The Oscars Streaker with Michael Schulman

In 1974, Robert Opel ran naked through the Academy Awards telecast, and into American history. Today, Michael Schulman, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Oscar Wars, tells Sarah the story of gay history, art, and tragedy that happened after Robert’s fifteen minutes were over.

Read Michael’s work here.

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Transcript

Sarah Marshall: It's also just thrilling to think about having to contact Patti Smith, not to interview her, but to be like, “Hey, did you have beef with this one lady 50 years ago or what?” But that's what you get for being culturally relevant, babe.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking about the Oscars. Not this year's Oscars, of course, but the Oscars 50 years ago in 1974, when Robert Opel streaked across the stage and had his 15 minutes of fame. 

Today I'm talking with New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman, author of Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, about Robert Opel's life before, during, and after his 15 minutes of fame. And it's also a story of gay history and the people we might never have met if someone hadn't gone and learned about them for us. 

This is also a story of murder, several murders in fact, including the assassination of Harvey Milk. It gets to some difficult places. We go to the realities of life for a gay man in 1970s America, and those realities sometimes meant death So this episode might be for you today. It might not. This is not exactly a fluffy Oscars history episode, but it is an episode that is also about joy and survival, and the people whose acquaintance we are lucky enough to make when we learn about history. 

If you want some bonus episodes, we have been doing our Britney Spears book club with Eve Lindley over on Patreon and Apple+. We just released part two. Part three is coming in April. We hope you're enjoying those episodes if you're listening, and if you're not, you know where to find them. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for joining us as we enter the spring, in the Northern Hemisphere anyway. Here's your episode.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where sometimes we get Oscar fever. I don't know if that's a thing people say. And with me today is Michael Schulman, and we're going to talk about the Oscar streaker. Are you a Michael or a Mike? Or like a third thing? 

Michael: I'm a Michael. I'm definitely a Michael.

Sarah: Do you feel, is this a thing that people feel strongly about? I feel like I would if I were a Michael. 

Michael: The only person who's ever called me ‘Mike’, where it's acceptable, is my dad. And then whenever I meet someone who just jumps to Mike without asking, assumes I'm a Mike, I just don't trust them. It's usually some dude, some straight dude, who's “Hey, I'm Mike. And you're like, excuse me?”

Sarah: I don't know you. That's my purse. I don't know you. There's no nickname for Sarah. We're all just Sarah's till the day we die. Some people are Sally's. I do know a Sally, but that's more of a mid-century thing.

Michael: Wait, Sally is a nickname for Sarah? 

Sarah: It is. 

Michael: That's news to me, oh my god.

Sarah: See, so really, we're on our own out here. This is irrelevant, but it feels somehow connected. Because I suspect that this story is going to be about someone who also was a kid who yearned for a nickname once.

Michael: I don't know. He's a Robert who stayed a Robert. 

Sarah: Okay. So there is a thematic connection. Because Roberts who stay Roberts, I suspect are in a similar boat, is behind, The Bastards, posted by Bob Evans. And Michael, you also have a book out about the Oscars. Can you tell us about that? 

Michael: Yeah, it's called, Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood and Gold, Sweat and Tears. And it tells the history of the Oscars in 11 installments, from the very first year through ‘envelope gate” with Moonlight and La La Land, and it ends with me watching the slap. 

Sarah: Oh my god. Yeah, it's really been quite a century. Was there a place that you found yourself,, while researching or writing this book that just made you think, “I did not expect to end up here or to be holding this artifact or talking to this person?”

Michael: Oh my gosh, I talked to so many amazing people. I talked to Gregory Peck's sons, and Dalton Trumbo's daughter, and Candace Bergen about her correspondence with Gregory Peck in 1969. Yeah, I didn't get to hold any actual Oscars, but I held the telegrams of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in the Academy library from the twenties. Yeah. Brought me to a lot of interesting places. 

Sarah: And now the Oscars themselves, which as we're recording this, you’re about to go to.

Michael: Yep. Here in LA. I've got my tuxedo ready. And I guess by the time people hear this, they'll know who won and what happened and if anyone slapped anyone. 

Sarah: Or streaked, which would be ideal.

Michael: Or streaked. 

Sarah: So we're talking about Oscars history. And this is an interesting area for me because when I was like a tween to early teen, I loved the Oscars because they're so fun. You get to see who and what everyone is wearing. You get to see Joan and Melissa Rivers be horrible, if you’re a kid in 2003.

Michael: What was your iconic Oscars that you remember being really fixated on? 

Sarah: It's so funny because as you said, “iconic Oscars”, I had an overwhelming, just a huge mental image just bloomed in my mind of Adrien Brody. At the time we said ‘kissing’, I think today we might now say ‘assaulting’ Halle Berry. Because he won an Oscar for The Pianist and he just had to just grab a woman.

Michael: Unacceptable. 

Sarah: And then Peter Jackson cast him in King Kong. It makes you think. 

Michael: And what did Halle Berry get? She got Catwoman. 

Sarah: Yeah, God. And I feel like the Oscars are, along with the Olympics and elections, are the three secular rituals in America that we the people, and also broadcasters, just have to hope will create.

Michael: Yeah. There's a whole history of crazy things that have happened at the Oscars, a lot of them pretty recently. I've been to the Oscars, this year is my sixth time actually going there in person. My first year was 2017, to cover it for The New Yorker. And my very first year was the year of the envelope mix up with Moonlight and La La Land.

Sarah: Oh my god. 

Michael: And I was in the press room, and everyone screamed when they saw what was happening. People weren't expecting something to actually happen, and suddenly there was this mystery to solve. 

And then I went back a couple times, and my fourth time there was ‘the slap’, which I watched from the balcony. Everyone was so on edge. It was like being in a bar where a fight was breaking out. And everyone was very confused, even in the room. 

Sarah: How big is the room? 

Michael: It's a big auditorium, so it's quite large. But what people don't realize is that the Oscars are at a mall. 

Sarah: I did not realize that, I'll tell you that much.

Michael: Yes, it's called Ovation Hollywood. It used to be called something else. But basically you go in and there are wafting curtains, and of course red carpets everywhere. But if you peek behind one of these gold curtains, you'll see like a Hot Topic. Or a Sephora. It's very confusing.

And it just, to me, goes to show that like much of Hollywood, it's a lot of smoke and mirrors. And the glamour is there. It's paper thin. And as soon as you're leaving the Oscars at the end of the night, they're already rolling up the red carpet and packing things up, and it's returning to its natural mall state. And you're like, oh, that's a Sephora, how weird.

Sarah: We are the dreamers of dreams. I find that both very bleak and very lovely. It's a Nathanael West kind of a detail, if Nathanael West had known about Hot Topic. 

Michael: At some level he did. 

Sarah: The Oscars are fascinating intrinsically, because they are a big ceremony that is both for broader consumption and for the public, but also a night for people within an industry. And in that way, it's like an orthopedic surgeon conference as well, where it's like everybody's drama. 

Michael: Oh, yeah.

Sarah: And I was wounded by Crash winning the year I believed, in my little heart, that Brokeback Mountain would win. And then I swore to never watch the Oscars again. And I basically didn't. I'll watch them if someone else is watching them, but I don't watch them on purpose. Mostly out of laziness. 

But then especially the slap, I was like, I should be watching the Oscars because something ridiculous could happen. And I feel like if you look at the history of American television, there's a lot of different stuff that's made its way on, but ever since the birth of the medium, Americans have loved to watch game shows and singing and dancing, and that's what the Oscars are. And then we added in the element, which we also love, of spontaneity and ‘anything can happen tonight here, folks’. This is live. That feels like the trinity of great TV. 

Michael: And I would argue that being angry at winners you don't agree with is It's kind of part of it.

It's true. I think the Oscars are a platform for us all to discuss movies and the first line in my book, Oscar Wars, is the Oscars, it should be said at the start, are always getting it wrong. And I think that's built in. The outrage over Crash, or this year about the snubs for Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie for Barbie.  We're all discussing this because we all have opinions about the movies we've seen. 

Sarah: I can't believe people think Barbie isn't complex. You try playing a fucking doll. 

Michael: I was personally outraged about May December, did you see that? 

Sarah: I did, yeah. What were the nominations, though? What are you outraged about? 

Michael: It got one for the screenplay. None of the actors, it didn't get Best Director, didn't get Best Screenplay, it was my favorite thing of the year, and I was outraged.

Sarah: I mean, Julianne Moore should be nominated for every performance she gives, really.

Michael: I know, just for showing up, but especially doing that. 

Sarah: To get into Oscar's history a little bit. My understanding is that this started off, as most things do, as a relatively small affair. Where you just had dinner and passed out some statues. Is that correct? 

Michael: Yeah. And the first Oscars were in 1929, and they were at the Blossom Room of the Roosevelt Hotel. And they were just a banquet. It was actually the Academy's second anniversary dinner. And awards were not the reason why the Academy was founded. It was really intended as a League of Nations for Hollywood, and there was a whole union busting side of that. And they were trying to put a loftier face on the industry because there were all these salacious tinsel town sex, drugs, and murder scandals that gave Hollywood a really bad image problem.

Sarah: Oh, they're like, no queers here. Don't worry about it. 

Michael: Yeah. The academy had a lot of different purposes, but awards were down on a list of ideas of things they thought they might do eventually. And finally, two years in, they got around to having them at the end of this dinner.

There were speeches and other Academy business. And at the very end of this banquet, they handed out the awards in 15 minutes. And then there was dancing, so it really wasn't the show that it became over the many decades. 

Sarah: It's so funny to just think of it as what it literally is and be like, yeah, the Academy is giving out some awards. It's oh, that's not that big of a deal when you put it that way, but we need to make it an occasion, what else is there?

Michael: So yeah, there's a kind of regalia to it. It's not unlike the royal family in that there's a lot of conventions, a lot of glamour, and then there's a kind of underbelly to it that sort of cuts against that.

Which is, if someone gets up on stage and slaps someone, or if Harvey Weinstein mounts some really aggressive campaign and gets everyone to vote for Shakespeare in Love, and people are outraged. Or in the 50s when people were on the blacklist and winning screenplay awards under fake names, or someone running naked across the stage, perhaps.

Sarah: Perhaps, yeah. And so this is where we get into the Oscar streaker. And I'm so excited for this because we get to do another episode that takes place in the 1970s, Battle of the Sexes Land. 

Michael: Sarah, what do you know about the Oscar streaker, and I'm curious if you have any associations with streaking, in general, as a fad?

Sarah: So the mental image I have, and I suspect many listeners had when you said that, is of a joke from The Simpsons, where I believe it was Homer's lifelong dream to streak at a baseball game. And then there's a picture in the paper and the headline is something like, “Idiot ruins game, team loses pennant.” And that my understanding is that streaking was some kind of fad in the 70s. And I think this probably came up for me first. 

The longer I do this show, the more I reveal myself as someone whose entire education came from VH1 countdowns. But I think they probably covered this in, I Love the 70s or something like that. And so my understanding is that streaking was a kind of a fad. Maybe at baseball games like Homer did, or at campuses, and that somebody stroked? No, streaked! Stroked. Somebody straked. Somebody streaked at the Oscars. And I've seen video of it, and I believe he just jogged past at a leisurely pace and threw up a peace sign. 

And the thing I remember about it is that David Niven was in the middle of saying something, and had a clever quip. And that it's a chapter in the story of the David Niven mystique, which is someone who grew up every Christmas watching, The Bishop's Wife. David Niven could get it, and I'm not afraid to say it.

Michael: You love that dry, British wit. 

Sarah: I do, yeah. And he had a lot of great one liners. And my favorite one is regarding becoming aroused while filming sex scenes, “I'm sorry if I do, and I'm sorry if I don't.” 

Michael: That's good. Yes. Let's start with what he actually said when the streaker ran by. This was April 2, 1974. We are about to hit the 50th anniversary of this sacred event. Absolutely wild. It was the very end of the night, and David Niven was one of the co-hosts. Elizabeth Taylor was to hand out the award for Best Picture, which was going to be The Sting. 

Sarah: Oh, wow. So it's the big-ticket item.

Michael: Yeah. And by design. So it's really the climax of the show. He's saying a few words about Elizabeth Taylor, and then indeed this streaker runs past him. As you said, a kind of light jog, flashes a peace sign, he has a nice bushy mustache, and then goes off. And there are all these kind of nervous jitters in the crowd.

Sarah: And I forget if I was clear, but by definition you're naked while you do this. 

Michael: Yes, that is what streaking is. You are indeed naked. 

Sarah: That's really the whole point, artistically. 

Michael: Yes, that is what it is. The man is naked. The orchestra doesn't quite know what to do, so they start playing a little jaunty tune.

Sarah: Throw on some Marvin Hamlisch.

Michael: Exactly. Niven says two things. First of all, he says, “Ladies and gentlemen, that was almost bound to happen, but isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?” And that just had the audience back, people lost their minds, it was so funny. And that was it. It was just a couple seconds long. 

Sarah: The whole evening could get very derailed, and you have to soothe them with a joke. And that feels more about your ability to announce that you're still in control of the moment, as the person on stage.

Michael: Absolutely. It's worth saying that this evening was one of several Oscars that kind of went a little wacky. This was a couple years after George C. Scott refused his Oscar and said that the Oscars were a “meat parade”. 

Sarah: That's the name of daddy's magazines.

Michael: This was a year after Marlon Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather, famously to decline his award for The Godfather, which was another sort of mind-bending Oscar moment. And so the idea that something would go wrong, not awry, but something unusual would happen, we were deep in that moment in culture. Where the Oscars were just, it's like today where every other year it seems, something absolutely nuts happens.

So the man runs off on the other side of the stage. The show goes on. Elizabeth Taylor comes out, The Sting wins Best Picture. What happens next is, instead of being taken to the authorities or anything like that, the man is greeted by an Academy official who brings him to the press room. 

And he's not naked at this point. He's wearing a jumpsuit that has a zipper going down to his waist. And there are all these great photos of him with those big Oscars that they have in the press room. And he starts answering questions, and he identifies himself as Robert Opel. And what he says is that he works in advertising, that he's 33.

Sarah: I like how he's, “don't worry, I work in advertising.” 

Michael: Which is not true, by the way, we'll get to that. And he says, “It just occurred to me that it might be an educative thing to do. People shouldn't be ashamed of being nude in public. Besides, it's a hell of a way to launch a career.”

Sarah: Okay. Wow. The fact that whoever was in charge was like, put that man in the press room, rather than immediately arrest him or something like that, is giving me an “I love L.A.” kind of a moment deep in my heart.

Michael: And this kind of leads to the next thing that happens. Which is people start to get a little bit suspicious of this whole thing. There's an immediate conspiracy theory that he's a plant for ratings, and how had David Niven come up with that brilliant line so fast. And people start speculating, as they did with the slap, was this all staged? 

Sarah: And I had that thought. And I think Oscars are really the thing to have a conspiracy theory about that's totally unfounded and just based on vibes, if you have to have a conspiracy theory like that about something. And I was like, what are the odds that something this out of pocket would happen so close after the La La Land fiasco. But I also believe that these things could happen just naturally, especially in the past few years, people are more on edge. But it's fun to have a conspiracy theory. 

Michael: But there was another theory that there was a possibility that someone might streak the Oscars, because streaking was happened so much that they had pre -ritten a line in case it did happen and written it on what was called an ‘idiot card’ that someone could lift up in case this happened.

Now I talked to one of David Niven's two children, Jamie, and he said it was absolutely spontaneous. Because he noticed a flash of anger in his father's eyes that reminded him of when he brought home a bad report card from Harvard, and he got the same look. So he told me that he saw his dad and saw anger. He was pissed off that this had happened. 

And of course Opal himself, when he told his story, said that he had acted alone. He completely was not planted. But I want to return to the first thing that David Niven said when it happened, which was, “Ladies and gentlemen, this was almost bound to happen.” That was true. And to explain why, we should go into how streaking actually became a thing. 

Sarah: Yeah, I can't begin to guess.

Michael: Yeah. It turns out it was an extremely limited fad that lasted no more than six months. And in fact, the first big streak was about four months. Before the Oscars, a housewife in Van Nuys had run through San Fernando Valley nude.

Then it became a fad in Los Angeles, and a DJ at KMET Radio set up a tip line so locals could call in with streaker alerts. And then it grew. Someone streaked a basketball game at University of Florida versus University of Alabama. 

Sarah: So it's like a meme, like a planking, which I realize is a very recent reference. 

Michael: Yeah, it just caught on and then people started getting more creative with it. A guy in boots and a ski mask streaked through the Michigan House of Representatives. People were doing it on bicycles, they were doing it in parachutes.

And one big one was that the University of Georgia, 1,543 people streaked across campuses at once. And Time Magazine started reporting on all the different streaks that were going on. And they wrote, “Probably not since the days of the ancient Greeks have so many exposed so much to so many.”

And so the idea that someone might try to streak the Oscars seemed inevitable. And so it is actually, when he says that was almost bound to happen, he's right. Everyone thought it could happen. 

Sarah: Yeah, and I had no idea that it was this finite period where it was just this very dominant social craze. And then if the Oscars are coming into that you're like, of course there'll be some kind of crossover.

And in the coverage of it, are people trying to figure out the meaning of this? And are the youths essentially, “we eat what we like?”

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. There were some interesting theories. One is that it's a sort of outgrowth of the sexual revolution. It's an attack on proper social mores. People thought maybe it was a kind of release valve from Watergate, inflation, Vietnam. It's in a way a kind of weird mirror of Vietnam, because it's disruptive. It's like guerrilla warfare where no one gets killed. It's the joyous version of that. And then of course college campuses became a locust for streaking. What else are college kids going to do? 

Sarah: It just makes sense as the kind of thing that would spread, just seeing the kinds of trends that go around now. It feels pretty intuitive. And was this associated with, 

Michael: Yeah, it became just a kind of baby boomer thing. I don't know. I imagine this is deep in the era of Vietnam protests. I just imagine that people were used to going out and being in groups and going to concerts and doing stuff in crowds together outside. Like you said, it was a meme. It just caught on. 

Sarah: So America, it's really the year of the streaker in 1974. 

Michael: It is. And now this man, Robert Opel, has become the king of the streakers. He has done what no one else has done, which is streak on TV at this event that millions and millions of people are watching.

And I want to talk about what happened to Robert Opel after the streak. Because he is a wild man and he went on a wild journey. And there were a lot of things about him that, amazingly, the press didn't pick up on. He had these 15 minutes of fame, but the way it was reported was, here's this crazy thing that happened. 

Here's what Pam Greer had to say about it when she was backstage, and David Niven coming up with the perfect line. What wasn't covered, and I imagine today there would be a lot more coverage of this guy, who he was and where he came from, and why he was doing this. 

Sarah: We would fall in and out of love with him within 36 hours. And then he would get a supplement sponsorship. 

Michael: Oh, he would absolutely be milkshake ducked today, yeah. First of all, the mainstream press did not report that he was gay. In fact, he was a kind of man on the street photographer for The Advocate, which was then a kind of local gay Los Angeles newspaper. So he did this feature called Around Town with Robert Opel. And his photographs were a hitchhiker in very snug bell bottoms, shot from a great view of his butt. Or a hippie lounging naked under the Hollywood sign. He was outrageous. He was an outrageous sort of person. Fun, gay man about town. 

And just going back a little, we can talk a little bit about who he is and where he came from. So Robert Opel was born in 1939. He was raised in what his younger sister, Mary, told me was an intact Catholic, loving, middle-class family. His mother drove church carpools. His father was a surveyor in New Jersey and worked for the Atomic Energy Commission. 

And amazingly, this guy started out really on the conservative straight and narrow. He was big in the Boy Scouts. He was in the debate team. He went to Providence College and told his sister the first year, “See that boy on stage. He's the president of the student body. And in four years, that will be me.” And he, in fact, became the president of the student body. Then he got a master's degree in linguistics, and he joined the Peace Corps and studied Thai. He had this whole plan that he was going to go to Thailand and teach English.

This is the first moment when he gets knocked off the straight and narrow, which is that just before he was supposed to go to Thailand, he was told that he couldn't because he quote, “couldn't get along well with others.” And his sister, Mary, told me that in fact, they had figured out that he was a homosexual, and so he couldn't go.

Then he went to California, and he actually dropped one of the P's from his last name. So he was trying to reinvent himself. And in 1966, he became a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, who was running for governor. 

Sarah: Wow. That would be a great challenge, because he was totally unqualified. 

Michael: Of course, this is the law-and-order candidacy. So what his sister Mary told me happened, is that there was some kind of conflict with some of those different writers, and it was leaked to the press that Reagan had homosexuals on his staff.  

Sarah: I remember this. Yeah. From my Reagan research, this was a fairly major scandal for him, right? 

Michael: Yeah, and one of the results is that Robert Opel got fired.

Sarah: Jesus! And also,this is something I read a year ago, but I am under the impression that part of this was because Nancy was lifelong friends with various gay men who dressed her and made her seem like she had a personality. She didn't love them enough to address AIDS in any way, obviously.

But Truman Capote visited the California legislature or something when Reagan was governor, and that there was, because of his Hollywoodness, he needed to maybe be especially vigilant in the appearance of rooting out homosexuals. Which is interesting, because I feel like there's a sense that there should have been, with the Reagans, an allegiance to all of the gay people they knew from being in Hollywood. But in effect it seems to have made frozen their hearts, yet more against them in order to prove that they weren't too sympathetic.

Michael: Nope. Ask Rock Hudson. Didn't work out that way. Robert Opel is no longer on the straight and narrow. And somehow between the 1966 Reagan campaign and the streak, he completely became a different person. This was the era of the Stonewall Riots. And he became this kind of hippie, prankster, freak by the time of the streak in 1974.

He was actually not only working for The Advocate, but he was working as a consultant for the L.A. School District. And he talked in one of the newspapers right before the Oscars about how he was trying to reinvent the curriculum for teaching English to foreign students. But the day after the streak, the school district sent him a letter saying, “Your service will no longer be needed here.”

Sarah: The news travels immediately.

Michael: Yeah. He identified himself, and that was the end of his storied career. But now he was famous, so yay. 

Sarah: And he said it's a great way to start a career, right? In the press room. So what is he trying to start? 

Michael: Okay. So here's how Robert Opel spent his 15 minutes of fame. He went on the Mike Douglas show and he sat next to Bea Arthur. 

Sarah: I was going to guess that! I can't believe it. Yeah. 

Michael: Yeah. There's a great clip of Bea Arthur being like, “Oh, everyone thinks you did it on purpose.” And he was like, “No, I didn't. “He appeared at a party for the Producer Alan Carr, who is this gay producer known for his fabulous house parties and his many designer caftans, and he had Robert Opel streak this party for Rudolf Nureyev. 

He did a stand-up show in Philadelphia at a place called Cafe Erlanger, and he was in clothes. It was a performance called, Letting It All Hang Out. But in the middle of the set, a man who was wearing only an earring walked on stage and gave him a kiss. So the streaker was streaked.

Sarah: And that's 1974 for you. 

Michael: Okay, so then a couple of months, like three months after the Oscars, Robert Opel did a second streak. So there was this this spot in Venice Beach where a lot of skinny dippers went, and the LA City Council was debating a ban on nudity. And so there was a hearing with 400 people in the council chamber, and in comes Robert Opel the Oscar Streaker, in a jumpsuit. He goes up to the police chief, Ed Davis, flashes that peace sign and asks, “Is this lewd?” nude. And the nudity ban passed, and he was booked for indecent exposure and disturbing a public meeting. 

Then there was a trial. Now this guy had such a great sense of humor, it's part of what I love about him. He showed up at his trial dressed as Uncle Sam, and his lawyer argued indecent exposure generally means there was something sexual about it. We're quite sure in this case that Opel didn't come there to make love to the city councilman. In his testimony on the witness stand Opel said, “I wanted to give the council an example of what a live nude person might look like, and to show them that there were no reasons to conclude that simply being nude was being lewd.” And he was found guilty, not of indecent exposure, just of disturbing the peace. And he went to jail. He got a four-month sentence. 

Sarah: Wow. God. This is just making me think about what nudity means in this context, and it does feel like such a sort of gentle, spoofy way to protest in a time of sex serious problems. I don't know that this feels like a message from the establishment, saying that no matter what kind of protests you engage in, we'll respond the same way. 

Michael: Yeah, what flies at the Oscars does not fly with police chief Ed Davis, a homophobic policeman who's going to be our villain for a moment in this story. 

Still clutching on to his 15 minutes, right after the Nixon resignation, Robert Opel announces his candidacy for President of the United States. 

Sarah: Oh, nice. I'd vote for him. 

Michael: His platform is complete disclosure. And his campaign slogan was, “Not just another crooked dick.” 

Sarah: And because you can see it, it really is about transparency. 

Michael: Exactly. And when that didn't work, he launched a write-in campaign for City Council. It was sponsored by an entity known as Fags for Unseating Civic Knuckleheads, or F U C K. And its goal was to remove L.A. Police Chief Ed Davis, who he called a “pterodactyl preying on the minds and bodies of anyone who has had an original thought since the Stone Age.”

Sarah: Aw, I really like the pterodactyl part. These are all reasonable points, I really think, so far. 

Michael: He's having fun. He's good at getting attention. He's good at making a point through humor. But there was a kind of deeper philosophy to it. And in my research, I went to the LGBT Center in San Francisco, and they had these back issues of an erotic magazine that he was editing at the time called, Finger. This was a magazine where real couples would send in stories about their sex lives and photos and stuff. So it was amateur erotica. 

And I was thrilled in this research to come across one issue that began with a letter from the editor that is kind of Robert Opel's manifesto of nudity. And I'm going to send you part of it to read. 

Sarah: Oh my gosh! Okay. 

“There came a time in my life when it became necessary to stand in front of my fellow humans and alert them to certain realities as I saw them. The thrust of my message is undress. As long as cover up is part of anyone's mental set, he or she will be diminished in his efforts to be totally self-actualized. Undress goes far beyond simply urging one to remove the clothes from one's physical person. But that can be a start. A visual statement of innocence and external signs of one's intent to exercise hypocrisy.”

I like it!

Michael: Yeah, and he goes on to write a little bit more about Catholicism,, and repression and really he's just a guy who believes that sexuality and nudity and the human body should not be attached to shame.

Sarah: How do you connect this to the basic premise of believing in gay rights on any level at this time, which it feels like are even more radical than any kind of manifesto about taking your clothes off?

Michael: Yeah, that's the thing. This was the era of 70s gay liberation post-Stonewall. And there has always been a kind of rift in the gay rights movement about whether you should just be totally out there and radical and separate from heteronormative society, or should you try to assimilate and just blend in and be quote unquote, “normal”. And Opel was stepping right on that kind of rift. And it started having consequences immediately. 

He had this character he would play called Mr. Penis, which is like Mr. Peanut, but a big penis. And he had a big costume he would wear. That year at the Christopher Street West parade, which was The LA Pride Parade, he was warned not to show up as Mr. Penis, but he did anyway. So he showed up in this costume as Mr. Penis, and the Parade Committee tried to eject him. He had a confrontation with the chairperson in the parade, and he was handcuffed in jail for three hours. So he was really in your face. He was pushing the envelope even more than the kind of establishment LA gay community necessarily wanted him to.

Sarah: Yeah, and seemingly not worrying about the potentially extremely harsh consequences to him. 

Michael: Yeah, exactly. And LA at the time, this homophobic police chief Ed Davis was running things, and it was not without physical risk to really get in people's faces and push buttons like that and be publicly lewd and outrageous. And this is going to be an important quality of Opel's as his story gets more and more serious. 

One of the other things he was doing at the time was contributing to Drummer, which was a magazine for the gay leather community. So on Halloween that year, he did a cover story on the cycle sluts.

Sarah: Is that a specific group?

Michael: It is! And they're sluts on cycles. 

Sarah: Aw, okay. I like it when it's self-explanatory. 

Michael: But Drummer was under real duress because of Police Chief Davis. They had a charity event which was an S&M slave auction, and police chief Davis actually tried to prosecute the publisher on charges of slavery.

Sarah: Yeah, because that's who we need to worry about. 

Michael: Exactly. So Drummer was getting pushed out of town. Opel was getting pushed out of town. LA was not a great place for what he wanted to do. So in 1977, he left LA and he moved to San Francisco at the same time that Drummer Magazine moved to San Francisco. Because San Francisco, as you can imagine, was the place to be if you were a wild and crazy gay man in 1977.

Sarah: That's what I learned from Tales of the City. 

Michael: Yes. Yes. This is the world that we're going into. It's the world of Harvey Milk, of the Castro, of the hanky code, of people dancing to Donna Summer at bathhouses, that whole shebang. He walked right into it in in spring of 1977. 

The place he went and settled himself was actually not the Castro. He went to the south of Market, Soma, and that was the center of the leather community. And he opened up a storefront art gallery called Fey Way, which was a pun on Fei, like limp wrist gay, and also a pun on Faye Wray, the star of King Kong. 

In March of 1978, he had his first show at Fay Way, which was called X- Pornographic Art, and one of the artists was the little known at the time photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe.

Sarah: Ah. God, I love it. Robert Mapplethorpe. There was a moment, I think, in the early 90s when he was so big that there's an SNL sketch that I've always remembered. Where it's a parody of a PBS fundraiser where if you donate in the next 20 minutes, you get a free Robert Mapplethorpe tote bag. And he lived with Patti Smith, and there are all these great photos of them as babies living in New York City. And my best friend and I used to look at them in high school and be like, “That'll be us somehow.” 

Michael: All of that sort of being persecuted by the government for his obscenity was in Robert Mapplethorpe's future. He was just a kind of a little-known photographer from New York City who this was one of his first showings in California. 

Sarah: And what is his work like for people who haven’t experienced it?

Michael: I think the classic images are just these beautiful black and white photos of male bodies. And much like Robert Opel, they celebrated nudity, and they celebrated gay, male sexuality. But the person who linked them up is actually the editor of Drummer Magazine, whose name is Jack Fristcher. He's wonderful. He is in his 80s now, and I talk to him a lot. Because he's a former S&M gay leather man, who is now just an old gentleman who loves talking the dirtiest possible way. 

One of the reasons that Opel moved up to San Francisco, he told me that Opel reminded him of a sybaritic pan. And at the time he was dating Robert Mapplethorpe.

Sarah: Do you find yourself thinking as a historian about, because I return to this a lot, the fact that there are periods that we analyze and that you can trace so many threads to and from, and that sort of changed the course of history, and kind of showed what was possible. But that actually in the aggregate, if you're looking at the period when there was freedom and safety to be a promiscuous gay man in San Francisco. It's a period of just a handful of years, just vanishingly short, and yet it feels meaningful to describe the ways that such a short period can still affect people to the end of their lives. 

Michael: Yeah, I think in retrospect, because of AIDS coming right after this in the 80s, it's thought as this sort of Eden, this horny Eden from which the gay community fell into tragedy. And that actually leads me to some of the stuff that wasn't so Edenic that was going on at the time.

Sarah: Because I'm doing that right now. I'm like, there was a moment when things were okay. And it's, come on. Were they, are things, could things have possibly been okay? Of course not.

Michael: No, of course not. And so this was an era when the San Francisco Police Department was rounding people up and beating them with nightsticks in the park and raiding bars. And it was also, of course, because there was so much liberation happening, there was a very strong backlash.

So it was also the era of Anita Bryant, doing her anti-gay crusade. And it was out of this conflict that Harvey Milk emerged as a major political figure. And that was really happening at the same time. One thing that interested me is how Harvey Milk and Robert Opel were these mirror images of each other. There were both people who started out in a kind of conservative milieu. Milk actually campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964, around when Opel was working for Ronald Reagan. They both became radicalized in the 60s, and they both came to San Francisco. They both had storefront businesses. Opel had his storefront business studio Fay Way, and Harvey Milk had Castro Camera, his store that became his campaign headquarters. 

As far as I could tell, they never actually directly encountered each other, but they came close. So one day, Robert Opel walks into Castro Camera and plunks down a color Xerox of a campaign poster that he himself had designed and was offering up to the Milk campaign. And it was a woman exposing her left breast with a “Harvey Milk for Supervisor” pin about to pierce her nipple. 

Sarah: What is the messaging here? What are we trying to say about the candidate? Harvey Milk, he'll pierce your nipples. 

Michael: Exactly. Anyway, shortly after this, Harvey Milk, of course, was the first gay elected official in California. One of the most high profile in the country. And it was a huge victory for gay San Francisco. And then a lot of crazy shit went down in San Francisco all at the same time. 

And I just want to quickly run through some of them, because they're the background for what comes next with Robert Opel. But the Briggs Initiative happens, which is a proposition and that would ban gays and lesbians from teaching in schools. This was something that really got under Opel's skin as someone who had himself lost an education job. Harvey Milk is leading the campaign to defeat the Briggs Initiative. It is defeated in a landslide. Everyone is celebrating in the streets, in the Castro, till 4 a.m. 

And then 11 days later, was Jonestown. And Jonestown had been based in the People's Temple in San Francisco. Of course Jonestown was in Guyana, but it was something that really hit hard in San Francisco, because a lot of people had relatives or friends or people who had died in Jonestown. So that kind of was this mind bending, awful tragedy that happened in November 1978. 

Just a couple days later, on November 27th, was the assassination of Harvey Milk and the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone. Gay Eden immediately falls apart, and the city has a nervous breakdown, essentially. Especially when they find out that the guy who murdered the mayor and Harvey Milk was one of their colleagues, Dan White. 

Sarah: What was his position? He was in government, too? 

Michael: Yeah, he was elected the same election as Harvey Milk, to the Board of Supervisors. And I guess we don't need to go into all the nitty gritty of why Dan White murdered these two people. He was a former cop. He was very clean cut looking, and conservative, and extremely homophobic. He had lost his job and then promised his job. He quote unquote, “snapped and snuck into city hall with a gun and shot them.” And it was Dianne Feinstein, one of their other colleagues, who had to break the news to the public and the press that these two people had been murdered, and the murderer was Dan White. If you've ever seen that clip, it's just it's horrific. 

Sarah: In what way? 

Michael: You should hear the gasps. You hear just the absolute gasps of disbelief. This gay icon, plus the mayor, had been assassinated in a double assassination. And remember, people were still absorbing the fact that Jonestown had just happened, and then this happens. And the guy who killed them was not some rando. It was another elected official. 

Sarah: Yeah. And Jonestown is something that, I think it has been tricky to absorb in any real way, in the past 45 years or so. And so the idea of if these two tragedies were to follow each other so closely, it really would create a feeling of, God, what next? Maybe it'll just be an endless string of these. Maybe no one will ever be safe again. 

Michael: Yeah, and it really galvanized Robert Opel as well. A lot of people had a lot of different, conspiracy theories about how this had possibly happened. And he was telling friends that he was collecting cucumber seeds. He was collecting clues about why Harvey Milk was really killed, and he was going to write a play about what actually happened. So he was caught up in this fervor and this anger and grief in the gay community, as anyone would. 

And at the same time, a new character entered his life. Something very unexpected happened, which was that Robert Opel got a girlfriend. Her name is Camille O’Grady. She was a punk rocker from New York City. She had actually been a lover of Robert Mapplethorpe’s, they met when they were at Pratt. She was an artist, she was a rocker. 

Okay, when I met her, she told me that she had a rivalry with Patti Smith. Because she said her band, Leather Secrets, played at CBGB before Patti Smith did. And Patti Smith was apparently very possessive of Robert Mapplethorpe, so she didn't like Camille O’Grady, and said, “Oh, there's only room in this town for the two of us.” We did check with Patti Smith when I was writing this for The New Yorker, and Patti kind of gave me a Mariah Carey, “I don't know her” response.

Sarah: It's also just thrilling to think about having to contact Patti Smith, not to interview her, but to be like, “Hey, did you have beef with this one lady 50 years ago or what? Do you remember this?”

Michael: And I don't think Patti Smith was super psyched to get this question about her one-time supposed rival, Camille O’Grady.

Sarah: But that's what you get for being culturally relevant, babe.

Michael: Another fun fact about Camille O'Grady is that she was also really into the leather scene, and she had a leather man alter ego. She had a drag alter ego named Jack Savage, who was like her leather man persona. 

Sarah: That's fantastic. 

Michael: And she would dress up as him and sneak into leather bars in New York City. So she moved to San Francisco in late 1978, and Mapplethorpe told her to look up Robert Opel. And she goes to Fey Way Gallery, and they had a four-hour mind melt, where they were just made for each other. They became lovers. He invited her to a party at the perform at the gallery on New Year's, and she almost immediately moved in. Because this gallery had a living space in the back, like a little apartment. And so Camille and Robert were suddenly playing house there together and they were a couple. 

And one of the things she told me was, he was an eternal kid. Sometimes when he got really loaded, he did a perfect Jimmy Stewart. The thing he did not suffer gladly was shitheads in government. 

So we're going into 1979. He also was plotting at this point to try to get his own cable station, which you could apparently do if you had $500 and 18 hours of footage.

Sarah: The 70s do sound fun. 

Michael: Yeah. And part of how he got his footage was, he was interviewing John Waters and Divine when they passed through town. 

Sarah: Yeah, he's like Forrest Gump, actually. 

Michael: I think in many ways. However, he was also selling PCP. 

Sarah: I guess Forrest Gump didn't do that.

Michael: So on one level, Opel has big plans. On another level, he's starting to associate with some unsavory types. One of them was this guy named Dana Chalman, who was selling him Quaaludes. Camille hated Dana Chalman. She found him just really oogie, and he seemed dangerous. She was getting worried about Opel because he was going on these drugged out frenzies where he'd run around naked and then curl up in a ball and scream. And she would videotape him to prove that this actually was not a lot of fun. So it was a throwback to the streaking, but a little darker this time. 

And he's starting to lose it. And on top of this, in May 1979 was the Dan White verdict. So this lands on San Francisco like a bomb. This was, of course, the infamous so-called Twinkie defense, which is another you're Wrong About moment. I believe it's been covered in the greater You're Wrong About cinematic universe. 

Sarah: There's a great Maintenance Phase about it. But I would love for you to talk about it.

Michael: Essentially, Dan White was on trial for this double assassination. He got off on a very light punishment. He was sentenced to seven years and eight months in prison on voluntary manslaughter, which is obviously not what happened. It was murder. 

So his defense was diminished capacity, meaning that his lawyers argued that he was suffering some severe depression and basically just lost his mind. One of the expert psychiatric witnesses said something about how he had been binging a lot of junk food, and that was actually a symptom of his depression, but there's some evidence that it can affect your behavior.

And essentially the press just ran with that and called it the ‘Twinkie defense’. And that sort of became the way people absorbed what had happened. That, he got basically this slap on the wrist. That if you're a clean cut, straight, white guy, you can just say, “I ate too many Twinkies” and get away with double murder. Which is not really how it happened. 

Sarah: It feels like what really happened is actually more egregious in a way, right? Because if there was some kind of Red 40 defense or something, we were saying if you eat too many Twinkies, sometimes you just snap. Then that would be ridiculous. But it seems actually less dehumanizing than saying, we can see by his Twinkie consumption that's evidence that he was depressed, and when you're depressed, sometimes you kill a gay person. It's not that big of a deal.

Michael: And really what happened was that the jury was extremely conservative. Some of the jurors were openly weeping when Dan White gave his testimony. 

Sarah: This also feels like a way for a jury to express the value they place on different members of society, by whether or not they're willing to believe that.

Michael: I cannot believe you said that, because that is exactly how Robert Opel felt. 

Sarah: Oh. We're really vibing. I'd be his girlfriend. 

Michael: Opel was like everyone, absolutely enraged. This verdict was met with rioting. It was called the White Night Riots, very famous gay uprising. Police came into the Castro and smashed up bars and people.

Opel was incensed. And he was not just that, but he was really activated by it. He was angry. So Dianne Feinstein officially announced that she was going to run for mayor to replace George Moscone, who was killed. And he shows up to this event in leather and a Nazi emblem and starts shouting at Feinstein that he needs her to help him with something. The thing that he wants her to help with is a pseudo-event, as he called it. Basically, a piece of performance art called, The Execution of Dan White. 

Sarah: It's not putting your best foot forward, Robert. 

Michael: No. There was no way this was going to work. It was pure provocation. And he made this poster for this event, The Execution of Dan White, that had the following line, “What would happen if a queer, gay, homosexual, pervert, cocksucker, faggot shot and killed an ex-cop? Would he get away with murder?” 

This trial, this result beyond the Twinkies, it showed the value that was placed on one kind of person versus the other. And so that's what this performance art was supposed to be about. He started getting death threats right away at the gallery, so he borrowed a prop gun from a friend. They had a friend who looked exactly like Dan White, and that was part of this, too. He started writing to Dianne Feinstein saying that, he would love her help in this show trial that would attract worldwide media attention and be a great cathartic event.

Presumably, she did not respond to this invitation. The people who were in charge of the parade started warning him, please don't do this, please don't do this. But he insisted that he would do it. And so on the day of this pride parade he came in on his handmade float and they stopped at United Nations Plaza. Opel came out as the character “Gay Justice”. He took out his fake gun, and he quote unquote “executed” their friend who was a dead ringer for Dan White. And it was on the evening news. 

Sarah: And I feel like in a time when there is no mainstream ordained response to what's going on, right? You can't go through the approved channels to lodge a complaint in a world that doesn't recognize he was human. There are many kinds of protests and one of the kind that makes the most sense to me is this kind of art that is not offering solutions and is in fact maybe only able to provoke you. Provocateurs are a necessary element of society. We can't have a healthy one without them. 

Michael: There was a state of desperation and pure rage in this community that made something like this, the sort of street theater agitprop, feel like the only little piece of power that they could claw back.

We're now going to go to two weeks later, July 8, 1979. And we're going to talk about the death of Robert Opel. That night, Camille O’Grady was at a club with a friend of theirs called Anthony Rogers, who went by the nickname Harmonious. And she had a bad feeling, and she said Anthony, we've got to get back to the house. At 9pm, they were back at Fay Way with Robert Opel, who had stayed behind because he felt sick. And the front buzzer rang. These two guys entered. Camille, in later court testimony, said that she heard one of the men say either. “This is for Dana” or “This is from Dana”. And she remembered that Dana Challman was this creepy guy who was selling him drugs, and he'd actually been there the night before. 

One of the guys pulled out a gun. Opel says, “I don't want to see that. Put it away.” The man is demanding drugs or money. One of them puts the shotgun up to Camille's neck and says, ‘Give us the money or I'll kill her.” And Opel says, “You'll have to kill us all. There's no money.” Obviously, this is not a smart thing to do. But from everything we know about Robert Opel, he doesn't really know when to stop himself. 

Sarah: Yeah, he's like the fool in the tarot deck. He's just going to walk happily off a cliff with his little dog. And sometimes it works out.

Michael: Yeah. So he starts snarling back at these guys, “I want you out of my space. Get out.” Camille and Harmonius are back in the kitchen. They hear a shot, like a warning shot. They hear a second shot. And Opel says, “I'm not giving you nothing. You're going to have to shoot me.” And then Camille heard a third shot. And then she heard a thud.

The second gunman with the shotgun ripped the phone off the wall and used the cord to tie up Camille and Harmonious. They heard the neighbors running down the stairs in response to the gunshots, and the two gunmen fled. Before they did, the second guy told Camille something that stuck with her, which was, “If you identify us, you'll be killed.” And she found that phrasing very suspicious. Not ‘we will kill you’, but ‘you'll be killed’. So that kind of planted this idea in her that this might be connected to something else. 

But they untie themselves from the telephone cord and they go out and they see that Opel is on the floor bleeding. He's been shot above his eye, and he is pronounced dead at 10:40 at San Francisco General Hospital. 

Sarah: Man. And how old is he? 

Michael: He was 39. Now, of course he was somewhat notable as the Oscar Streaker. So it was interesting to see how this was misreported in the papers. The San Francisco Examiner headline was, Gay Militant Slain in Port in Porn Art Gallery.

Sarah: Okay. Settle down.

Michael: And then The Los Angeles Times said, The Oscar Streaker Has Been Killed. And they said he owned a sex paraphernalia shop. Everyone just got it wrong. 

Sarah: This feels dead center of the era of there being an unspoken mainstream media belief that gay sex would lead directly to murder.

Michael: He was part of this seedy underbelly of this, and that and of course this happened. 

Sarah: Yeah. You know what, you get too liberated, and it leads to murder. And that's the story we'll sell.

Michael: Now, that was how the mainstream press reported it. The gay press was starting to have different ideas about this. Which was that this was yet another conspiracy. Camille especially felt this was too weird. He had just done this really provocative performance art piece two weeks before about Dan White. We know that the San Francisco police was extremely homophobic. They were extremely pro Dan White. 

Two days after the murder, there were signs around San Francisco about a memorial service. And across one of them, somebody wrote, “assassinated artist”. And she thought back to that thing that the gunman had said to her, “You will be killed.” So she started to think this had to be connected to something bigger. Like, this wasn't just a random drug stick up. This was, what if the police are in on it too? What if someone was trying to eliminate him? 

And then what really clinched it for Camille is that she was brought into the homicide unit with Robert's sister, Mary, who'd come to town. And they saw this box of evidence that was labeled “Homicide”. And after they saw that Dana Shulman, the dealer guy who she was so suspicious of, came out of the detective's office and came up to her and told her that he had given these two guys their guns, and said that he burned them in front of their house. Which meant that he sold them bad drugs and blamed it on Opel.

So she's starting to think, are you connected to the cops? What's going on here? Also, the two guys were arrested at the airport, but then the next day, Maurice Keenan, who was the guy who shot Opel, just walked out of his cell and left. And they found him in Miami and brought him back.

Sarah: So no matter what's going on, there's this unspoken conspiracy to not take Robert Opel's murder all that seriously on the part of the cops, it seems. 

Michael: Yeah. And in fact, the main detective on the case was someone who was involved in Cops for Christ. It just didn't seem like the authorities were on their side at all and cared at all about this.

Camille is also really freaked out because she specifically asked the cops, do not reveal where I live because I was threatened. “You'll be killed.” And then, because her address was also the murder site, the scene of the crime, the gallery, it appears in the papers, and she has to flee. And so she's completely freaked out. She's going from one safe house to the next. And at one point she was at one of her safe houses and looked outside, and there were all these reporters outside and people taking pictures. And remember, I said earlier that she had this drag alter ego, Jack Savage, the Leatherman.

Sarah: Jack Savage to the rescue. 

Michael: She dressed up as Jack Savage and just waltzed out of the house, and no one realized it was her. 

Sarah: I love her. 

Michael: Very sadly, I spent two days with Camille when I was researching this story in 2019. And she was a real weirdo. Like old punk. You could tell she had lived a lot of life. Right at the beginning of the pandemic, I found out that she had passed away. So my conversation with her was one of her last about this topic. And Harmonious passed away years and years ago from AIDS in the early nineties. 

Sarah: Yeah, there's so much history dying with people every day. Which is just a side note that if you want to talk to people and record history, you should, because we always need more.

Michael: Yeah. And I feel really lucky that I got to hear her tell the story. So Maurice Keenan was tried for the murder of Robert Opel. The trial was in 1982. He showed up to proceedings completely high on LSD that had been smuggled to him in jail. His wife, Linda, who was into black magic, she had driven the getaway car. And she would show up in court and try to cast spells on the jurors, like cast hexes.

Sarah: It's one of the only constructive things you can do, I guess, in that position. 

Michael: There were all these stories about how he and his wife Linda had egged each other on. They were this crazy, druggie Bonnie and Clyde couple that just brought out the worst in people.

She had these mob connections in Florida and was doing her black magic. It was just a bad scene with these two. And the more I talked to people who were connected to him, especially his lawyer, the more the kind of conspiracy theory around it started to feel. This guy actually just wanted money for drugs and was out of his mind on speed.

Sarah: That's the thing. There's typically plenty of people who will commit murder, not as the culmination of any kind of organized plot, but just because they or their addictions have backed themselves into a corner, and it's just become the most reasonable thing to do in the moment. 

Michael: Exactly. And yet this conspiracy theory about his death did not die. And one last real interesting irony of this murder case. So Maurice Keenan, the guy who shot him, he was found guilty, and he was sentenced to death. And he spent 20 years on death row. In 2002, there was another trial, because some jury misconduct had come to light. I actually went through these court papers in the San Francisco courthouse, and in the original trial, one of the jurors, a sheet metal worker, had said in deliberations, quote, “If the victim had been a nun or my daughter, I'd be for the death penalty. But since the victim was a fag, it doesn't matter.” 

And in response, one of the other jurors who was gay, decided I wasn't for the death penalty before, but I'm definitely for it now. Because, screw this guy. And he actually, there was a report that there was this one older woman who had been the holdout in the death penalty, and the gay juror intimidated her into voting for it because he was so appalled by the homophobic sheet metal worker. 

So all of this came to light in an appeal, and his sentence was commuted to life without parole, and he's still in jail right now. He's still in prison. The fascinating thing to me about this is that this was the exact same question that Opel had asked in this fateful piece of performance art at the Gay Pride Parade about Dan White and Harvey Milk.

Sarah: Yeah. There's something very haunting about an artist's work in a way anticipating their death, and in a way that doesn't feel surprising in a sense. Because it makes sense to feel urgency to make art about the world you live in when this is not just something you're observing from afar, but something you understand could come for you tomorrow.

And also, thinking about the idea of the cops having a hit list and this being a conspiracy. I never know where to stand on conspiracy theories, because I think that the ones that are true are often ones that the people who are conspiring don't feel particularly ashamed about and hide either very poorly or not at all. But also that strikes me as a way of framing a villain as someone who thinks about you. When in fact, it seems like the villainy of mainstream society and the police at this time is not in framing the gay community as an enemy and going after them specifically out of some kind of recognition of the dangerous humanity of the people they're targeting, but just because it's Tuesday. You're targeting gay people as a cop because it's your job and because you like it, probably. 

Michael: I want to close out his story by sending you another thing to read. This was a personal statement that Robert Opel made, and after his death it was printed in Drummer, the leather magazine, alongside a picture of Opel holding a skull, kind of Hamlet style.

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

Michael: Yeah. So how do we feel about this guy, the Streaker? 

Sarah: I love him. 

Michael: I'm so glad. 

Sarah: And I feel like, I don't know, to me this feels like just a very sad story that also, to me, the hope embedded in this is partly through the reminder of no one is boiled down to their 15 minutes of fame. And if anything, those moments allow us to have a starting point that can let us learn about, or in your case, research and find new truths, about an entire life and an entire vantage point of history. And just that there are no small parts, there are only small penises. Not to say there isn't one. 

Michael: Ooh, a line worthy of David Niven. Well said. And in terms of Oscar history, this is just not how this moment is remembered. It's like this kind of kitschy, seventies, weird thing that happened. 

But Jack Fritcher, the guy from Drimmer, told me something I really loved. He said, “Robert was dream fulfillment to Oscar viewers. Robert was everybody who ever wanted to sneak into the Oscars. Every year, his memory puts an edge of suspense on the Oscars, like a promise that something unscripted and exciting and sexy might happen.” 

Sarah: Ah, that's so true. No more slapping. Let's bring back the streaking.

Michael: Make love, not war. Undress.

Sarah: Undress. Undress for Robert.

And that was our episode. Thank you so much for being with us as we stumble into the spring or the fall, depending on where you live. Thank you to Michael Schulman for guesting and for writing, Oscar Wars, A History of Hollywood, and Gold, Sweat, and Tears. You can find his writing there, or at The New Yorker.

Thank you so much to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. That's it from us. We will see you in two weeks.