Original subtitles

When

You make an opening in somebody's body,

it's just like making a physical opening, when you do this,

you're making an opening in the psychic body.

He had a tendency between visual art, spirit, body,

and sexuality - that everything flowed

or could flow from one to the other,

that there was no real separation.

This subculture has been dubbed 'Modern Primitive.'

A Menlo Park man is considered the patriarch of the

movement.

His name is Fakir Musafar.

You can call me Roland or you can call me Fakir, okay?

It's not too hard once you get used to it. Fakir.

Self-mutilation - Well, I don't like

to call it self mutilation. What

I'm doing is very precious and very sacred.

I think that this is a little barbaric.

I'm an anthropology student

and we no longer use the word barbarism.

Maybe they still use it in medicine,

but they certainly don't use it in other sciences.

Now, is that one of those belts that I've read about?

I don't know, what have you been reading? - A shift in

consciousness brought me to...

Can you give me ah, ah, ah, a good reason, your best reason,

if you will, that somebody might want to do this?

Are you trying to find an answer to a question

that you cannot form?

Sometimes the way these stories of the past start is

'what is your earliest memory?'

I think I might ask,

what was your earliest awareness of death?

The whole purpose of life is to finally get out

of physical condition.

Your memory is in your consciousness.

Your body is just the condition you're in at the moment.

My old friend who's now deceased, rang my bell here

and introduced me to a man in a suit

with a normal haircut.

You know, a white man. And then he worked

two pearl handle daggers into these slips in his chest

right in front of us.

When someone presents themselves in such an unconsciously

theatrical way, anyone would ask the question, well,

how did you get this way?

Which of course involves some mythologizing and,

and poetry if you, yeah, poetry,

really.

Consciousness came into this body

on August 10th, 1930 in Aberdeen, South Dakota.

I inherited my Uncle Milton's 1918 Vest Pocket Autographic

Beautiful camera, shot one 27 little roll of film.

So I said, mother, I'm going to be a photographer,

but I need a dark room.

I says 'can I use your fruit cellar down in the basement?'

Uh, in those days, I would live for the day I could send

for some magic tricks.

I got my money to work through college

by doing my magic act.

One of my best clients was the Farmer's Union.

And I had loved the stories of freaks and circus things.

We had only letters

and whispers, uh, between fans of the strange.

I had nobody to play with and nobody to share this with.

I was tiny, effeminate,

and I did not fit well in the social pattern.

And I saw cruelty. I saw some of the worst sides of humanity.

Because we were on a reservation,

and this was a period of assimilation.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs encouraged those who are Sisseton Sioux

to commute in and go to school,

And the townies, they used to go to a powwow

to laugh and ridicule.

I didn't feel that way about it.

I was feeling kind of awe stricken by what they were doing

And all of this at the same time,

'cause I was under another influence.

My mother, one of her sons had to be a Lutheran minister,

and I was the apple of the pastor's eye.

This is the most strict German Lutheran you

can possibly get.

And it was Hell and brimstone.

And I could see them getting red in the face

as they're doing the sermon.

And it would, rant on and on and on.

I could see 'em getting an erection underneath the pulpit.

By age 12, I had already given up on Christianity.

I just couldn't see anything redeeming about it.

And I don't know, I just had an empathic connection

in the place where I grew up.

I could pick up a rock and the rock would, I'd close my eyes

and I'd get visions and it would kind of tell me

what had been going on around the rock.

Just a feeling sensation about this.

And so I would take my own pictures when I

had a chance in privacy.

And in those pictures that I shot, I had self bondage.

I had made little stamps to simulate

that I was tattooed all over,

all of which were erotic to me.

And so I started a practice very early on

of clamping clothespins on my body.

And I liked the sensation of doing this,

and I would do it very slowly.

The Feelings that I had when I went inside, feelings

that I had when I tranced, they gave me a feeling

of belonging and of power.

So I did these kinds of experiments, radical ones.

I made a bed of nails and laid on it.

I, um, made my first permanent body piercing.

My most ambitious experiment was when I was 17.

My parents left for a weekend

and I had the house all to myself.

I didn't have to lock the dark room door.

I fasted for two days.

I went down to my dad's garage

and borrowed all the logging chain I could, wrapped it

around my little thin body

and, uh, danced around in the basement

until I was weary and exhausted.

And about three in the morning,

I had rigged up something on the coal bin wall - we were using

coal to heat the house.

And, uh, time went by and I was enjoying the bondage.

And I finally felt, you know,

after maybe an hour, I felt like my legs were kind

of coming apart and my arms started to get the same thing.

Like they were moving around

and they weren't there in the bondage.

And then finally, uh, this sort of creeping paralysis

of the physical body kind of moved up into my torso.

And then I started struggling

to breathe like I am now with the cancer.

And I had this sensation of like being on a long cable

between two rock chasms being swung back and forth.

And finally all the consciousness I had left was like

in the center of my head.

It was like a little light.

And finally it went click,

like you throw a light switch on the wall.

And I had a fuzzy sort of vision.

And what I saw with this was my body latched

to the wall about 10 feet away.

Did you ever want another person

involved with what you do?

Yes, but I could never find one.

In France where I grew up, um,

where there were a lot of abuse,

what attracted me to BDSM was that it was negotiation

and everything was about consent.

Because I guess to say yes, I get

to say maybe, I get to say no.

I get to try new things.

And there was tenderness too, and that really mattered to me.

You're not gonna let somebody take you in into your muck

and your inner darkness

unless you trust that they can help you

pull yourself back out of it.

Fakir, he wanted to try everything.

He had made these little bars that can squish things with,

with metal pieces that spins like that.

You know,

he set up the backdrop and the light and everything.

So I remember the cord somewhere to turn me the right angles

and boom, he shot it.

And when I come down, I was so turned on,

I was completely energized.

Is it something I wanna do every day? No.

It's extremely intense.

What happens if you,

you cannot, you cannot move.

You cannot stand. You cannot lay down. What happens to you?

And then I was, uh, drafted into the army in the Korean

conflict and served my two years as a draftee.

And, uh, finally decided that this was it.

I had to get out into the big society.

I also had, um, some GI bill available

of all places San Francisco State,

had graduate work in technical theater

here, that was in the 1950s.

And at that point in time, they had regular

broadcasts from Alan Watts,

who was recording on his Webcore recorder in the garden,

in Mill Valley.

Persona became the name for a mask.

When you look in the title pages of a play

and you see a list called dramatis personae,

the persons of the drama, which originally meant a mask

has come to me, what we really

and truly feel ourselves to be.

And I was totally enthralled, this was

what I was waiting to hear.

He was very big into sensory deprivation, as a way

to journey inward, like body meditation maybe.

Hmm.

Beside being his wife, I was his companion,

his art assistant.

You know, we had a relationship

where there was power, both powerful people.

So they were power play back and forth.

When time came that Hitler invaded France,

my mother became a Nazi collaborator.

So I came out of

that Nazi ideology rather than anything else.

I said, you know, I want to escape.

I wanna go to California.

There's this song, get some flowers in your

hair, blah, blah, blah.

And I decided, I am leaving.

I didn't speak any English. I didn't care.

Meanwhile, Fakir had his own little private life,

And he was aware that that wasn't really normal,

so he better shut up about it.

I had discovered in San Francisco State costume

department, uh,

that I was very good at making custom period costumes.

And that got me on another curiosity track.

I had already trained my waist down with belts.

Uh, I started doing that back in high school.

And it's like you train yourself for two hours, six hours,

so many hours a day, the remolding of the body.

'cause if there was anything that took a male body

and made it look more female, it would be a corset

that made the waist smaller.

Fakir always was between genders.

But he don't, didn't call it like that.

He called it being in the cracks.

Like he was always aware

that there was, is, in his terms, Anima.

He was aware of her.

He took picture of her, but he didn't share her with anyone.

He has a picture in his mother's bedroom with a door open.

Very young. 1958. 58? Wow.

I was 10. You were somewhere

in the cosmos waiting to come back.

My activities, my secret activities of experimentation

and body play had become a rather important part of my life.

I was not going to be a Lutheran minister.

I did all kinds of things

and some things were just there,

I don't know where they came from,

I had crazy ideas to try things with my body.

Uh, mostly I got my ideas from the library - witchcraft,

the Dervishes in Morocco and Egypt, the Indian friends that I had

and their customs,

which would throw people into a trance state.

He would look at stuff in the National Geographic.

'cause he came from the thirties, you know,

nobody was talking about cultural appropriation

then.

When I got into the National Geographic, uh,

they would show a picture of a Hindu in a Kavadi frame.

And, uh, they would've a caption.

Well, I never believed the captions

'cause it was always an interpretation.

But I would stare at the picture

and I would start to get feelings.

The essence of what was happening at the time it was taken

was still in the image.

I've got these feelings of high euphoria

of communion with spirit.

I actually felt I have to do these things to see

what happens, to see what my connection is to spirit.

The stuff that I wanted to do the most I couldn't do myself.

There wasn't any SM community when I got out here.

And I found a few fringe characters who were sympathetic,

who wanted to help me do these ceremonies.

So we did them.

And there was a custom in San Francisco at that point.

All the people who were into metaphysics and astrology

and that sort of thing would meet at midnight.

And I worked with a professional ventriloquist.

He was a weirdo, but then he was Mr.

Happy, wholesome guy on television.

So we had a television show for a year,

and he threw fabulous parties,

and we also needed some entertainment.

So he found this guy playing in the theater organ in a bar

in Sunset District, and that was Anton LaVey.

We got, hit it off right away.

We both loved Todd Browning's, uh, "Freaks," he had the film,

and would show that and play music

with it rather than run the,

the soundtrack, parties started at midnight

and they served cheap wine out of a potty chair.

And this is all what became the Church of Satan.

You might be as they are -

They did not ask

to be brought into the world, but into the world

they came.

Anton LaVey is a product of carnivals.

He's a Carney hoax guy, okay?

And he never believed any of this.

He knew how to speak. He knew how to entertain.

He knew how to make an audience.

And we both had some understanding

of magic and carnival life.

And where the two mixed, there's an overlap here.

It's a true with some magicians

who actually have had experiences that are really magic.

I met Doug Malloy in 1972 at one of these parties in LA

and I didn't know who the hell he was,

but I had a bunch of pictures of

what I had made in my dark room, of my experiences,

of my adventures.

And he says, oh my God, do you have more of these?

I didn't know Jim Ward at this point.

I met Jim through Doug Malloy.

I read an article. It was about a man who had traveled

around the world and to mark that event,

he had had an ear pierced.

And it was something that I found very intriguing.

It didn't take long after that,

before this fantasy began to kind

of percolate in my consciousness about, hmm,

wouldn't it be sexy to have rings in my nipples?

Eventually, Fakir came down,

Rolly Loomis, came down to LA to spend time with Doug.

And the three of us got together socially.

Doug Malloy would have what he called T

and P parties, uh, tattoo and piercing parties.

And it was a group of guys that, uh, Doug had made contact

with through personal ads mostly.

We would have a potluck at somebody's house.

And then afterwards, uh,

I would pierce whoever wanted to get pierced.

And we learned all of this by trial and error.

And little by little, it went from four

or six people to more and more and more.

And we were sharing our experiences about piercing.

And so he would say, well, he did my nipples and he did 'em this way.

Hey, can we do that over Doug's tonight?

And every time we did a piercing, we had

to get the jewelry custom made by Jim.

So little by little we, um, came up with standards.

Doug was pretty liberal with the truth.

Oh, he told a story about something called dydoe piercings,

which are on the side of the penis head.

He said that this group called the Cyprian Society,

they were Jewish men who invented this piercing

to restore some of the sensation they had lost

because of circumcision.

There's no evidence that any such society ever existed.

He believed that, or claimed that

Roman centurions attached their little capes

to nipple rings.

And I said, more likely it's that,

the men were wearing metal breastplates

and the rings were in the breastplates and not in the men.

And his response was, well, maybe.

But it makes a good story.

And I think that these myths about piercings were

very influential in getting this whole body

piercing movement going.

It was a whole period back in the seventies.

It was about self-discovery and gurus and spirituality

and freedom.

In the late seventies, uh,

our T and P parties were getting too popular, and both Doug

and Jim had this vision.

Is it possible we could have a place, commercial place

where you could walk in between these hours

and get a body piercing anywhere you wanted on your body?

What are we gonna give it for a name?

Well, Jim says, if I'm gonna sit in there,

it's gonna be Gauntlet.

Um, is it true? This is the only store in the world

that does this type of thing.

To the best of my knowledge, it's the only store

that's devoted exclusively to piercing.

We also started PFI magazine, a fan magazine here

to promote what we're doing and let world know.

He wrote articles for the magazine that Doug

and I started Piercing Fans International Quarterly.

PFIQ, uh, gave him a voice

that he hadn't had until then.

So it was all that under(ground) culture thing that was going on

where people were communicating, um, through magazine.

Then this community expanded.

I fell in love with his photographs first,

which I saw in PFIQ.

I was blown away by the photos.

So I wrote him a fan letter.

I was living in Italy at the time,

and we started a correspondence.

We're gonna lock the doors

and just get our whole bodies massaged

with steel needles.

She sent me a love letter with a lock of her pubic hair

and said, I wanna meet you in New York.

We had a romance

and we did a piercing party.

All the piercing parties

before that had pretty much been gay,

and it was a real mix of queers and straights

and all kinds of people.

He was pretty much in the closet. He was an art director.

He had a business, and you just didn't, you know, tromp

around and flesh hooks back then.

So he had a double life.

Rolling.

And put your cigarette in the picture.

Yeah right, okay,

It's like a series of still pictures.

Okay, come in. Yeah, that's fantastic.

Uh, when I first came out, I came out of the closet

to be the feature entertainment at the conclusion

of the first international tattoo convention, in Reno, Nevada.

By then, I had made permanent piercings in my chest.

I had made them large and heavy,

which we figured would be great to hook up to one

of these baggage things with a tattooed belly dancer on it.

And I would pull her around the ballroom.

We worked out an act.

Doug Malloy was one of the money backers.

He said, you need a name.

He says, is there anyone that you've admired? I says, yes.

This Sufi mystic that was misunderstood about using piercing

as a way of opening your consciousness.

His name was Fakir Musafar.

And I never intended to use that

other than in this 1977 international tattoo convention.

We had a packed house of about 900 people.

And instead of, uh, giving you the heave-ho

or putting you in an insane asylum,

they will give you applause.

His first big public performance was very

circus side show.

That was his entry into being more public.

And he loved the circus aspect,

but I think the circusy sideshow aspect was

socially acceptable.

Also, it was a time where BDSM clubs started popping up.

I was coming out into kink and I went to a program

and Fakir was giving the program.

Anybody ever seen this?

And at some point during his talk, he opened up his shirt

and showed people his chest,

and he said, is there someone who would like

to slide their finger in my fleshy loops?

And of course I said, yes.

I walked up to him

and I put my right index finger right through his nipple.

You told me one time this story, when you did that,

you looked him right in the eye when

you stuck your finger through.

Of course I did. I didn't stuck. I, it was gliding.

I glided my finger through his nipple.

And, and, and, you know,

and when you do that, you just look at the person.

It's, you know, it's nipple play.

You don't just look at the nipple, you know where they are.

Your hands feel them, you look at the person

to see the reactions.

In the course of SM play,

very often, a bottom in a scene would go into some other

kind of space, some other kind of trip,

other than the SM trip. What was actually happening here,

I think was a shamanic act, a spiritual exploration.

BDSM was very underground at the time.

It was mainly, uh, kinky or leather gay men.

History does not record women ever being at a 15 event,

but it happened?

Well, it was also not recorded at the Catacombs

that people like Carla were wandering in and out either.

She was invited in to play with the gay men,

and she had a small fist.

And she has wonderful stories

to tell about the Catacombs in that era.

Yeah,

I have arrived to this place.

Where I can connect my spirit, my heart,

and my cunt with my gay brothers.

They are my lovers.

I look at it in different ways.

Like I was looking for new rituals, um, body experience

that was as intense as this, um, you know,

ecstatic church experience.

But, um, also as an identity,

I first became aware of Fakir through, um,

Annie Sprinkle's Love magazine, which was from '83.

And then when he came to Highways, which is, um, '91,

I, I participated in that and became very ecstatic.

And I was already into body play,

but not like that with a group of people.

And I do practice mortification of the flesh

in a Judeo-Christian way.

And, and the idea of suffering

and the book of Job. Evangelism shares a lot

of tactics with vaudeville.

So, um, I guess I subscribe to shabby shamanism.

Like, I don't want to belong anywhere.

I, I come from a cult already.

I don't want to be in another cult,

but I, I do need to fill up with something.

My baby me, seeking something,

an answer to a question I cannot form.

All right, so I remember a play date with two women.

One was like my leather daddy back in the day.

We were playing, flogging, playing, fucking, et cetera, right?

Face down, on like cushion

or something, being flogged, whatever else was happening.

And I had this distinct feeling

and vision of a very large white snake coming up

from the base of my spine and then diving in

and out of my spine

and just feeling like, wow, cool.

File that away. Years later,

I would encounter neo-tantra people.

Then they would start talking about Kundalini yoga.

And frankly, I thought it was all kind

of orientalist and pretentious.

Then they started talking about, um,

snakes appearing from the base of your spine.

I'm like, oh, yeah, done that.

But I also did not tell this to the,

well, the likes of Fakir and the Tantrikas around me.

Yeah, I know that I was experiencing something special,

but I didn't want somebody else to label it.

And I come from Japan, you know, my, my, I guess religious

influence is more Zen.

And lemme tell you, Zen is like austere.

You don't talk big about

these unknown things.

Piercing is really a very profound experience.

So we started doing piercing rituals where lots

of people came, and the people to get pierced

would be in the center of the circle, surrounded by people

cheering them on, people witnessing their rite of passage.

We'd have bells and music and ritual clothing.

And now we are between the worlds.

We don't remember the simple powers that we have,

but we reclaim them.

The ritual doesn't cause things to happen.

The clarity and focus that the ritual brings allows you

to see the pathway forward.

It's 80 or 90% theater.

Thee we invoke by the moonlit sea

by the standing stone and the twisted tree...

Fairly early on in the wake of these piercing rituals, I

and several other people participated

with the Radical Faeries.

Oh, they're accepting

and they're breaking through all these

barriers and boundaries.

And when I got there, we had body piercings.

We had tattoos. And the faerie boys were like, ew, ew, icky.

That's so weird. Get away from me.

There were a lot of young men who were, you know,

searching and not finding.

And the next morning, the rest

of the camp was just scandalized.

Some people were upset

because they couldn't sleep through all our noise.

Harry Hay felt that we were exhibiting

internalized self-hatred.

And Mark spent five hours

with him talking about the deeper meanings

of our explorations.

And finally, Harry said, well,

I guess there have always been fairies

with black leather wings.

And in the next year, we held our own gathering

and created a community called Black Leather Wings,

Trees, breeze, black leather.

I've had some more initiations this year.

Um, I had my butt cherry popped, and I played with a cunt

and I'm having a great, great time.

The dawning of the age of Aquarius.

And the new age was a new way to look at things.

The point was, our sexuality

and our spirituality are not separate.

It is the same energy.

And it deserves honor

and respect that needs to not be relegated to a dark room

where you turn off the lights.

Play tends to often be very egocentric.

Ritual tends to expand that beyond the individual.

I'm not just feeding my own little fantasy.

I'm feeding a fantasy that we all share,

that we've all agreed that we share.

I'm not even sure it's a fantasy at that point.

At some point, subjective reality,

if there's enough people experiencing it

becomes less subjective.

I introduced the idea of hook pulls and the ball dance,

but I was always trying to bring this in with understanding

that these were borrowed from other cultures

and we should honor and respect the other cultures

and should have some understanding of what it meant

and what the intent was of doing these things.

Well, you know, I used to show up to the,

the Black Leather Wings parties late

so I could skip the opening circle

because something about it made my skin crawl.

Fakir was very much involved.

He and Carla were very much involved with it, and Drew

and I were involved with it for a while.

I was able to embrace ritual practice,

but I did not see it as the be all

and end all. Doing piercing

as a means of sexual enhancement.

That was the direction that I came at it from.

Oh, I am going to get my, um, clitoral hood re-pierced today.

After the ball dance of, uh, two days ago,

and during the ball dance, I had this really great healing

of, uh, being raped when I was a virgin.

And I felt all this crap come out of my,

my cunt, psychically.

And now I want to reopen it for more happiness

and more happy sex and, um, heal the old wound

of rape, multiple rapes

and abuse, so that I can be a happier woman.

I need this piercing to be about boundaries for my cunt.

I gonna put a lot of pressure on you here, I'm sorry.

Should we do it tomorrow morning? No.

I want you to get all the helpers you need

and I will try my best to, to let go.

She wants total organization, very slow.

And in the fading light. Do we have enough light? Just enough.

Just enough.

Oh

No more rape.

No more rape. No more rape.

No more rape. No more rape.

No more rape. No.

It was a beginning of the rising of the leather world

and more, uh, BDSM consciousness and more gay freedom.

And I stepped right into that moment,

and then the people started dying and dying and dying.

We had set out to explore the world

on our terms at intimacy levels that doomed many of us.

And yet we never felt wrong about exploring the world.

We just felt very sad that this was happening to us.

The grief has been eternal. It has never gone away.

This is not grief that can be discharged. This is grief

we carry, all of us carry.

Richard has

asked me to tell you why I am doing this,

and I don't know why,

but for me, being an HIV positive gay man,

this is my staying alive.

I feel like I'm right on the brink of, of ill health.

And this is to, to help fortify me and empower me

and give me life and the energy and the courage

and strength that I need to survive this awful, awful plague

One year at gathering

so many had died

and there were lots of new people, young people.

And I wanted to, I wanted to have my tribe,

but my tribe was gone.

And I walked out by myself, as I was walking,

I could feel my departed ones

all around me.

And they were all boisterous and joking and full of joy.

And it was very exhilarating.

For a few minutes. I felt like I had one foot

on this Earthly material plane

and one foot off into the ethers.

And I realized that I really wanted to be

with the dead spirits,

and I didn't wanna be with the living people.

By then Mark had caught the bug

and Mark was my lover at the time.

And I talked to Mark

and I said, I want to do this ritual that Fakir does,

because the grief is too much.

I wanted to have pictures, which were Polaroid, and,

and I wanted to make a road where you stop at each station

and do a little prayer.

So I had a row on the right and a row on the left.

Uh, one of the rows was all the people that departed.

They were friends, loved ones,

and also sexual partners from the Catacombs.

And then they were also the ones I was afraid of losing.

And Mark was in that.

And I danced really, really hard and I cried and I screamed.

And I called people's names and I said goodbye.

And it was a huge, uh, grief releasing prayer.

It was really a big body prayer.

Life and death,

when they're close, doing mundane things

just doesn't cut it.

You need to go deep.

You need to deeply feel

and deeply experience what you're going through

and also strive for some relief.

There was so much caretaking involved in our everyday life

of people in the hospital, losing people constantly.

So I think this body celebration was so needed.

It was a, a natural counterpart to how, um,

harsh reality was in that moment.

If you're facing a worn out body, you have to go

to your higher mental body

and say, take me when the time is right

and please let me know.

Our, our big job, we're not bodies, we just live in 'em.

You know, it's just a hunk of flesh.

It's all gonna be carbon, sulfur, water when we get done.

Because of these experiences, I've actually been able

to see and feel what it's like on the other side.

If the consciousness leaves, you have dead meat.

So consciousness, how can we tell what that is?

What is that juice? That nectar

that fills us and keeps us alive?

What is it?

I don't know if you're familiar with the movie

Dances Sacred and Profane?

So we all went out on an expedition to do the Sun Dance.

And, uh, they documented it all.

And that's what's in this film. Now you call it a Sundance?

There are several ceremonies in here.

A bizarre movie about to premier in San Francisco

at the Roxie.

It's about American cults and rituals.

It's Dances Sacred

and Profane, by the superb documentary producers

Mark and Dan Jury, opens Friday.

This is the front of the Roxie, the eight o'clock show,

which was absolutely packed, is letting out.

Congratulations, Roland. You're on your way.

They hired a pro publicity person.

I got on talk shows, on television.

I don't know myself, that's why I'm asking

what is, what was the concern?

I think the concern was a non-Indian person professing

to be an expert on something

that is very sacred to native people.

And this still goes on? Yes, it does.

A lot of the Sun Dancers are conditioned

through their life, through the, through the religions

and through the sacred pipe, et cetera.

And it isn't, it isn't a free for all to see

how much pain you can stand

and see how many television shows you can get on.

This isn't for everybody. This

is what I was directed to do.

So I've had a lifelong search trying to find out

what the heck this is about.

Slow Turtle. Well, this is our right.

I mean, if he can endure,

but the Sun Dance has got a whole different

atmosphere to it.

But the, the Kavandi isn't just endurance either.

The Kavandi is for the same purpose

that your people do the Sun Dance.

That's the Hindu ceremony you're doing, right?

Yeah. And there are others from Middle East.

Isn't it possible that any human being could learn the

discipline and go through this and, and,

and benefit from the practice?

If that were true, I think there would,

there would be less misery in this world.

We, we, we would have answers to a lot of the problems

that, that are going on.

I, I think the whites ought to look into their background.

I think there's a lot that they have in their background

that they could be proud of.

They don't need to look over the fence at

what somebody else has - Ah, but I'm not looking over the fence-

And then hop over the fence.

And, and the idea of spirituality and,

and a man with God is a very, very private thing

with the American Indians.

He had a real sense of holding on to

what was real for him.

And nobody could convince him differently.

At the time we were trying to understand a connect,

but we made mistakes.

We wouldn't do it the same way now.

What do you think it is that like

makes us look elsewhere?

I wish you'd asked this earlier so I could think about it.

I mean, almost like there's a hole

to be filled or this sense of absence?

You'd have to ask him.

Yeah, I do wish

that I had started this while he was still alive

so he could speak to the way we're

defining these things now.

Well, Fakir defined the Modern Primitive movement.

I think he was working on it before we met, but after he

and I started collaborating, that began to crystallize.

I've done so much work that I don't feel that aching hole

that could be filled with another belief system,

but that I have all, all kinds of rituals

and beliefs that, that fill that up now.

Some things aren't meant to be where you,

you come to and stay.

And I feel like the Modern Primitive movement was an enlightening

time. Before that movement,

people felt the right to confront you.

Like, why do you wanna be different?

You know, like you were making a big statement

against them, instead of it being

for yourself, for your own community.

They couldn't imagine you had a

community that looked like you.

So eventually now we have the formation of a lot

of new communities that are not really about conformity.

And in the 1980s I met people in the punk scene

who were publishing books and magazines.

This idea appealed to them of young people today

who in some way found some value in these body

rituals that I was doing.

No one wrote about this piercing scene.

It happened secretly in leather bars

and only at the Gauntlet West Hollywood.

But to see it in that context it was like, you know,

the door flew open.

By 1989 when Modern Primitives came out

it just hit everybody.

Modern Primitives had a very simple goal,

my bestselling book, try

to do this project without any censorship or moral judgment.

And of course, Fakir is at the beginning

because he's the one person who'd done everything.

And here is the tit-cam! Here is the tit-cam!

There's absolute stuff.

I mean, we had phrases then like avant-garde.

And I own two books with the title Modern Primitives in it.

They're called primitive painters.

'cause they weren't taught in official art colleges.

And they're called modern

because they're reflecting, you know,

the society of the time.

And so I got turned on to the concept of naive art.

New York Times later changed the phrase to outsider art,

uh, outside of the gallery, museum system.

I, I think in a way we're both artists,

but we didn't see that for a really long time.

I know that he was surprised when the art community started

looking at him as an artist.

He was like, oh, really?

To me it was all a continuation.

As he really started owning that title performance artist,

we were put in the same festivals.

This is the vaginal canal. Let's all say

that together. Vaginal

Canal.

We were making art through our bodies.

I cannot, there was so much going on.

Uh, a French woman, she did many surgeries on her face

and then there was Franco,

who did all kind of weird stuff

and it was just like, why all this blood?

What are they looking for? We, we don't get it.

Like when he argued with Stelarc.

Fakir got into this tremendous argument.

Stelarc did so many eloquent things.

It was not done for any specific reason,

like getting out of your body to meet God or anything.

'cause he didn't believe there was anything like that

or world beyond what he was doing.

Why are you doing this? What, where do you go with this?

Does this ever turn you on? Do you ever get a hard dick?

You get into an ecstatic space.

Do you see things that aren't there?

No, it's just art. Alright.

I think that except for Ron Athey, we didn't have much respect

for any of those things.

If, if you're performing on that level of

what you could call ritual performance,

I work with hypnotists, I work with all kinds of things

to exhaustion to get in this altered state.

But nothing is as fast as pain.

In addition to having all that beauty

and all the thing of a performance,

something else happened there.

People were like (inhale), it was like energy - light

from a light bulb coming out over the audience.

You had all of these people that had grown up with punk

that were the few that did not die.

We were looking for the next thing.

And fetish was exciting.

It was underground, and it wasn't drugs or alcohol.

The, the fetish community brings in practices that were

part of demos, demonstrations as performance

whips are getting pulled out

and people are get, getting flogged.

And like, the thing is, none of this was a cliche yet.

Like the nineties hadn't happened yet.

There was a group of us body-based performance artists

that definitely came from

more underground - sex work,

BDSM. Venues were

afraid to present us.

If I showed my cervix one night,

there were police in the lobby ready to take me away.

Thanks for coming. Yeah.

A lot of us were used to defund the NEA.

We cannot fund so-called works of art

that cannot be discussed in this chamber

With children visiting with their taxpaying...

I don't think everything just moves forward.

I think it moves forward

and a little bit backward at the same time.

And there's a price to pay for everything.

You know, what's happening is we

start to have moral panic.

The satanic panic, the conservatism, fear of AIDS,

um, absolutely shapes piercing culture,

but also a new wave, a new type of homophobia

that's completely unveiled.

It's just a whole other level

of discrimination that's occurring.

Up until the AIDS epidemic started,

we were reusing needles.

I mean, they were not readily available. Up until that time

we didn't use disposable gloves.

Dentists didn't use exam gloves.

The doctor, nobody did.

Word of mouth business has turned LA's Gauntlet, a clinically

safe piercing salon, into a cottage industry.

He got so busy down there in LA, Jim had to get help

And then down and out like a puppy dog.

It's not that I wanted to be a piercer when I was a kid.

That wasn't even an option.

This was like literally an underground business model.

It wasn't even an industry yet,

but I'm like, oh, I can be out

and I can look the way I want.

And I'm like, you have to teach me how to pierce.

Fakir and I, uh, we disagreed over the way

that Gauntlet was training

its piercers. For one thing,

We weren't doing enough of the, the spiritual, ritual.

You cannot force that on people. I'm sorry.

It's, it's basically like what Christians do.

I would encourage visitors who came with a piercing

to come in and hold their hand and connect their energy.

Oh, we would go in and light incense

and that was not good business practice.

I do a body piercing school

and part of my body piercing school is to keep the magic.

Uh, it's not just a, a sterile hygienic

thing. It makes a big difference

if you have someone who understands it, shamanically.

And we get them to breathe.

And we, we do use a lot of things like Chinese medicine.

Body piercing can never be an industry,

but retail stores, people that make

and sell jewelry, healing supplies, that's the industry,

but not the practice itself.

The practice itself is a ritual.

Fakir had his way of doing things

and they were the right way, and they were the only way.

Whether it was conscious

or not, he had to have an excuse for enjoying sex.

It had to be a spiritual experience for it to be valid.

It couldn't just be because you enjoyed it.

Uh, I think there was some Lutheran guilt

underneath all of that.

You know, he had a big ego

and he also had a fragile ego at the same time.

He had these really heavy issues

inside about, I don't fit in, I don't fit in.

And it was hard for him to talk about these things.

I don't know, that home I grew up in just looks smaller

every time I come back here. Hug each other.

This family?

Michael, I won't hug you I promise. We're sorry we missed you.

What's this tough guy? Was there conflict?

Or just distance?

I'd be flying overhead going to England or someplace.

I'm flying over South Dakota now I'm going

to England to do a show.

Should I tell you about it? Or I just published a book.

Can I send you a copy? No, don't bother.

I mean, he was remote.

There are so many times with some of these men

that I would just love to jump up and hug and kiss them.

See, I always get sucked into these dominant women

and actually my heart longs for some kinds of men.

When we get older, we get to choose the family we want.

We get to make the shape of that family fit, who we are,

not necessarily the shape that society

or other entities tell us

a family must have.

By the time we found Black Leather Wings, the vast majority

of the members were, were lost.

It was the, the women, the gay women mostly

that came in to take care.

There was an organization about this.

I mean, people who actually do take the care needed

to have consensual, really consensual relationships.

We had common values

and the energy was really good.

We all merged together

as chosen family.

And then he was able to have a wonderful,

loving relationship with Alan.

So it took him a really long time to get to that place.

There was the, the captain and the cabin boy.

He was Rolly at times.

And we would do a role play, which was not defined so much

as just sort of fallen into,

but I think for, for Fakir, for Roland,

it was something really special that he had not had

with a man before.

He got big joy out of it, so he could let go of

that Fakir responsibility he had and just be Fakiki.

The transformation that takes place isn't just physical,

it's spiritual, it's mental, it's, it's everything.

Um, and you choose,

you can still choose which parts you wanna keep

and which parts you want take

and which parts you want to be at any given moment.

Thanks for letting me be here with these people.

Give thanks for the gift of the body.

Give thanks for everything wonderful in this world.

Fakir didn't even start the piercing school

until he was 61 years old and this would've been in '92.

Just let it come out, your deepest most feelings.

He has such a strong, strong desire

to make community and that's what he's doing.

Building the community around him for the next 27 years.

My students and the people I'm mentoring

and all this, they're all young.

I think working with kids

and having a new bunch every six

weeks, I have a new bunch of people.

It's great. I make new friends every six weeks.

And if you hang around with young people, you don't get old.

Fakir is an embodiment of ideas

and ideas can get viral and spread.

Ideas are as powerful as people. Maybe more powerful.

The western world is not enormously connected emotionally.

I wanna go up too. We erect walls between us.

Some of them are due to the religion

that founded this country.

Some of them are due to our new religion, capitalism, which

reduces every single relationship to money.

But there's a fair number of people that somewhere deep

inside want more than that. Alternate ways of

feeling, of experiencing the world.

Make good use of the time you have in this body.

'Cause a body is the only connection you have to time.

When you're not in your body

there is no time.

Okay, now let's take some deep breathes in, I'll start with the

outside on this side.

Another nice deep breath. Hold it. Hold it. Let it,

Out real slow.

Yay. That was great. Yeah.

You're not screaming like me when they put the... You okay? Yeah.

You gonna faint or anything? I'm fine.

You want to push down on this

because when I pull on this one, it makes it uneven.

Got it. Now I understand. Okay.

Okay. Is that what you want? Yep.

That's, well, this is gonna be excellent.

It takes a while for all the physical substance in the

physical body to return to Ma nature. Equally,

it takes quite a while for all the energy

that's accumulated in that shadow body, astro body,

whatever you want to call it, for that to disintegrate

and pull itself back up into the higher self

that made it in the first place.

It was amazing to watch the level of surrender that he was

capable of embracing.

He was preparing to die.

And I remember one instance, I got a little impatient.

I said something kind of da da da because I'm kind of fiery.

And he looked at me with his eyes wide open

and he had the breathing little tube in his nose.

And he said, Carla, I am just trying to die.

Do you mind if I show you a little piece of video

you have never seen?