March 9, 2024 • 38 mins
With the 96th Academy Awards this Sunday, we wanted to revisit this episode from last year. The Oscars seems to be cursed with a series of chaotic live television gaffes. But one moment in Academy Award history takes the cake. In 1974, a scrawny white man named Robert Opel ran across the stage butt naked, right as the Best Picture category was being announced. New Yorker magazine writer and Oscars aficionado Michael Schulman recounts the queer, wonderful, and historic life of the 1974 Oscars streaker.
You can read the full story here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/06/what-became-of-the-oscar-streaker
You can find Michael Schulman’s new book Oscar Wars here.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I'm Michael Schulman, and I wrote Ballad of the Oscar
Streaker for The New Yorker and it's the story of
the Week.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Five weeks before the two thousand and nine Oscars, I
got a call from Hugh Jackman's producer. Jackman was hosting
the show and he wanted to know if I would
be one of the show's writers. Like so many things
in my career, I figured somebody just made some kind
of mistake. I figured I was just a last minute
addition to a huge group of talented variety show writers.
(00:49):
So I flew to New York City, where we went
to work out of a conference room at the Mandarin
Oriental Hotel. When I walked in, I saw just three
other guys, all my age, all of whom were hired
the same week that I was. There was no head writer.
There wasn't even a whiteboard. It was just the four
of us looking at our computer. It was bizarrely casual.
(01:12):
In fact, we spent most of our time trying to
figure out how much room service we could order without
getting in trouble. Hugh Jackman would come in for a
couple of hours each day, telling us how great our
ideas were and hugging us and letting us try on
his eighteen thousand dollars plastic wolverine clause. What I learned
is that even though it's the highest rated entertainment show
(01:32):
of the year, the Oscars is a pretty thrown together operation.
I've written for sitcoms that you've never heard of, and
we got way more notes and time and money to
make those shows. So I'm never surprised when chaos ensues
at the Oscars, whether it's announcing La La Land instead
(01:53):
of Moonlight as Best Picture, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock,
or my very favorite, the nineteen seventy four Streaker. Writing
is hard.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy
trying to dig all stand So it turns on a
Mike made the twitles enough because a journalist friend has
got in that jewel jibes. Single story Just listen to
smart people speak, conversation, film and information is the story of.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
With the Oscars coming up this weekend, I figure how
better to cover the awards than to dive into the
best thing that's ever happened at them. In nineteen seventy four,
a man ran across the stage at the Academy Awards
butt naked. That was the last that most people heard
of him. But it turns out that was only the
beginning of a much weirder story. The guy who streaked
(03:05):
the Oscars was a former Ronald Reagan's speech writer turned
into this kind of gay liberation performance artist. He was
like the Zelig of the history of gay rights, popping
up at the murder of Harvey Milk, hanging out with
Robert Maplethorpe and interviewing John Waters. He lived a life
full of stunts, pranks, and pornography until one money making
(03:28):
scheme ultimately led to his death. Michael Shulman wrote about
all this for The New Yorker. Michael, thank you for
coming on and telling us about this crazy story.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
It was nineteen seventy four, which is pretty much It's
an inflection point in society, right, like the Vietnam War
had ended the year earlier.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Absolutely, yeah, it was a very unstable, strange, slightly unhinged,
and electric moment in American life.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
And the Oscars kind of reflect that, right. They've got
like two cool hosts and two old school hosts. They
have four people hosting and one of them is David Niven.
So this is like an old school British actor.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yes, a very dry wit.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
And now to diverge the contents. So this year's most
important envelope is a very important contributor to world entertainment.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
So it's the end of the Oscars night and they
are about to injuries Elizabeth Tilword to give the best
picture Oscar when this sort of amazing thing happens out
of nowhere.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Right, So David Niven is gearing up to bring on
Elizabeth Taylor and behind him, all of a sudden, a
thirty something year old man runs across the stage, totally.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Nude, but he's so casual and calm about it. He
just looks like he was supposed to be there. He
kind of just seems to know where the camera is,
flashes the peace sign. He just seems so cool.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Yeah, and then he's gone. David Niven did not exactly
know what was happening at first, and you kind of
see him react and figure out how to play this
moment because the audience is rumbling and I'm not sure
what to do. Sort of nervous laughter.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
The band plays, which is an odd reaction, like it's
a parade, and everyone applauds. It's a very odd reactor.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yeah, weird energy and it's sort of awkward. And then
David Niven, to his credit, immediately gets the energy and
focus back in the room by saying two things. He says,
first of all, ladies and gentlemen, that was almost bound
to happen, and so that gets people laughing.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
And it was bound to happen because it was nineteen
seventy four was like the year of the streaker, right,
they were everywhere.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
It was true, it was almost bound to happen because
streaking had been such a popular fad and had gotten
bigger and bigger, bigger. It had started several months earlier
with like a housewife running through the valley and then
suddenly they.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Were well that's how streaking starts. Yeah what, yeah, there
was I figured it was like college kids.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Well it became a major college kid fad, like, you know,
the entire student body of the University of Georgia had
fifteen hundred and forty three people streak across campus, and
then people were streaking football games. It was infectious. Streaking
was just a thing that people did, but only for
like six months, and so by the time he got
to the Oscars in April nineteen seventy four, it had
(06:29):
been going on for a couple months and people actually
sort of expected that someone might try to streak the Oscars.
So when David Niven says this was almost bound to happen,
that wasn't just a line like that was kind of true.
So that gets people laughing, and then he pauses a
moment and then has this perfect one liner.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
Probably the only laugh that man will ever get in
his life was by stripping off and showing his shortcomings.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Addicta well done.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Incredible, and that just gets everyone back. And it's this
perfect save.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
And did people at home actually see his penis?
Speaker 2 (07:06):
The cameras managed to avoid, you know, oh the sweet spot.
So yeah, that was some quick thinking.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
How did this guy pull it off? This sounds like
an impossible thing. Actually spent an Oscar's backstage once the
Oscars had me like live blog or something, and I
was on the wings. It's pretty well regulated back there, Like,
I don't see how it is now.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure the streak had them
tighten the security. But basically he got it press pass
from a friend. He came in and he sneaked backstage.
He later said that he was so nervous about all
the wires he thought he was going to get electrocuted,
but he waited because he wanted to wait until the
final envelope. And then when the time came, he took
(07:51):
off his clothes and he broke through the cyclorama, you know,
the psych that was part of the set, and he
just ran across the stage and then he was on
the other side of the stage, and he thought he
was going to be apprehended by security guards, but instead
the academy press people found him and brought him to
the press room to do interviews.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
So their immediate reaction was, let's hear more from this guy.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, we want to know more.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Who are well, that's so he never got arrested or
in any trouble for this, Nope? And who is he
and why is he doing this?
Speaker 2 (08:27):
So the streaker's name was Robert Opple. He was a
kind of gay man about town and sort of wild child.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
He has an interesting life that led him to that moment, right,
because he grows up conservative right right?
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Yeah, you know, he had a very suburban, middle class family.
He was in the boy Scouts.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Not just in the Boy Scouts you report that he
was an Eagle Scout, and then he did Order of
the Arrow, which is like for the like one percent
of people who love the Boy Scouts so much, you.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Seem to know more of the Boy Scouts than I do.
I've never touched the Boy Scouts.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
But you should not touch Boy Scouts. That's been a
whole problem. But I for my first book where I
tried to learn how to be a man to raise
my son, I had never done the Boy Scouts because
my mom thought it was a fascist organization. So I
went and got my first badge into a sleepover with
the Boy Scouts, where I learned about all this. Wow.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
So yeah, I mean he was this straight a student
is overachiever, Robert ople you know, he was the student
body president and all that kind of stuff. He tried
to join the Peace Corps and teach teach English in
Thailand and he studied Thai and he was about to
go and then the Peace Corps basically kicked him out
because he was gay.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
And then what year is that?
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Basically that's like mid sixties, early in the mid sixties.
And then he wound up working for Reagan's gubernatorial campaign
in nineteen sixty six, which was obviously a very conservative campaign,
but he was fired because he was gay. Again, there
was a press leak that said that there were homosexuals
in this campaign and they got rid of him. So
(10:01):
he was what was he doing for speech writing? He
was a really smart, like straight laced, straight and narrow
kind of guy. And then after nineteen sixty six he
was transformed by the hippie movement, the sexual Revolution, and
he emerged in the early seventies as this hippie, wild child,
(10:22):
crazy man.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Do you think that's because he got kicked out of
the conservative world for being gay and this was the
only world that was available to him.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah, I think so, because he obviously was on this
conservative path and was just shut out of that world
over and every end. But also the times changed in
nineteen sixty nine, there was of course Stone Wall, which
really changed when it meant to be gay, and he
sort of found his place in this new gay liberation movement.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
What Maakeson decided to do this streaking bit at the oscars.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Well, at the time he said, it just occurred to
me that it might be an educative thing to do.
You know, people shouldn't be ashamed of being nude in public. Besides,
it's a hell of a way to launch a career.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Yeah, that last part sounds like the truth.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yeah, I mean yeah, he was a little bit of
attention seeker, you know, to show up at like the
Gay Liberation March is dressed as a character named mister
Penis who was supposed to be a cousin of mister Peanuts.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Was it like a Penis with a monocle?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, just like a giant penis costume.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
And then after he streaks, he gets fired from his job.
He's working for the Los Angeles Unified School District as
helping to figure out ways to teach English to kids
who come to LA without speaking English. They fire him
for streaking.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
They immediately were like, your services are no longer needed.
But he managed to hang on to his fifteen minutes
of fame and suddenly everyone in Hollywood was really interested
in him. He went on the Mike Douglas Show, he
did a comedy show in Philadelphia, like a stand up
show where someone streaked him.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Oh so someone showed up at his event to streak him.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, but he kind of what I love about Robert
ople Is that he was really funny, Like, right after
this happened, he launched a sort of fake campaign for president,
and this was, of course at the same time that
Watergate was all going down. He created his own party
called the Nude Lib Party, and his platform was total transparency,
(12:16):
and his campaign slogan was not just another crooked dick
nice So he was like he was pure comedy, but
he really also had a sincere belief that nudity should
not be shameful, and that sexuality should not be shameful,
and that the way to dispel the shame was to
take off your clothes.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
So he's living in LA and he's got a nemesis
in LA. The LA Police Chief At Davis, that's right.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
I mean At Davis was a real homophobe. You know,
the police were really constantly cracking down on you know, homosexuals,
and there was a wisconstant harassment in LA for the
gay community there. So not long after the Oscar streak,
there was this LA City Council meeting to discuss whether
they should put a ban on nudity and the public areas,
(13:06):
and Robert Opal showed up again nude walked right up
to police chief Davis held up a peace sign again
and asked, is this leude?
Speaker 1 (13:16):
But he went to jail for this.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Yeah, he was sentenced to four months.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
He did four months in jail for taking off his
clothes at the La City Council and zero for being
naked to the oscars. Four months in jail seems like
a lot.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Well, don't mess with police Chief Ed Davis in nineteen
seventy four.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
And then he runs your city council in La right.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah, when his presidential bit did not work out well,
he started a writing campaign for city council. It was
sponsored by a committee called FAGS for Unseating Civic Knuckleheads.
Take the first letter of each one of those words
and you get fuck. And mostly was trying to remove
Ed Davis from office.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
And then while he's running, he somehow gets arrested again.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
So he showed up to the Christopher Street West Parade,
which is basically the gay Pride Parade from that time,
dressed as mister Penis. So there was some disagreement within
the parade committee about whether they wanted this kind of thing,
and the gay movement then as now really was sort
of caught between conformity and assimilation. And seeming respectable and
(14:21):
undermining heteronormative standards. And obviously Opel did not care about
good behavior or respectability, and so he shows up as
this penis character and the parade ejected him and he
was handcuffed and just spent a few hours in jail.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Right, there's this rift in the gay community, like you said,
exists now between do we fight for acceptability or do
we let our freak flag fly?
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Oh exactly. I mean that's that's been a perennial tension
within those queer rights going up through gay marriage, like
do we want marriage? Do we want to partake in
the institution of marriage like everyone else? Or is marriage
to heteronormative and you know, but do we want to
maintain a kind of separatism and a more radical lifestyle?
(15:08):
You know, I think it was it was that same
kind of tension, but the mid seventies version of it.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
So he's sort of famous now from the streaking and
he's made the most of it. And then he becomes
the editor of a gay porn magazine in Los Angeles.
How does that go for him?
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Oh? Yeah, this magazine is called Finger. And when I
was researching this story, I was in San Francisco at
the GLBT Historical Center there, and I found copies of Finger,
which is very raunchy. It's like straight up to total smut.
But there was the thing that I found in these
archives that was like a total gem is that in
(15:48):
one of these issues of Finger, he wrote an editor's letter,
like a welcome letter, that was basically his manifesto of nudity.
So he said, the thrust of my messages 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. Undressed goes far beyond simply urging
(16:09):
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 exorcise hypocrisy.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
So he's a real believer in nudity in addition to
the gay.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Rights stuff, yeah, and a believer in sexuality, that human
sexuality should not be shame. He goes on in that
editorial to write more about Catholicism, and I think you
see some of his conservative upbringing coming through in his
sense of rebellion against kind of Catholic morality.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
And so he's worked. Why is it called finger the magazine?
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Why wouldn't it be is your magination?
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Well, the next gay magazine works for it's called Drummer,
which I figured is some other gays slining term. I
don't know, Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Know why it is called Drummer, but Drummer was it
was like the Bible of like gay s and m.
It is a leather magazine and he was writing about
like the cycle sluts, which were leather men on motorcycles.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
And then the magazine gets rated by nemesis Ed Davis
at some point.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Right, Yes, that's right. So the LAPD was really harassing
the people a Drummer and they actually held a charity
SMM slave auction, and police Chief Davis tried to prosecute
the publishers on charges.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Of slavery, oh, of actual slave.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Slavery, like, oh, you're having a slave auction. Slavery is
against the law.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Did that work?
Speaker 2 (17:41):
No, of course, it's it's ridiculous, but it did sort
of harass the magazine out of la and they moved
their operations to San Francisco. And that's part of the
reason why Robert ople himself moved to San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
In San Francisco, Robert ople would reinvent himself as an
art gallery owner and connoisseur of gay photography, rubbing shoulders
with Robert Maplethorpe, John Waters, even Harvey Milk until well,
he rubbed shoulders with the wrong guy, which is podcast
speak for murder. But first, our advertisers want to sell
(18:19):
you a very fine artist in leather harness. I'm just kidding.
It's probably Meandes. Just three years after he streaked the Oscars,
Robert Opole's basically been run out of Los Angeles, and
he finds a place where everyone and their hardcore porn
(18:40):
magazines are welcome. Yeah, if you had any means to
move from wherever you were and you were gay, you
went to San Francisco in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Right absolutely, And this is where we get the explosion
of the Castro. Droves of people were coming from around
the country, and gay people from around the country were
coming from their little towns and going to the Castro
because they knew that in San Francisco they could be
themselves and have a community.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Even in the early nineties, when I was in college
at the Bay Area, we would I fy the Castro
and it was it was scary as hell. It was
like Pete Townsend's rough boys, gay like leather. It just
felt like everyone was looking to fuck or fight like
it just scared the hell out of me.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Well so, actually, when Robert Opple got there, he found
the even rougher gay neighborhood which was South of Market
or Soma, which was like Castro, was where the sort
of the young pretty boys were like going disco dancing.
Soma was the leather community that was like hardcore leather.
So that's where Robert ople found his place. He moved
(19:43):
there in nineteen seventy seven, you know, and this was
of course before the AIDS epidemic. So there was just
an aspect of hedonism and possibility and the dating scene
where you could actually find people to date if you
were a gay man, and it was a place that
was totally sexually liberated.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Yeah, you wrote in your piece about this guy Jim
Stewart who approached him with this crazy line.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Oh well, so Jim Stewart was one of the leather
man in Soma, and he he had an erotic photography
business in his apartment and he wrote a memoir called
Folsome Street Blues, where he wrote about how one day
after Robert Opele arrived, he found Ople, you know, knocking
on his door and Jim Stewart says, why do I
think I know you have we fucked? And Ople said,
(20:31):
I streaked the Academy Awards.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
So many ways to be known in Master District at
the time.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Yeah. But the reason that he was there seeking out
Jim Stewart was because he was opening an art gallery
and erotic art gallery in South of Market called Faye
Way Studios, and he was looking for artists to display there.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Fay Way being a punt.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
It's a pun on Faye Ray from you know, the
girl from King Kong Kong movies in the thirties, the actress,
but also fay f E y as in you know,
limp wristed Faye Gay stereotype. But that was right.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
He was a photographer, So he is opening an art
gallery that's going to show a lot of photography, I imagine,
which is how he meets Robert Maplethorpe.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Yeah, I mean so. One of the things that's so
incredible about Ople's post streaking life is that he kept
brushing shoulders with these other famous people from countercultural history,
and one of them was was Robert Maplethorpe, who was
very young and not well known at the time. He
had barely cracked California. He was really a New York
(21:39):
artist who was producing these homo erotic, very boundary pushing photographs,
and Ople put some of his work in Faywai Studios.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Was it one of the first places that Maplethorpe was shown.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
In, certainly in California?
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Wow? So Robert Ople's kind of a big deal in
this scene.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah. I mean, this was like a storefront gallery, but
it kind of became a hot spot where people would go.
And at the time, gay art in San Francis had
mostly been shown like in restaurants, in clubs, places where
people are not necessarily looking at the art. So to
have a gallery that was dedicated to erotic, rough gay
(22:23):
art was pretty brown breaking.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Okay. So he's on one extreme of this gay rights
movement in San Francisco, But there's a whole other part
of the gay rights movement in San Francisco, which is
like the Harvey Milk part, which is Harvey Milk's wearing
the three piece suit and he's running for the word
of supervisors in San Francisco. What does ople think of
Harvey Milk at that point?
Speaker 2 (22:44):
You know, it's really interesting because I saw Harvey Milk
is almost like a mirror image of Robert Opple, Like
they sort of had parallel past. They had both started
out in you know, sort of conservative politics and then
sort of became these wild child hippies and then wound
up in San Francisco. But whereas Opel was opening an
erotic art gallery, Harvey Milk cut his hair, got his suit,
(23:09):
ran for political office, and he was projecting a much
more again like respectable image of gay culture and gay
gay influence. But Robert ope was really into Harvey Milk.
And there's this one story where he actually walked into
Milk's campaign office, which was at Harvey Milk's camera shop
(23:30):
in the Castro, and he offered a campaign poster that
he had created, and it was a picture of a
woman with an exposed breast and she was piercing her
left breast with a pin that said Harvey Milk for Supervisor,
and he kind of left it there, like, in case
you need it, here's an idea for a campaign poster.
(23:51):
And of course that is absolutely the opposite of what
they wanted to project. You know, it was just pushing
that boundary, pushing that envelope. That's not what the Milk
campaign was doing. They were appealing to like the labor
unions and trying to expand their voting base beyond just
the gay men and the castro And that's how he
eventually won.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
And then not long afterwards, of course, Dan White, one
of the other council members, assassinates Harvey Milk after he wins.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Dan White was this former policeman, very clean cut guy, conservative,
representing a very conservative, whitebread district in San Francisco. He
was elected in the same election as Harvey Milk, and
they were colleagues and there's a sort of long tangled
history to how Dan White got to this point. But
then he showed up at city Hall, climbed in through
(24:42):
a window with a gun and assassinated the mayor, George
Moscone and Harveney Milk right in city Hall, and Diane Feinstein,
who was their colleague, had to come out and tell
the press the murderer is Dan White. I mean, there's
video of this.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
It is jaw dropping, and this really, I mean upsets
everyone in San Francisco, especially in the gay community, but
it really motivates Robert ople Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Immediately there were all sorts of conspiracy theories swirling and
you know, how could this have happened or the cops
in on it. There was a lot of suspicion, and
rightly so, because the San Francisco Police Department was constantly,
you know, cracking down, rating gay bars and you know,
taking people into the park and clubbing them with nightstcks.
So there was just a lot of tension. And the
(25:31):
murder of Harvey Milk, who was one of the first
openly gay elected officials in the whole country and really
the mascot of this community. I mean, that just it
just blew everything wide open. And even more so when
Dan White was put on trial and given a relatively
slap on the wrists. If the gay community was devastated
(25:53):
before because of the assassinations, the verdict is really what
turned that into complete rage. And so there was a
night called the White Knight Riots where the entire castor
community just was ripping up cars, setting things on fire,
and the SFPD reacted by raiding gay bars, beating people.
(26:14):
It's a legendary night in the gay rights movement?
Speaker 1 (26:18):
What does Opel do?
Speaker 2 (26:20):
So he was very involved. He appeared at a benefit
for some of the protesters who've been arrested, and he
was on one hand telling friends that he was going
to write a play about what really happened to Harvey Milk,
And he started developing this plan for something he was
going to do a kind of performance art piece where
(26:41):
he was going to go to the Gay Freedom Day
Parade and stage a pseudo event called the Execution of
Dan White. He had a friend who looked just like
Dan White. So the idea is they would dress someone
ups Dan White and that Opel would appear as a
leather man and publicly execute him. There was actually a
poster for this event at the parade that said, what
(27:01):
would happen if a queer gay homosexual per cocksucker faggot
shot and killed an ex cop? Would he get away
with murder?
Speaker 1 (27:09):
And he does this performance and it makes the evening news?
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Right, Yeah, So at the Gay Parade that year nineteen
seventy nine United Nations, Plaza and Ople introduced himself as
the character Gay Justice like in an allegory, and then
he quote unquote executed this lookalike of Dan White and.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Do you get in trouble for this?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
They immediately got death threats at his gallery. The organizes
of the parade strongly advised him against doing it, but
he did it anyway, so it did upset people.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
So then, and this was maybe the most surprising part
of your very surprising piece. Robert Ople gets a girlfriend.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Yeah he does. You thought that was the most surprising part, huh,
I mean it did so okay. So this was this woman,
Camille O'Grady. She is like a super punk and she
had come from New York where she was in a
punk band. She knew Robert Mayplethorpe and also dated him,
so she had so gay boyfriends. So Camilla Griddy ended
(28:11):
up in San Francisco. She got there at the end
of nineteen seventy eight. Maplethorpe had told her to look
up Robert Ople, so she goes to the gallery. They
have this like four hour mind meld, and soon they're
dating and they're kind of tied at the hip, and
Camille actually moved into the back of Fewai Studios, which
I had a little apartment, and they're basically living together
(28:32):
and all of.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
This is happening. So quickly. This is only a couple
years after the streaking, right.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Yeah, this is nineteen seventy nine, so five years after
the streak.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
And they make a little movie together called Fuck You
Santa Claus, which did that win in the Oscars?
Speaker 2 (28:49):
No, but they do have a nominee this year called
My Year of Dix. So I feel like maybe Robert
Oplethorpe's you know, long influence has been felt.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
And he's interviewing like John Waters and Divine for this
proposed cable station that he's trying to create, and he
decides he decides to fund that by selling drugs.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Right, I mean, first of all, I love that he was,
of course in the same meal you as John Waters
and Divine. Of course, why wouldn't he be. He just
loved that sort of down a dirty camp, be outrageous.
John Waters overra is is opel, very charming, delightful. Every
foot all the footage I've seen of him, he's funny.
(29:32):
He just had so much spark and energy and conviction.
He had political conviction behind all this stuff, but he
always sort of laced it with humor, with outrageous rivaled humor.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
And he's selling drugs. Is this new there is. He's
been doing this whole time.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
The people who knew him seemed to think that he
started selling drugs to kind of fund his activities. He
was selling PCP or angel dust and Opa would take
it himself and he would sort of run through the
streets naked a little bit of a throwback to his
streaking days. And Kamil, his new girlfriend, Camille Grady, was
very much a against this whole thing. She was very
(30:10):
worried about him. She would videotape him while he was
on PCP and then show him the next day to
say like look you and the night like curled up
in a ball, weep it like this is not cool.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
And so what happened on this night of July eighth,
nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
So this was two weeks after the execution of Dan White.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
This all happened within three weeks.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Oh yeah, So July eighth, nineteen seventy nine, O'Grady went
out to a club called the Plunge and Opah was
not feeling well, so he was back at the gallery.
So Camille was with a friend called Anthony Rogers who
his nickname was Harmodius. And so Camille and Harmodius are
at this club and she was very into sort of spiritualism,
(30:52):
and she said she had a premonition and she said, Anthony,
we've got to go back to the house. They get
back around nine pm to Feway Galleries and while they're there,
there's a buzzer that rings at the front door. They
go to the door and income these two really rough
locking guys and one of them pulls out a handgun,
(31:14):
the other has a sort of shotgun, and they demand
money and they demand drugs, and one of them puts
the muzzle of the shotgun right on Camille's neck and says,
give us the money or I'll kill her, and Opel
unwisely fought back. He said, you'll have to kill us
all there's no money, and then he keeps saying get
(31:34):
out of my space.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
And that's just the kind of guy he is.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
He was not taking any shit from anyone, and.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
He's not afraid of David Nivin. He's not gonna be
afraid of these guys.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
Well, I mean he should be, because David Niven isn't
going to kill you except with his dry wit. So
like the first guy with the shotgun says, I'll blow
your head off, and he fired a warning shot up
in the ceiling. Opel says, get out, get out. He says,
you're gonna have to shoot me. And meanwhile Camille and
(32:04):
Harmodious Anthony Rodgers were tied up in the back and
they hear a shot and then they hear a thud,
and that is the murder of Robert ople the two gunmen,
they leave, Camille and Harmodius untie themselves, go out into
the gallery and see Robert Opole a bleeding from above
(32:24):
his eye and taking his last breaths.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
How big a story was this murder when it.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Happened, It was really big in the gay press. So
in the Bay Area Reporter there it was front page news.
And part of what happened immediately after the murder is
that the gay community thought that this was somehow a
big plot and that it was a political assassination essentially,
because remember it had happened two weeks after his performance
(32:50):
art about Dan White in the Gay parade.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
And you know, Milk had just been killed.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Milk had just been killed, the mayor had just been killed.
The cops were raiding people like San Francisco was having
a Milt debt and so everyone was very conspiracy minded,
and in a way rightly so, like crazy things were happening,
absolutely mind bending things were happening. And so the gay
community saw the killing of Robert ople as this couldn't
have just been a stick up for drugs like this
(33:17):
had to have been a political assassination.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Who were these guys?
Speaker 2 (33:22):
These guys turned out to be. Maurice Keenan was the
man who actually shot Robert ople and then Robert Kelly
was his accomplice.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
I don't want to be murdered by a Maurice. I
want a much tougher I want a much tougher name.
I'm a murderer, you know.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
One of the things that I found out a lot
about but really didn't have room in the story for
was just sort of their background and what led them
to this moment. They basically Maurice was absolutely on a
crazy drug Binch. He was on just a paranoid frenzy
that had lasted days that it came out the day
before he had shot his own dealer because he thought
(33:57):
that he was, you know, working for the man. Maurice
Keenan was tried in the early eighties and he was
sentenced to death and he spent many years on death row,
and then years later, in an appeal, his sentence was
downgraded to life in prison.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
And is he still alive on death threat?
Speaker 2 (34:15):
He's in prison in California somewhere. I wrote him a
letter in prison. He never responded.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
So you not only wrote this story about the Oscar Streaker,
you also wrote a whole book about the Oscars called
Oscar Wars. What would you say is your craziest Oscar story?
Speaker 2 (34:28):
You know? I have been there covering it when the
Envelope makes up happened with Muna Longland. I was there
for the slap last year, and.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Oh you were there for the slap?
Speaker 2 (34:38):
I was there. Yeah, I saw it happen from the
cheap seats up in the balcony.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
I saw it happen live on TV. And I remember
being shocked at the audience reaction and the fact that
the audience was so eager to keep this show going
and pretend it didn't happen. What was the feeling in the.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Theater, Absolute bewilderment.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
A lot of people ever pretended it was no big deal.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
No, no, people were just it was like it was just shocked,
you know what it felt like it felt like when
you're in a bar and a very violent brawl breaks out,
or two people are yelling in a restaurant or something like,
you know something where you're in a public place, there's
this element of like danger and unpredictability. And some people
even there thought that it might have been, you know,
(35:24):
a comedic bit. I didn't because as soon as I
heard him say, get my wife's same out your fucking mouth,
I thought, well, you can't say that on TV. And
he sounds extremely angry. I can hear this all the
way in the balcony. I could hear him yelling, and
I was like, this man just had a moment. But
you know, it's funny to bring it back to the Streaker.
I mean, Dasher's always has an element of unpredictability because
(35:47):
you don't know who's gonna win. But then there are
these moments that are just in their own echelon of
absolute crazy, unpredictable things. And you know, I think the
slab is up there with the Streak, with sashing little feather,
you know, declining the award from Irelon Brando, the envelope
mix up. You know, these things that just happened, they
become the story of the Evening.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
Michael Schulman, you wrote the Ballad of the Oscar Streaker
for The New Yorker. Thank you so much for talking
to us.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Thank you for having me. This is really fun.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
So who knows, maybe this year there'll be another streaker
or a slapper or someone to meet. The Oscar is
a tiny bit interesting to give us something to actually
talk about the next day. But let's be honest, most
years the Oscars suck. It's like a sports event where
instead of watching the game, someone just shows up on
screen and announces a winner. Worse, the mood in the
(36:40):
place is awful. You start out with a bunch of
nervous people and then halfway through it's just a bunch
of pissed off people who didn't win their awards and
don't want to be there. But you know what, there
is something I actually look forward to every Oscar's Night,
and that's reserving a table at a restaurant in Los
Angeles that's normally totally booked.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
At the end of the show, what's next for joel Stein?
Maybe he'll take a naper poke around one.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
Our show Today was produced by Molibard and Nisha Benkutt.
It was edited by Lydia Jan Kott. Our engineer is
Amanda kay Wang and our executive producer is Catherine Shira Dao.
And our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan
Colton and a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky
(37:30):
Merrick and my consulting producer Laurence Alasnik. To find more
Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Joel Stein and
this is the story of the week. Do you think
if you'd been in San Francisco during this time, you
would have been involved in any of this?
Speaker 2 (37:49):
God, I would love just I think a day in
nineteen seventy nine San Francisco in the castro. I don't
think I would be involved in like the leather scene.
I don't think I can I really have the stomach
for that. But maybe I would have been a castro boy.
Who knows?
Speaker 1 (38:04):
You know, after only having talked to you for about
an hour and a half, I can tell you that
you would have been in none of this.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
I like disco. I've been I've gone in disco danced.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Oh my god, that's I've gone and disco, dance.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Loved, I would have thrived in the disco age. Thrived
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I'm Michael Schulman, and I wrote Ballad of the Oscar
Streaker for The New Yorker and it's the story of
the Week.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Five weeks before the two thousand and nine Oscars, I
got a call from Hugh Jackman's producer. Jackman was hosting
the show and he wanted to know if I would
be one of the show's writers. Like so many things
in my career, I figured somebody just made some kind
of mistake. I figured I was just a last minute
addition to a huge group of talented variety show writers.
(00:49):
So I flew to New York City, where we went
to work out of a conference room at the Mandarin
Oriental Hotel. When I walked in, I saw just three
other guys, all my age, all of whom were hired
the same week that I was. There was no head writer.
There wasn't even a whiteboard. It was just the four
of us looking at our computer. It was bizarrely casual.
(01:12):
In fact, we spent most of our time trying to
figure out how much room service we could order without
getting in trouble. Hugh Jackman would come in for a
couple of hours each day, telling us how great our
ideas were and hugging us and letting us try on
his eighteen thousand dollars plastic wolverine clause. What I learned
is that even though it's the highest rated entertainment show
(01:32):
of the year, the Oscars is a pretty thrown together operation.
I've written for sitcoms that you've never heard of, and
we got way more notes and time and money to
make those shows. So I'm never surprised when chaos ensues
at the Oscars, whether it's announcing La La Land instead
(01:53):
of Moonlight as Best Picture, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock,
or my very favorite, the nineteen seventy four Streaker. Writing
is hard.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy
trying to dig all stand So it turns on a
Mike made the twitles enough because a journalist friend has
got in that jewel jibes. Single story Just listen to
smart people speak, conversation, film and information is the story of.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
With the Oscars coming up this weekend, I figure how
better to cover the awards than to dive into the
best thing that's ever happened at them. In nineteen seventy four,
a man ran across the stage at the Academy Awards
butt naked. That was the last that most people heard
of him. But it turns out that was only the
beginning of a much weirder story. The guy who streaked
(03:05):
the Oscars was a former Ronald Reagan's speech writer turned
into this kind of gay liberation performance artist. He was
like the Zelig of the history of gay rights, popping
up at the murder of Harvey Milk, hanging out with
Robert Maplethorpe and interviewing John Waters. He lived a life
full of stunts, pranks, and pornography until one money making
(03:28):
scheme ultimately led to his death. Michael Shulman wrote about
all this for The New Yorker. Michael, thank you for
coming on and telling us about this crazy story.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
It was nineteen seventy four, which is pretty much It's
an inflection point in society, right, like the Vietnam War
had ended the year earlier.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Absolutely, yeah, it was a very unstable, strange, slightly unhinged,
and electric moment in American life.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
And the Oscars kind of reflect that, right. They've got
like two cool hosts and two old school hosts. They
have four people hosting and one of them is David Niven.
So this is like an old school British actor.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yes, a very dry wit.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
And now to diverge the contents. So this year's most
important envelope is a very important contributor to world entertainment.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
So it's the end of the Oscars night and they
are about to injuries Elizabeth Tilword to give the best
picture Oscar when this sort of amazing thing happens out
of nowhere.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Right, So David Niven is gearing up to bring on
Elizabeth Taylor and behind him, all of a sudden, a
thirty something year old man runs across the stage, totally.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Nude, but he's so casual and calm about it. He
just looks like he was supposed to be there. He
kind of just seems to know where the camera is,
flashes the peace sign. He just seems so cool.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Yeah, and then he's gone. David Niven did not exactly
know what was happening at first, and you kind of
see him react and figure out how to play this
moment because the audience is rumbling and I'm not sure
what to do. Sort of nervous laughter.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
The band plays, which is an odd reaction, like it's
a parade, and everyone applauds. It's a very odd reactor.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yeah, weird energy and it's sort of awkward. And then
David Niven, to his credit, immediately gets the energy and
focus back in the room by saying two things. He says,
first of all, ladies and gentlemen, that was almost bound
to happen, and so that gets people laughing.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
And it was bound to happen because it was nineteen
seventy four was like the year of the streaker, right,
they were everywhere.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
It was true, it was almost bound to happen because
streaking had been such a popular fad and had gotten
bigger and bigger, bigger. It had started several months earlier
with like a housewife running through the valley and then
suddenly they.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Were well that's how streaking starts. Yeah what, yeah, there
was I figured it was like college kids.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Well it became a major college kid fad, like, you know,
the entire student body of the University of Georgia had
fifteen hundred and forty three people streak across campus, and
then people were streaking football games. It was infectious. Streaking
was just a thing that people did, but only for
like six months, and so by the time he got
to the Oscars in April nineteen seventy four, it had
(06:29):
been going on for a couple months and people actually
sort of expected that someone might try to streak the Oscars.
So when David Niven says this was almost bound to happen,
that wasn't just a line like that was kind of true.
So that gets people laughing, and then he pauses a
moment and then has this perfect one liner.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
Probably the only laugh that man will ever get in
his life was by stripping off and showing his shortcomings.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Addicta well done.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Incredible, and that just gets everyone back. And it's this
perfect save.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
And did people at home actually see his penis?
Speaker 2 (07:06):
The cameras managed to avoid, you know, oh the sweet spot.
So yeah, that was some quick thinking.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
How did this guy pull it off? This sounds like
an impossible thing. Actually spent an Oscar's backstage once the
Oscars had me like live blog or something, and I
was on the wings. It's pretty well regulated back there, Like,
I don't see how it is now.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure the streak had them
tighten the security. But basically he got it press pass
from a friend. He came in and he sneaked backstage.
He later said that he was so nervous about all
the wires he thought he was going to get electrocuted,
but he waited because he wanted to wait until the
final envelope. And then when the time came, he took
(07:51):
off his clothes and he broke through the cyclorama, you know,
the psych that was part of the set, and he
just ran across the stage and then he was on
the other side of the stage, and he thought he
was going to be apprehended by security guards, but instead
the academy press people found him and brought him to
the press room to do interviews.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
So their immediate reaction was, let's hear more from this guy.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, we want to know more.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Who are well, that's so he never got arrested or
in any trouble for this, Nope? And who is he
and why is he doing this?
Speaker 2 (08:27):
So the streaker's name was Robert Opple. He was a
kind of gay man about town and sort of wild child.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
He has an interesting life that led him to that moment, right,
because he grows up conservative right right?
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Yeah, you know, he had a very suburban, middle class family.
He was in the boy Scouts.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Not just in the Boy Scouts you report that he
was an Eagle Scout, and then he did Order of
the Arrow, which is like for the like one percent
of people who love the Boy Scouts so much, you.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Seem to know more of the Boy Scouts than I do.
I've never touched the Boy Scouts.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
But you should not touch Boy Scouts. That's been a
whole problem. But I for my first book where I
tried to learn how to be a man to raise
my son, I had never done the Boy Scouts because
my mom thought it was a fascist organization. So I
went and got my first badge into a sleepover with
the Boy Scouts, where I learned about all this. Wow.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
So yeah, I mean he was this straight a student
is overachiever, Robert ople you know, he was the student
body president and all that kind of stuff. He tried
to join the Peace Corps and teach teach English in
Thailand and he studied Thai and he was about to
go and then the Peace Corps basically kicked him out
because he was gay.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
And then what year is that?
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Basically that's like mid sixties, early in the mid sixties.
And then he wound up working for Reagan's gubernatorial campaign
in nineteen sixty six, which was obviously a very conservative campaign,
but he was fired because he was gay. Again, there
was a press leak that said that there were homosexuals
in this campaign and they got rid of him. So
(10:01):
he was what was he doing for speech writing? He
was a really smart, like straight laced, straight and narrow
kind of guy. And then after nineteen sixty six he
was transformed by the hippie movement, the sexual Revolution, and
he emerged in the early seventies as this hippie, wild child,
(10:22):
crazy man.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Do you think that's because he got kicked out of
the conservative world for being gay and this was the
only world that was available to him.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah, I think so, because he obviously was on this
conservative path and was just shut out of that world
over and every end. But also the times changed in
nineteen sixty nine, there was of course Stone Wall, which
really changed when it meant to be gay, and he
sort of found his place in this new gay liberation movement.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
What Maakeson decided to do this streaking bit at the oscars.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Well, at the time he said, it just occurred to
me that it might be an educative thing to do.
You know, people shouldn't be ashamed of being nude in public. Besides,
it's a hell of a way to launch a career.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Yeah, that last part sounds like the truth.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yeah, I mean yeah, he was a little bit of
attention seeker, you know, to show up at like the
Gay Liberation March is dressed as a character named mister
Penis who was supposed to be a cousin of mister Peanuts.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Was it like a Penis with a monocle?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, just like a giant penis costume.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
And then after he streaks, he gets fired from his job.
He's working for the Los Angeles Unified School District as
helping to figure out ways to teach English to kids
who come to LA without speaking English. They fire him
for streaking.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
They immediately were like, your services are no longer needed.
But he managed to hang on to his fifteen minutes
of fame and suddenly everyone in Hollywood was really interested
in him. He went on the Mike Douglas Show, he
did a comedy show in Philadelphia, like a stand up
show where someone streaked him.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Oh so someone showed up at his event to streak him.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, but he kind of what I love about Robert
ople Is that he was really funny, Like, right after
this happened, he launched a sort of fake campaign for president,
and this was, of course at the same time that
Watergate was all going down. He created his own party
called the Nude Lib Party, and his platform was total transparency,
(12:16):
and his campaign slogan was not just another crooked dick
nice So he was like he was pure comedy, but
he really also had a sincere belief that nudity should
not be shameful, and that sexuality should not be shameful,
and that the way to dispel the shame was to
take off your clothes.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
So he's living in LA and he's got a nemesis
in LA. The LA Police Chief At Davis, that's right.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
I mean At Davis was a real homophobe. You know,
the police were really constantly cracking down on you know, homosexuals,
and there was a wisconstant harassment in LA for the
gay community there. So not long after the Oscar streak,
there was this LA City Council meeting to discuss whether
they should put a ban on nudity and the public areas,
(13:06):
and Robert Opal showed up again nude walked right up
to police chief Davis held up a peace sign again
and asked, is this leude?
Speaker 1 (13:16):
But he went to jail for this.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Yeah, he was sentenced to four months.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
He did four months in jail for taking off his
clothes at the La City Council and zero for being
naked to the oscars. Four months in jail seems like
a lot.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Well, don't mess with police Chief Ed Davis in nineteen
seventy four.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
And then he runs your city council in La right.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah, when his presidential bit did not work out well,
he started a writing campaign for city council. It was
sponsored by a committee called FAGS for Unseating Civic Knuckleheads.
Take the first letter of each one of those words
and you get fuck. And mostly was trying to remove
Ed Davis from office.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
And then while he's running, he somehow gets arrested again.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
So he showed up to the Christopher Street West Parade,
which is basically the gay Pride Parade from that time,
dressed as mister Penis. So there was some disagreement within
the parade committee about whether they wanted this kind of thing,
and the gay movement then as now really was sort
of caught between conformity and assimilation. And seeming respectable and
(14:21):
undermining heteronormative standards. And obviously Opel did not care about
good behavior or respectability, and so he shows up as
this penis character and the parade ejected him and he
was handcuffed and just spent a few hours in jail.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Right, there's this rift in the gay community, like you said,
exists now between do we fight for acceptability or do
we let our freak flag fly?
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Oh exactly. I mean that's that's been a perennial tension
within those queer rights going up through gay marriage, like
do we want marriage? Do we want to partake in
the institution of marriage like everyone else? Or is marriage
to heteronormative and you know, but do we want to
maintain a kind of separatism and a more radical lifestyle?
(15:08):
You know, I think it was it was that same
kind of tension, but the mid seventies version of it.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
So he's sort of famous now from the streaking and
he's made the most of it. And then he becomes
the editor of a gay porn magazine in Los Angeles.
How does that go for him?
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Oh? Yeah, this magazine is called Finger. And when I
was researching this story, I was in San Francisco at
the GLBT Historical Center there, and I found copies of Finger,
which is very raunchy. It's like straight up to total smut.
But there was the thing that I found in these
archives that was like a total gem is that in
(15:48):
one of these issues of Finger, he wrote an editor's letter,
like a welcome letter, that was basically his manifesto of nudity.
So he said, the thrust of my messages 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. Undressed goes far beyond simply urging
(16:09):
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 exorcise hypocrisy.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
So he's a real believer in nudity in addition to
the gay.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Rights stuff, yeah, and a believer in sexuality, that human
sexuality should not be shame. He goes on in that
editorial to write more about Catholicism, and I think you
see some of his conservative upbringing coming through in his
sense of rebellion against kind of Catholic morality.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
And so he's worked. Why is it called finger the magazine?
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Why wouldn't it be is your magination?
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Well, the next gay magazine works for it's called Drummer,
which I figured is some other gays slining term. I
don't know, Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Know why it is called Drummer, but Drummer was it
was like the Bible of like gay s and m.
It is a leather magazine and he was writing about
like the cycle sluts, which were leather men on motorcycles.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
And then the magazine gets rated by nemesis Ed Davis
at some point.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Right, Yes, that's right. So the LAPD was really harassing
the people a Drummer and they actually held a charity
SMM slave auction, and police Chief Davis tried to prosecute
the publishers on charges.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Of slavery, oh, of actual slave.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Slavery, like, oh, you're having a slave auction. Slavery is
against the law.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Did that work?
Speaker 2 (17:41):
No, of course, it's it's ridiculous, but it did sort
of harass the magazine out of la and they moved
their operations to San Francisco. And that's part of the
reason why Robert ople himself moved to San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
In San Francisco, Robert ople would reinvent himself as an
art gallery owner and connoisseur of gay photography, rubbing shoulders
with Robert Maplethorpe, John Waters, even Harvey Milk until well,
he rubbed shoulders with the wrong guy, which is podcast
speak for murder. But first, our advertisers want to sell
(18:19):
you a very fine artist in leather harness. I'm just kidding.
It's probably Meandes. Just three years after he streaked the Oscars,
Robert Opole's basically been run out of Los Angeles, and
he finds a place where everyone and their hardcore porn
(18:40):
magazines are welcome. Yeah, if you had any means to
move from wherever you were and you were gay, you
went to San Francisco in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Right absolutely, And this is where we get the explosion
of the Castro. Droves of people were coming from around
the country, and gay people from around the country were
coming from their little towns and going to the Castro
because they knew that in San Francisco they could be
themselves and have a community.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Even in the early nineties, when I was in college
at the Bay Area, we would I fy the Castro
and it was it was scary as hell. It was
like Pete Townsend's rough boys, gay like leather. It just
felt like everyone was looking to fuck or fight like
it just scared the hell out of me.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Well so, actually, when Robert Opple got there, he found
the even rougher gay neighborhood which was South of Market
or Soma, which was like Castro, was where the sort
of the young pretty boys were like going disco dancing.
Soma was the leather community that was like hardcore leather.
So that's where Robert ople found his place. He moved
(19:43):
there in nineteen seventy seven, you know, and this was
of course before the AIDS epidemic. So there was just
an aspect of hedonism and possibility and the dating scene
where you could actually find people to date if you
were a gay man, and it was a place that
was totally sexually liberated.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Yeah, you wrote in your piece about this guy Jim
Stewart who approached him with this crazy line.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Oh well, so Jim Stewart was one of the leather
man in Soma, and he he had an erotic photography
business in his apartment and he wrote a memoir called
Folsome Street Blues, where he wrote about how one day
after Robert Opele arrived, he found Ople, you know, knocking
on his door and Jim Stewart says, why do I
think I know you have we fucked? And Ople said,
(20:31):
I streaked the Academy Awards.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
So many ways to be known in Master District at
the time.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Yeah. But the reason that he was there seeking out
Jim Stewart was because he was opening an art gallery
and erotic art gallery in South of Market called Faye
Way Studios, and he was looking for artists to display there.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Fay Way being a punt.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
It's a pun on Faye Ray from you know, the
girl from King Kong Kong movies in the thirties, the actress,
but also fay f E y as in you know,
limp wristed Faye Gay stereotype. But that was right.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
He was a photographer, So he is opening an art
gallery that's going to show a lot of photography, I imagine,
which is how he meets Robert Maplethorpe.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Yeah, I mean so. One of the things that's so
incredible about Ople's post streaking life is that he kept
brushing shoulders with these other famous people from countercultural history,
and one of them was was Robert Maplethorpe, who was
very young and not well known at the time. He
had barely cracked California. He was really a New York
(21:39):
artist who was producing these homo erotic, very boundary pushing photographs,
and Ople put some of his work in Faywai Studios.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Was it one of the first places that Maplethorpe was shown.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
In, certainly in California?
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Wow? So Robert Ople's kind of a big deal in
this scene.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah. I mean, this was like a storefront gallery, but
it kind of became a hot spot where people would go.
And at the time, gay art in San Francis had
mostly been shown like in restaurants, in clubs, places where
people are not necessarily looking at the art. So to
have a gallery that was dedicated to erotic, rough gay
(22:23):
art was pretty brown breaking.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Okay. So he's on one extreme of this gay rights
movement in San Francisco, But there's a whole other part
of the gay rights movement in San Francisco, which is
like the Harvey Milk part, which is Harvey Milk's wearing
the three piece suit and he's running for the word
of supervisors in San Francisco. What does ople think of
Harvey Milk at that point?
Speaker 2 (22:44):
You know, it's really interesting because I saw Harvey Milk
is almost like a mirror image of Robert Opple, Like
they sort of had parallel past. They had both started
out in you know, sort of conservative politics and then
sort of became these wild child hippies and then wound
up in San Francisco. But whereas Opel was opening an
erotic art gallery, Harvey Milk cut his hair, got his suit,
(23:09):
ran for political office, and he was projecting a much
more again like respectable image of gay culture and gay
gay influence. But Robert ope was really into Harvey Milk.
And there's this one story where he actually walked into
Milk's campaign office, which was at Harvey Milk's camera shop
(23:30):
in the Castro, and he offered a campaign poster that
he had created, and it was a picture of a
woman with an exposed breast and she was piercing her
left breast with a pin that said Harvey Milk for Supervisor,
and he kind of left it there, like, in case
you need it, here's an idea for a campaign poster.
(23:51):
And of course that is absolutely the opposite of what
they wanted to project. You know, it was just pushing
that boundary, pushing that envelope. That's not what the Milk
campaign was doing. They were appealing to like the labor
unions and trying to expand their voting base beyond just
the gay men and the castro And that's how he
eventually won.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
And then not long afterwards, of course, Dan White, one
of the other council members, assassinates Harvey Milk after he wins.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Dan White was this former policeman, very clean cut guy, conservative,
representing a very conservative, whitebread district in San Francisco. He
was elected in the same election as Harvey Milk, and
they were colleagues and there's a sort of long tangled
history to how Dan White got to this point. But
then he showed up at city Hall, climbed in through
(24:42):
a window with a gun and assassinated the mayor, George
Moscone and Harveney Milk right in city Hall, and Diane Feinstein,
who was their colleague, had to come out and tell
the press the murderer is Dan White. I mean, there's
video of this.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
It is jaw dropping, and this really, I mean upsets
everyone in San Francisco, especially in the gay community, but
it really motivates Robert ople Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Immediately there were all sorts of conspiracy theories swirling and
you know, how could this have happened or the cops
in on it. There was a lot of suspicion, and
rightly so, because the San Francisco Police Department was constantly,
you know, cracking down, rating gay bars and you know,
taking people into the park and clubbing them with nightstcks.
So there was just a lot of tension. And the
(25:31):
murder of Harvey Milk, who was one of the first
openly gay elected officials in the whole country and really
the mascot of this community. I mean, that just it
just blew everything wide open. And even more so when
Dan White was put on trial and given a relatively
slap on the wrists. If the gay community was devastated
(25:53):
before because of the assassinations, the verdict is really what
turned that into complete rage. And so there was a
night called the White Knight Riots where the entire castor
community just was ripping up cars, setting things on fire,
and the SFPD reacted by raiding gay bars, beating people.
(26:14):
It's a legendary night in the gay rights movement?
Speaker 1 (26:18):
What does Opel do?
Speaker 2 (26:20):
So he was very involved. He appeared at a benefit
for some of the protesters who've been arrested, and he
was on one hand telling friends that he was going
to write a play about what really happened to Harvey Milk,
And he started developing this plan for something he was
going to do a kind of performance art piece where
(26:41):
he was going to go to the Gay Freedom Day
Parade and stage a pseudo event called the Execution of
Dan White. He had a friend who looked just like
Dan White. So the idea is they would dress someone
ups Dan White and that Opel would appear as a
leather man and publicly execute him. There was actually a
poster for this event at the parade that said, what
(27:01):
would happen if a queer gay homosexual per cocksucker faggot
shot and killed an ex cop? Would he get away
with murder?
Speaker 1 (27:09):
And he does this performance and it makes the evening news?
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Right, Yeah, So at the Gay Parade that year nineteen
seventy nine United Nations, Plaza and Ople introduced himself as
the character Gay Justice like in an allegory, and then
he quote unquote executed this lookalike of Dan White and.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Do you get in trouble for this?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
They immediately got death threats at his gallery. The organizes
of the parade strongly advised him against doing it, but
he did it anyway, so it did upset people.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
So then, and this was maybe the most surprising part
of your very surprising piece. Robert Ople gets a girlfriend.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Yeah he does. You thought that was the most surprising part, huh,
I mean it did so okay. So this was this woman,
Camille O'Grady. She is like a super punk and she
had come from New York where she was in a
punk band. She knew Robert Mayplethorpe and also dated him,
so she had so gay boyfriends. So Camilla Griddy ended
(28:11):
up in San Francisco. She got there at the end
of nineteen seventy eight. Maplethorpe had told her to look
up Robert Ople, so she goes to the gallery. They
have this like four hour mind meld, and soon they're
dating and they're kind of tied at the hip, and
Camille actually moved into the back of Fewai Studios, which
I had a little apartment, and they're basically living together
(28:32):
and all of.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
This is happening. So quickly. This is only a couple
years after the streaking, right.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Yeah, this is nineteen seventy nine, so five years after
the streak.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
And they make a little movie together called Fuck You
Santa Claus, which did that win in the Oscars?
Speaker 2 (28:49):
No, but they do have a nominee this year called
My Year of Dix. So I feel like maybe Robert
Oplethorpe's you know, long influence has been felt.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
And he's interviewing like John Waters and Divine for this
proposed cable station that he's trying to create, and he
decides he decides to fund that by selling drugs.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Right, I mean, first of all, I love that he was,
of course in the same meal you as John Waters
and Divine. Of course, why wouldn't he be. He just
loved that sort of down a dirty camp, be outrageous.
John Waters overra is is opel, very charming, delightful. Every
foot all the footage I've seen of him, he's funny.
(29:32):
He just had so much spark and energy and conviction.
He had political conviction behind all this stuff, but he
always sort of laced it with humor, with outrageous rivaled humor.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
And he's selling drugs. Is this new there is. He's
been doing this whole time.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
The people who knew him seemed to think that he
started selling drugs to kind of fund his activities. He
was selling PCP or angel dust and Opa would take
it himself and he would sort of run through the
streets naked a little bit of a throwback to his
streaking days. And Kamil, his new girlfriend, Camille Grady, was
very much a against this whole thing. She was very
(30:10):
worried about him. She would videotape him while he was
on PCP and then show him the next day to
say like look you and the night like curled up
in a ball, weep it like this is not cool.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
And so what happened on this night of July eighth,
nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
So this was two weeks after the execution of Dan White.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
This all happened within three weeks.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Oh yeah, So July eighth, nineteen seventy nine, O'Grady went
out to a club called the Plunge and Opah was
not feeling well, so he was back at the gallery.
So Camille was with a friend called Anthony Rogers who
his nickname was Harmodius. And so Camille and Harmodius are
at this club and she was very into sort of spiritualism,
(30:52):
and she said she had a premonition and she said, Anthony,
we've got to go back to the house. They get
back around nine pm to Feway Galleries and while they're there,
there's a buzzer that rings at the front door. They
go to the door and income these two really rough
locking guys and one of them pulls out a handgun,
(31:14):
the other has a sort of shotgun, and they demand
money and they demand drugs, and one of them puts
the muzzle of the shotgun right on Camille's neck and says,
give us the money or I'll kill her, and Opel
unwisely fought back. He said, you'll have to kill us
all there's no money, and then he keeps saying get
(31:34):
out of my space.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
And that's just the kind of guy he is.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
He was not taking any shit from anyone, and.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
He's not afraid of David Nivin. He's not gonna be
afraid of these guys.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
Well, I mean he should be, because David Niven isn't
going to kill you except with his dry wit. So
like the first guy with the shotgun says, I'll blow
your head off, and he fired a warning shot up
in the ceiling. Opel says, get out, get out. He says,
you're gonna have to shoot me. And meanwhile Camille and
(32:04):
Harmodious Anthony Rodgers were tied up in the back and
they hear a shot and then they hear a thud,
and that is the murder of Robert ople the two gunmen,
they leave, Camille and Harmodius untie themselves, go out into
the gallery and see Robert Opole a bleeding from above
(32:24):
his eye and taking his last breaths.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
How big a story was this murder when it.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Happened, It was really big in the gay press. So
in the Bay Area Reporter there it was front page news.
And part of what happened immediately after the murder is
that the gay community thought that this was somehow a
big plot and that it was a political assassination essentially,
because remember it had happened two weeks after his performance
(32:50):
art about Dan White in the Gay parade.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
And you know, Milk had just been killed.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Milk had just been killed, the mayor had just been killed.
The cops were raiding people like San Francisco was having
a Milt debt and so everyone was very conspiracy minded,
and in a way rightly so, like crazy things were happening,
absolutely mind bending things were happening. And so the gay
community saw the killing of Robert ople as this couldn't
have just been a stick up for drugs like this
(33:17):
had to have been a political assassination.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Who were these guys?
Speaker 2 (33:22):
These guys turned out to be. Maurice Keenan was the
man who actually shot Robert ople and then Robert Kelly
was his accomplice.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
I don't want to be murdered by a Maurice. I
want a much tougher I want a much tougher name.
I'm a murderer, you know.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
One of the things that I found out a lot
about but really didn't have room in the story for
was just sort of their background and what led them
to this moment. They basically Maurice was absolutely on a
crazy drug Binch. He was on just a paranoid frenzy
that had lasted days that it came out the day
before he had shot his own dealer because he thought
(33:57):
that he was, you know, working for the man. Maurice
Keenan was tried in the early eighties and he was
sentenced to death and he spent many years on death row,
and then years later, in an appeal, his sentence was
downgraded to life in prison.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
And is he still alive on death threat?
Speaker 2 (34:15):
He's in prison in California somewhere. I wrote him a
letter in prison. He never responded.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
So you not only wrote this story about the Oscar Streaker,
you also wrote a whole book about the Oscars called
Oscar Wars. What would you say is your craziest Oscar story?
Speaker 2 (34:28):
You know? I have been there covering it when the
Envelope makes up happened with Muna Longland. I was there
for the slap last year, and.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Oh you were there for the slap?
Speaker 2 (34:38):
I was there. Yeah, I saw it happen from the
cheap seats up in the balcony.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
I saw it happen live on TV. And I remember
being shocked at the audience reaction and the fact that
the audience was so eager to keep this show going
and pretend it didn't happen. What was the feeling in the.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Theater, Absolute bewilderment.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
A lot of people ever pretended it was no big deal.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
No, no, people were just it was like it was just shocked,
you know what it felt like it felt like when
you're in a bar and a very violent brawl breaks out,
or two people are yelling in a restaurant or something like,
you know something where you're in a public place, there's
this element of like danger and unpredictability. And some people
even there thought that it might have been, you know,
(35:24):
a comedic bit. I didn't because as soon as I
heard him say, get my wife's same out your fucking mouth,
I thought, well, you can't say that on TV. And
he sounds extremely angry. I can hear this all the
way in the balcony. I could hear him yelling, and
I was like, this man just had a moment. But
you know, it's funny to bring it back to the Streaker.
I mean, Dasher's always has an element of unpredictability because
(35:47):
you don't know who's gonna win. But then there are
these moments that are just in their own echelon of
absolute crazy, unpredictable things. And you know, I think the
slab is up there with the Streak, with sashing little feather,
you know, declining the award from Irelon Brando, the envelope
mix up. You know, these things that just happened, they
become the story of the Evening.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
Michael Schulman, you wrote the Ballad of the Oscar Streaker
for The New Yorker. Thank you so much for talking
to us.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Thank you for having me. This is really fun.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
So who knows, maybe this year there'll be another streaker
or a slapper or someone to meet. The Oscar is
a tiny bit interesting to give us something to actually
talk about the next day. But let's be honest, most
years the Oscars suck. It's like a sports event where
instead of watching the game, someone just shows up on
screen and announces a winner. Worse, the mood in the
(36:40):
place is awful. You start out with a bunch of
nervous people and then halfway through it's just a bunch
of pissed off people who didn't win their awards and
don't want to be there. But you know what, there
is something I actually look forward to every Oscar's Night,
and that's reserving a table at a restaurant in Los
Angeles that's normally totally booked.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
At the end of the show, what's next for joel Stein?
Maybe he'll take a naper poke around one.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
Our show Today was produced by Molibard and Nisha Benkutt.
It was edited by Lydia Jan Kott. Our engineer is
Amanda kay Wang and our executive producer is Catherine Shira Dao.
And our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan
Colton and a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky
(37:30):
Merrick and my consulting producer Laurence Alasnik. To find more
Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Joel Stein and
this is the story of the week. Do you think
if you'd been in San Francisco during this time, you
would have been involved in any of this?
Speaker 2 (37:49):
God, I would love just I think a day in
nineteen seventy nine San Francisco in the castro. I don't
think I would be involved in like the leather scene.
I don't think I can I really have the stomach
for that. But maybe I would have been a castro boy.
Who knows?
Speaker 1 (38:04):
You know, after only having talked to you for about
an hour and a half, I can tell you that
you would have been in none of this.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
I like disco. I've been I've gone in disco danced.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Oh my god, that's I've gone and disco, dance.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Loved, I would have thrived in the disco age. Thrived
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