Ron Athey

Prostrate probing interviews! Live action murder! Naked people! Tired death-rockers! And more! Much more!!

Reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard, the action is transposed from the silver screen's old backlots to contemporary male prostitution and the pornographic industry.

Documentary exploring Ron Athey’s life and career as a queer HIV-positive body modification and performance artist, including several of Athey’s internationally staged works from the late 1990s.

A look at the sex lives of the guys who make L.A. adult movies.

A BODY TO LIVE IN offers an uncompromising look at the rise of BDSM performance art, body modification and the ‘modern primitives’ cultural movement through the agonies and ecstasies of transgressive artist Fakir Musafar and the communities that surrounded him. Blending rare archival footage with the voices of queer and artistic trailblazers, the film shows how pain, ritual, and transformation became tools of identity, survival, and self-expression. Weaving from early experiments and secret gatherings to the emergence of a global subculture shaped by the AIDS crisis and spiritual reinvention, Director Angelo Madsen (NORTH BY CURRENT) reveals not just the story of one artist, but a collective history of bodies in revolt - asking what it truly means to live freely in one’s own skin.

In this documentary Kerkhof takes the viewer into a bizarre underworld, the sub-culture of blood art and body piercing performance art. Kerkhof's camera registered a performance by the American blood artist Ron Athey which took place during the FREAK ZONE festival in Lille, France in May 1997. The camerawork is so freaky one would almost suspect it is under the influence of heroin. The film includes interviews with Athey as well as shocking live fragments wherein Athey works his face over with injection needles. The crazy, maniacal clamour of the HIV positive priest/performer gives us insights into the motives and goals of this group of masochistic performance artists. Somebody who entertains his audience by cutting and stabbing himself; is this art? Who can say? What is beyond question is that Kerkhof's masterful use of the camera and editing not only obscures the images but also the boundary between art and unbearable filth.

Based off a homophobic Bataille essay — L’Anus Solaire (1931) — which draws the erect penis as the sun, and the anus as the nighttime, attracted to each other but unable to exist together, Ron Athey’s performance work aims to queer Bataille’s theory. After pinning his face and head into a crown, Athey proceeds to fuck himself with a dildo attached to a pair of high heels, eventually releasing a string of pearls from his anus.

Sanctuary explores queer spirituality and utopian sexualities through the figure of Purusha Androgyne Larkin (1934–1988), a monk, pioneering gay filmmaker, and self-proclaimed cosmic-erotic mystic. Larkin’s 1981 book, 'The Divine Androgyne According to Purusha', challenged repression with a spiritual vision rooted in eroticism and presented a radical path to cosmic-erotic consciousness through ‘extreme’ forms of sexual pleasure. Sanctuary explores Larkin's attempt to form a utopian, pleasure-based spiritual community, and considers the complex legacies of his ideas in queer culture. Shot on 16mm, the film weaves together the voices of Larkin’s friends and followers, creating a portrait in absentia of a figure ahead of his time.

But happily Kerkhof the uncompromising iconoclast is back. With his newest film RON ATHEY: IT’S SCRIPTED (the original title RON ATHEY: SO MANY WAYS TO SAY HALLELUJAH had to be changed because there is already a 2 hour documentary in production under this title) he has delivered a convincing artistic achievement. Those without strong stomachs will probably find the overwhelming amount of injection needles and razor blades a bit too much, but the film is so cleverly constructed that one cannot look away.

Athey and Pittakos were inspired by the inclusion of a short Pasiphäe video they made for their multimedia performance Acephalous Monster. Wanting to expand on the idea in a short film that could stand alone, but also start thinking about how it could fit in a new work, The Asclepeion. And to expand on the concept of possession, compulsion, abjection, realization.. this is archetype work. Hermes interpretation of the enchanted womb of a cow, this myth is truly the earliest reference of a glory hole being used to deceive and coerce, in this case, the seed of Poseidan’s bull.

Celebrating the life and career of dancer, performer, choreographer, LGBTQ+ and publicly HIV-positive activist Patrick Scully, whose Patrick’s Cabaret was a South Minneapolis fixture for decades. His work in MN, New York and Berlin, expresses his passion for life, and touches on subjects that are often controversial and profound.

From the director: "I set out to look at a case of police surveillance and infiltration, to listen carefully to the songs and signs of a secret society, and in the end, I turned towards the study of a life. I uncovered a book that was kept at the club in 1914, and in it, a poem about the author’s special friends: sea snails. When faced with ostracizing opprobrium and hate, it is moving to remember so many of us turned in solitude toward Nature, and to the Sea."

Ron Athey is a rising Los Angeles performance artist who presents his disturbing and power­ful S&M-related work in the underground club circuit. The tattoos on Ron's body, inspired by tribal markings and other religious imagery, are reference to stages in his life, from his childhood in a Latino neighbourhood, through his years of drug addiction and punk rock, to his present involvement in the 'Modern Primi­tive' movement in LA. This self-narrated doc­umentary is a complex account of an individual contending with the extremes of human experience.

HotMen CoolBoyz (or H.M.C.B.) is a Danish adult film directed by Knud Vesterskov and starring Ron Athey and Billy Herrington. It is the only gay hardcore pornographic film ever produced by an established mainstream film company, yet upon its release was almost completely ignored by the Danish press, and only later started to gain an international reputation for its unique artistic imagery.