in two feature films, Nights in Black Leather in 1973 and That Boy, which he also directed, in 1974.
Berlin’s photographs have been exhibited around the world, yet he never thought of himself as an artist. A 1986 exhibit of his works was curated by Robert Mapplethorpe, and a retrospective was mounted in 2006 at New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum. He was the subject of the 2005 documentary That Man: Peter Berlin. He currently resides in San Francisco.
Yusuf Eckholm: Why did you choose photography to showcase your art rather than mediums like watercolor, oil, collage, or sculpture?
Armin Hagen aka Peter Berlin: Well, I didn’t see my photographs as art. I never thought about doing any art for the sake of art. I just found it interesting to freeze a moment in time, the way I looked and the way I dressed in that time as Peter Berlin. So that was the quickest way to freeze the visual moment. Of course, you had to have a good camera.
YE: So when did that idea first spark?
PB: I was probably seventeen or eighteen when I started doing something with portraits. I say portraits, but they were not my face but my whole body in that very erotic way. So, I wanted to freeze that feeling that I had as a sexual object. I used myself as an object and just for my own entertainment. It was never that I said, “Oh my God, I want to put in a frame and hang it on the wall of a gallery or museum.” I never saw myself as what they called an artist.
YE:. But now it’s considered fine art. Why is that?
PB: I was always skeptical about where people draw the line between what’s art and what’s not. Probably there were books written about it, but then, of course I wouldn’t have read those books. I have a very simple view of my world: whatever people do is an expression of what they are doing it for. My mother bakes a cake to enjoy it and to have other people enjoy it, and then the cake is gone. I did my photography for my own entertainment. I like the idea of photography, because I am a visual person. So that made it easier to choose the camera. If I had lived in the 14th century, I don’t know—they had mirrors in those days—so maybe I would have stood there with a canvas, some paint, and a brush and just painted myself. And I can paint. I have made some paintings. The only problem is that it’s too time-consuming: the moment is lost. So, for me, the camera was the perfect tool.
YE: When you left home at eighteen, while still living in West Berlin, you started going to the well-known sex parks and other meeting places, correct?
PB: Yeah, it started in Berlin in the ’60s. At that time, there was a lot of underground gay life with underground gay bars. Very private and under the radar—in the playground, train stations, the streets, the park, the woods, and the beaches. There are all sorts of little beaches and beautiful lakes. Berlin is a very wet city. So, that’s where the people went night and day to cruise. It was a fabulous time. I don’t think it’s happening nowadays, but maybe just a little. People are cruising the Internet.
YE: Did you ever photograph the “honeycombs” [gay cruising area]at the height of activity? It would have some historical value today.
PB: No. My photographs I did inside. I wish I had taken the camera out, but I was sort of timid. I needed that intimate setting. But when I came to America, I did some outside shoots at the beach. I wish I’d done more of that.
YE: You mentioned that these places don’t exist anymore. It would have been nice if someone had documented that particular scene.
PB: This is my greatest regret of that time which I had lived through, with that lifestyle of the gay boys. And it was all male; women were even more underground and separated from society. So I would have been the perfect person to make a film and recreate that with a big production. I’m always surprised that someone hasn’t already done it. That would have been the greatest and most exciting thing of my existence: to create that film! I would be the theme in the film. And some of those places still sort of exist. We can recreate some bars. People didn’t run around with video cameras in those days. But there might be some footage of gay life in the bars. But the life that I lived through—nobody has dealt with it in the written or the visual arts. The people who could have done it are dead. And I’m not a forceful person who would run around and try to make that happen; it’s not my style. Maybe some recreation films have come out, nothing of much stature.
YE: There was a photograph of yours that I noticed at the Magnet Gallery exhibition in San Francisco back in 2014 that was titled The Piers. Was that taken at the infamous New York piers where guys fell to their death during drug-fueled sex encounters and the nude bodies washed ashore the next day?
PB: Yeah, the famous Piers in New York. That was another great place. It’s amazing what the gay male has used as a playground. Straight people have their playgrounds, but that kind of thing is what gay people do. And it was just fabulous. I miss it, but I am glad I lived through it.
YE: So, were you a participant or just there looking for certain locations to pose with your camera?
PB: Everyone was there to get laid, to find another person to have a good time with. But because my nature is very shy, I wouldn’t have been able to have a sexual encounter unless I could find a secluded place. So, nobody would have encountered Peter Berlin having sex in the public arenas. I was always having to flee that, because I couldn’t stand having an audience. That was always a problem for me. I always had to evade that audience. As much as people would say that I was an exhibitionist, I had to be the one to select my audience. Sex was always a very private thing to me, very intimate, as it is for most people. I was never part of an orgy in my life. That wouldn’t have been my cup of tea.
I’ve wondered sometimes, when people think of “Peter Berlin,” what idea do they have of what he’s all about? So far, I haven’t met anybody who had that idea and insight of what I was about. I always surprise people when I say that I am not the person they think I am.
YE: In these intimate interactions, people don’t care much for conversation.
PB: You mean in the sexual situation? For me, it was usually silent. There was some conversation after the fact, but never before. No, that is dangerous. That can destroy the fantasy. I have a very definite idea of what should take place.
YE: Like what?
PB: There was no idle talk. There was not some sort of direction from the other side. That means that I was never versatile. So, I would always get people to where I wanted them to be in my world—in my idea. And that would be great, too, if I had that film to direct—to recreate what Peter Berlin was actually doing. Because it was different from whatever you had seen in either the porno films or Hollywood films, where the erotic scenes are shown. You know, for me good sex is foreplay. What people go through in order to get what they want. And that can go on for hours or days without any definite physical thing.
I wanted to show my way of having a good time by not getting to the nitty-gritty physical functions. That is what I call foreplay. It’s a Hitchcockian idea where there is this tension at the start, and then it gets more interesting and goes in a certain direction. Maybe it goes to a twisting plot, where you think it goes somewhere but it goes somewhere else. So, this is my idea. For some people sex is very simple: you do what you do and it’s over in five minutes. But because of that erotic feeling, good sex is just a thing that goes on in your brain. The body is just a vehicle.
YE: San Francisco during the 1970s—did you ever venture into those infamous bathhouses?
PB: Oh, yeah. It was a great playground for me. The Barracks in the Folsom area, that was sort of a combination of a bar and bathhouse. It was a Victorian house with lots of rooms upstairs. You could walk from the bar up to the bathhouse. There was a famous one on 8th and Howard called Club Baths.
In my case, I had a good drug life. That means sex, rock and roll, and drugs were part of my life. Right now, I don’t take drugs, so basically, I am not having sex. I’m not driven to go out and look for young guys. I would rather lie on my bed and listen to someone ask me questions.
YE: That’s more healthy and safer that way.
PB: I laugh about it. But I can see a very interesting story between an older guy and a young man. There are all kinds of different relationships with different dynamics. But for me now sex is just a very nice memory.
YE: I am the same way these days. I have my memories, journals, film and photos I took over the past thirteen years for my Gerontophilia series. Sex to me is both a distraction and mechanical. It’s a bore.
PB: But, my boy, how old are you?
YE: Thirty-two. And I stopped having sex about a year ago.
PB: Why?!
YE: The old men were simply cookie cutters of liberal, atheist, mental depressives, with mommy and/or daddy issues, looking for an unpaid therapist. I didn’t want to use or be used by anyone.
PB: What’s wrong with that?
YE: If I was having a bad day, they wouldn’t be around, or if they were having a bad day, they would turn the conversation toward their own woes and heartache.
PB: I know. But the problem is that you had a certain idea in your head of what you wanted to happen. It is not easy to find the right partner. I put a lot of time into my life to find the partner. But because I had the time, it was a luxury that I had in my life. I had a lot of time. And I looked for a definite thing, and when I went out to find it, it took time and energy, but it was sort of a nice hunt. But in your case: you are now in your thirties, and for you sex is a done deal?
You see, when I came to America and became Peter Berlin, I was over thirty. And then I had the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s—three decades of a good time. I know how blessed I am to have had that experience. On the other hand, it’s not always as positive as it seems. With all the good stuff, I had to deal with a lot of negative stuff. But that’s what life is about. To be a sexual partner for someone who’s also good for you—it’s a crapshoot. And I think many people never find it. I think there are marriages going on for fifty or sixty years, a lifetime, but they never really knew each other. That’s not my idea of having a good time. I needed for my pleasure to see the pleasure in someone else. It was never a one-way street. When one partner is feeling unsatisfied or left out… I tell you, good sex experience is a lot of work. It requires a lot of willpower. You have to know what you want, and you have to be able to get it. People are usually very selfish. In your case, maybe you’ll run into someone. It’s never too late for that.
YE: I was using sex as a distraction. I never believed that sex was pleasurable. I went the sex addiction meeting route. There was no orgasm because they were strangers.
PB: Oh, my God, so you’re a very weird person—or different from what I have experienced. When I would ask a person a question—the only question that I was interested in: “What do you want?”—I realized that most people didn’t have a clue. In my case, I knew exactly what I wanted, and that’s the key to a satisfying life. But all the people that I asked the question, I always basically got the same answer. The fantasy didn’t go beyond money, a great house, or a car. Then I would say, okay, now pretend that you have all those things, so what is it now that you want? And that’s the question that you could ask yourself since you are sort of studying psychology. That is where you should spend some time, thinking about. And definitely having detailed ideas, like: if now, the door opens and there comes this guy, you know, Peter Berlin, who opens the door, now think about it was twenty years ago, and you were there, and here comes Peter Berlin into the house, and now it’s up to you to tell the story of what happened.
Of course, Peter Berlin was not the type for everybody. Some people look for someone completely different. They want some sort of hairy bear. I am not the hairy bear, so look for someone else. But if you can see Peter Berlin as a sexual object… for example, I inspired someone to write a poem about me. There were many people who were inspired by Peter Berlin as much as I was inspired by Peter Berlin. I mean, I liked like creation very much. It was a good creation. So, the last line of the poem was “I wish I could be him.” I wrote back, “the last line I liked very much,” adding: “So do I.”
Because I am no longer Peter Berlin.
YE: You’re Armin. But weren’t you always Armin?
PB: Of course, I was always Armin, but when I was out leaving the house, I was leaving in character. I became Peter Berlin. I played that role of Peter Berlin very well. You see, there were plenty of good-looking guys, but you wouldn’t be intrigued by them. I intrigued people as Peter Berlin—slipping into character like a good actor on screen. You know, in order to convince people, you have to go into a different character. I was Peter Berlin, and now I am not.
Yusuf Eckholm is freelance journalist, aspiring photographer, and founder of the zine called Libertine. He lives in South Pasadena, CA.
