Kalup Linzy on General Hospital - 2009įranco met openly gay performance artist Kalup Linzy at Art Basel Miami Beach in late 2009, and the two immediately embarked upon a series of collaborations. Watch a clip here (contains frontal male nudity):ģ. The film ends in Stephen having feces rubbed in his face by the boys, who discover his intentions - but Stephen appears to enjoy the act. Mounted by the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, the 12-hour presentation mainly focused on the film's late star, River Phoenix, hard at work on crafting his character, a gay street hustler named Mike.Ī student short directed by Franco while he attended New York University's film school, this mostly silent, black-and-white meditation is based on a homoerotic poem by Anthony Hecht and features a slim, bespectacled boy (the Stephen of the title) observing a pickup basketball game on the streets of New York - only to have the young men playing suddenly appear naked to him in a fantasy.
Here then are five efforts of a similar vein that led to its inception:Ī collaboration with openly gay filmmaker Gus Van Sant - who directed Franco in the Oscar-winning film Milk - this installation featured two films, Endless Idaho and My Own Private River, which were pieced together by Franco using dailies and other rejected footage from Van Sant's breakthrough 1991 film, My Own Private Idaho. James Franco's Cruising may mark a significant leap ahead in just how far its star is looking to push the envelope. The first cut features "real gay sex in it," Travis says, just as Franco, who plays himself in the film, had instructed. The result of this latest collaboration - James Franco's Cruising - was filmed over a period of two days. The notorious movie, which featured real S&M participants as extras and explicit depictions of public gay sex, is considered shockingly graphic even by today's standards.
Franco approached Mathews to oversee a project that would attempt to re-create 40 minutes of lost footage from Cruising - a 1980 William Friedkin film starring Al Pacino as an NYPD officer who goes deep undercover into the gay leather scene to catch a serial killer. The latest example, detailed in a new piece from Indiewire, sees the star of the upcoming Oz: The Great and Powerful working with Travis Mathews, an erotic art-film director.
And more often than not, these pieces veer toward gay themes. However, there was a rather different reaction in Canada, from where the company originated, when ‘at least’ ten customers complained about adverts that showed two men embracing.Īfter they popped up around the subway in Toronto, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) claimed they encouraged gay commuters to ‘break the law.’Ī TTC spokesman Danny Nicholson said: ‘The ad was taken down as it promoted sex in public places, which is against the law.The unlikeliest of A-list Hollywood idols, James Franco has spent the majority of his mainstream career living a double life as an art-world provocateur, probing the recesses of his own fame through a series of increasingly out-there performance art pieces. MORE : Tyson Fury kisses gay man in a bar to prove he’s ‘not homophobic’īut the ASB disagreed and stated that the adverts met ‘the necessary precautions in the context of good taste and public decency,’ adding that even though the men are topless they are not ‘shown in a sexually provocative pose’ or ‘suggesting any sexual acts.’ ‘Young children should not be faced with terminology such as ‘squirt’ and ‘cruising’ in conjuction with the picture (of half-naked men).’Īnother person claimed the adverts were designed to entice children to visit the website, while a third said they were ‘truly sickening and shocking.’