Chuck Arnett Introduced
Psychedelia, Surrealism, and the Needle
into the Veins of Folsom Street Leather Art and Culture...
CHUCK ARNETT:
LAUTREC IN LEATHER
by
Jack Fritscher
Robert Opel’s CHRISTMAS FIX invitation illustrated with Chuck Arnett’s drug-cartoon for the new year’s party at Fey-Way Gallery, Midnight, December 30, 1978, featured a surreal Santa Claus shooting up his forearm with a hypodermic needle revealing previous track scars spelling out NOEL.
The wild young Broadway dancer turned leather artist, Chuck Arnett (b. 1928), was the 1960s psychedelic hippie pioneer who created San Francisco’s legendary Tool Box bar (1962-1971), glamorized a sensuously louche leather look in gay media, and introduced the needle to 1970s Folsom Street sex.
Insisting that gay art be displayed in gay bars, he stated: “Galleries are funeral parlors for artwork.” I met him at the Tool Box in 1970, and hired him as a frequent contributor when I was editor-in-chief of “Drummer” magazine. He drew the cover of “Drummer” #5 after Robert Opel dubbed him our “Lautrec in Leather”in “Drummer” #4 because he so often sat observantly sketching our scene in bars like the Ambush, and the Red Star Saloon which he owned.
Nevertheless, the galleries got him.