The Oscars Streaker with Michael Schulman

It's also just thrilling to think about having to contact Patty 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 Your 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 Opal streaked across the stage and had his 15 minutes of fame.

Today I'm talking with New Yorker staff writer Michael Shulman, author of Oscar Wars, A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears.

about Robert Opal'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 Oscar's 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 Plus.

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 Shulman, and we're going to talk about the Oscar streaker.

Are you a Michael or a Mike?

Or like a third thing?

I'm a Michael.

You're a Michael.

Definitely a Michael.

Okay.

Do you feel is this a thing that people feel strongly about?

I feel like I would if I were a Michael.

Well, you know, 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, you know, asking, assumes I'm a Mike.

I just don't trust them.

Exactly.

It's usually some dude, some straight dude who's like, hey, oh, Mike.

And you're like, excuse me.

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 it's that's more of a mid-sanctuary thing.

Wait, Sally is a nickname for Sarah?

It is.

See, the fact that you.

Oh, that's news to me.

I'm not sure.

So really, it's, you know, we're on our own out here.

This is irrelevant, but

it feels somehow connected because I suspect that the story is going to be about someone who also was a kid who yearned for a nickname once.

Well, I don't know.

He's a Robert who stayed a Robert.

Okay.

So, yeah, so there is a thematic connection because Roberts who stay Roberts.

I suspect are in a similar boat.

Is Behind the Bastards hosted by Bob Evans?

No.

And Michael, you also also have a book out about the Oscars.

Can you tell us about that?

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 Land, and it ends with me watching the slap.

Oh my God.

Yeah, it's really...

It's been quite a century.

Was there like a place that you found yourself while researching or writing this book that just kind of made you think,

I did not expect to end up here or to be holding this artifact or talking to this person?

Oh my gosh, I talked to so many amazing people.

I talked to like Gregory Peck's sons and like Dalton Trumbeau's daughter and Candace Bergen about her, you know, her correspondence with Gregory Peck in 1969.

Yeah, I didn't get to hold any actual Oscars, but I held a lot.

Oh, I held the tele the telegrams of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in the Academy Library from like the 20s.

Yeah,

brought me to a lot of interesting places.

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

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.

Or, you know, or or streaked, which would be ideal.

Or streaked.

Or streaked.

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, you know, a kid in 2003.

What was your like iconic Oscars that you remember sort of being really fixated on?

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 Adrian Brody.

At the time we said kissing, I think today we might now say assaulting Hallie Berry because he won an Oscar for the pianists and he just had to just grab a woman.

Unacceptable.

And then and then Peter Jackson cast him in King Kong.

It makes you think.

And what did Hallie Berry get?

She got Catwoman.

Yeah, God.

Yeah.

And I feel like the Oscars are, along with the Olympics and elections, are kind of the three secular rituals in America that

we, the people, and also broadcasters, just have to hope will create big moments.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean,

there's a whole history of like crazy things that have happened at the Oscars, a lot of them pretty recently.

You know, I've been to the Oscars.

This year is my sixth time actually going there 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 Lamb.

Oh my God.

And I was in the press room and everyone screamed when they saw what was happening.

Like every, no, people weren't expecting something to actually happen, you know?

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 fight was breaking out, you know?

Yeah.

And everyone was very confused, even in the room.

How big is the room?

I mean, it's a big auditorium, so it's quite large.

But what people don't realize is that the Oscars are at a mall.

I did not realize that.

I'll tell you that much.

It's the, it's called like Ovation Hollywood.

It used to be called something else, but

you basically, you go in and there are like 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 like a Sephora.

It's very, very confusing.

And it just to me goes to show, like, you know, like much of Hollywood, it's a lot of smoke and mirrors, and the glamour is, you know, paper thin.

And as soon as you're leaving the Oscars at the end of the night, they're already kind of rolling up the red carpet and packing things up.

And it's returning to its natural maul state.

And you're like, oh, that's a Sephora.

How weird.

We are the dreamers of dreams.

I find that both very bleak and very lovely.

It's kind of a Nathaniel West kind of a detail.

If Nathaniel West had known about Hot Topic.

At some level, he did.

Yeah.

The Oscars are fascinating intrinsically because they are a big ceremony that is both for broader consumption and for the public, but also kind of

a night for people within an industry.

And in that way, it's kind of like,

you know, an orthopedic surgeon conference as well, where it's like everybody's drama.

Oh, yeah.

And, you know, I have, 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.

Like, I'll watch them if someone else is watching them, but I don't watch them on purpose.

Mostly out of laziness.

But maybe, but then, like, especially the slap, I was like, I should be watching the Oscars because like something ridiculous could happen.

And I feel like if you look at kind of 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, you know, and that's what the Oscars are.

And then we added in, I guess, the element, which we also love of spontaneity and no one, anything could happen tonight here, folks.

This is live.

That feels like the trinity of great TV.

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

You know, I think the Oscars are a platform for us all to discuss movies.

And, you know, 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 sort of built in.

The Outrage Over Crash or this year about, you know, the snubs for Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie for Barbie.

Like, we're all discussing this because we all have opinions about the movies we've seen.

I can't believe people think Barbie isn't complex.

You try playing a fucking doll.

I mean, I was personally outraged about May December.

Did you see that?

I did, yeah.

Did they, I, what were the nominations, though?

What are you outraged about?

We got one for the screenplay.

None of the actors didn't get best director, didn't get best screenplay.

It was my favorite thing of the year, and I was outraged.

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

I know,

for showing up, but especially doing that.

I mean, to get into Oscars history a little bit, my understanding is that this started off as a, as most things do, I guess, as a relatively small affair where, you know, you just kind of had dinner and passed out some statues.

Is that correct?

Yeah, 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, you know, awards were not the reason why the Academy was founded.

It was really sort of intended as a league of nations for Hollywood.

And there was a whole union busting side of that.

And, you know, they were trying to put a loftier face on the industry because there were all these salacious, kind of tinsel town sex, drugs, and murder scandals that gave Hollywood a really bad image problem.

They're like, no queers here.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah.

So, you know, the Academy had a lot of different purposes, but awards were kind of down on a list of ideas that they, 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.

You know, there were like speeches and other Academy business.

And at the very end of this banquet, they handed out the awards in like 15 minutes.

And then there was dancing.

So it really wasn't the show that it became over the many decades.

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 like, oh, that's not that big of a deal when you put it that way.

But

we need to make it an occasion.

You know, what else is there?

So yeah, there's a kind of regalia to it.

You know, it's not unlike sort of the royal family and 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.

Which is, you know, if someone gets up on stage and slaps someone.

Yeah.

Or if, you know, Harvey Weinstein mounts some, like, really aggressive campaign and gets everyone to vote for Shakespeare and Love and people are outraged.

I mean, or, you know, in the 50s when people were on the blacklist and winning screenplay awards under fake names.

Or someone running naked across the stage, perhaps.

Perhaps.

Yeah.

And so this is where we get into the Oscar streaker.

And I'm so excited for this because this, we get to do another episode that takes place in the 1970s battle of the sexes land so uh sarah what do you know about the oscar streaker and um i'm curious if you have any associations with sort of streaking in general as a as a fad

so The mental image I have, and I suspect many listeners had when he 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, like, my understanding is that streaking was some kind of fad in the 70s.

And I think this probably came up for me first.

The more 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 Loved the 70s or something like that.

And so my understanding is that streaking was a kind of a fad, maybe at like baseball games like Homer did or at 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 kind of like 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 like a clever quip and that it's like a chapter in the 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.

You love that dry British wit.

I do, yeah.

And he, I mean, 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.

That's good.

Yes.

Well, I mean, let's start with what he actually said when the streaker ran by.

Yeah.

So this was April 2nd, 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.

So he was introducing Elizabeth Taylor to hand out the award for best picture, which was going to be the sting.

Oh, wow.

So it's the big ticket item.

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 like kind of nervous jitters in the crowd.

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

Yes, that is what streaking is.

You are indeed naked.

That's really the whole point, artistically.

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.

Throw on some Marvin Hamlish.

Exactly.

Niven says two things.

First of all, he says, well, ladies and gentlemen, that was the most 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 kind of it.

It was just a couple seconds long.

The whole evening could get very derailed, and you have to kind of soothe them with a joke.

And that,

you know, it feels more about your ability to kind of announce that you're still in control of the moment as the person on stage.

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.

That's the name of Daddy's magazine.

This was a year after Marlon Brando sent Sashine Littlefeather famously to decline his award for The Godfather, which was another sort of mind-bending Oscar moment.

Yeah.

And so the idea that like something would go not not awry, but like something unusual would happen was, you know, we were kind of deep in that moment in culture where the Oscars were just, it's kind of 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, you know, 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 like those big Oscars that they have in the press room.

And he starts answering questions.

And he identifies himself as Robert Opal.

And when he says that he works in advertising, that he is 33.

I like how he's like, don't worry, I work in advertising.

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.

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 LA kind of a moment deep in my heart.

Right.

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.

You know, there's a, you know, an immediate thing is a false flag theory that, yeah, like he's a plant for ratings.

And how had David Nimmen come up with that brilliant line so fast?

And,

you know, people start speculating, as they did with the slap.

Like, was this all staged?

And, you know, and I had that thought.

And I think that, like, we're putting

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 because, you know, especially in the past few years, people are more on edge.

But it's fun to have a conspiracy theory.

But there was another theory that there was a possibility that someone might streak the Oseros because streaking was happened so much that they had pre-written a line in case it did happen and

written it on what was called an idiot card that someone could,

you know, 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 like 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 like how streaking streaking actually became a thing.

Yeah, I can't begin to guess.

Yeah, it turns out it was an extremely limited fad that lasted no more than like six months.

And in fact, the first big streak was about four months before the Oscars.

A housewife in Van Nuys had run through the 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.

Wow.

And then it grew.

You know, someone streaked a basketball game at the University of Florida versus University of Alabama.

So it's kind of like a meme, like

planking, which I realize is a very recent reference.

Yeah, I mean, it just kind of caught on.

And then people started getting more creative with it.

Like, you know, a guy in boots and a ski mask streaked through the Michigan House of Representatives.

People were doing it on bicycles or they were doing it in parachutes.

And, you know, one big one was that the University of Georgia, 1,543 people streaked across campus at once.

And

Time magazine started reporting on kind of 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 kind of thought it could happen.

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, well, of course there'll be some kind of crossover.

And are there like, like in the coverage of it, are people trying to figure out the meaning of this?

And are the youths essentially like, we eat what we like?

Like, what's that like?

Yeah, absolutely.

There were some interesting theories.

I mean, one is that, you know, it's a sort of outgrowth of like the sexual revolution.

It's, you know, it's an attack on, you know, proper social mores.

People thought maybe it was a kind of release valve from, you know, Watergate, inflation, Vietnam.

It's in a way, a kind of like, a weird mirror of Vietnam because it's sort of disruptive.

It's, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's like guerrilla warfare where no one gets killed.

It's sort of the joyous version of that.

Oh, wow.

Um, and then, of course, it was, you know, college campuses and became a kind of locus for streaking.

You know, what else are college kids gonna do?

Right, it just makes sense as the kind of thing that would spread, because seeing the kinds of trends that go around now, it feels pretty intuitive.

And was this associated with the youth?

Yeah, I mean, it became just a kind of baby boomer thing.

I don't know.

I mean I imagine this is this is like deep in the era of Vietnam protests.

I just imagine that you know people were used to going out and being in groups and you know going to concerts and doing stuff in crowds together that you know outside.

And like you said, it was a meme.

It just kind of caught on.

Yeah.

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

It is.

And now this man, Robert Opal, has become kind of 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 Opal after the streak.

Yeah.

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.

Like he had these 15 minutes of fame, but you know, the way it was reported was sort of like here's this crazy thing that happened you know here's like what pam greer had to say about it when she was backstage and you know david niven coming up with the perfect line what wasn't covered and i imagine today there would be a lot more coverage of you know this guy and who he was and where he came from and why he was doing this We would fall in and out of love with him within 36 hours and then he would get a supplement sponsorship.

Oh, he would absolutely be milkshake ducked today.

Yeah.

Well, 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 Opal, and his photographs were, you know, like a hitchhiker in very snug bell bottoms, you know, shot from, you know, like a great view of his butt, or like a hippie lounging naked under the Hollywood sign.

He was outrageous.

He was an outrageous sort of 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 Opal 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, I'm going to 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 became,

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 So he was trying to reinvent himself.

And in 1966, he became a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, who was running for governor.

Wow.

Well, that would be a great challenge because he was totally unqualified.

So, of course, this is the, you know, 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 own.

I remember this.

Yeah, from my Reagan research, this like was

a fairly major scandal for him, right?

Yeah, and one of the results is that Robert Opal got fired.

Jesus.

And also like, didn't,

I'm just like, this is something I read like a year ago, but I am under the impression that like part of this was because Nancy was lifelong friends with various gay men who dressed her and made made her seem like she had a personality.

You know, she didn't love them enough to address AIDS in any way, obviously.

But Truman Capote, like, visited the California legislature or something when Reagan was governor, and that there was, because of his Hollywood-ness, 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 Reagan 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.

No, ask Rock Hudson.

Didn't work out that way.

So Robert Opal is no longer on the straight and arrow.

Somehow between the 1966 Reagan campaign and the streak, he completely became a different person.

You know, this was the era of the Stonewall riots, and he became this kind of hippie prankster, you know, like 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 LA 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.

The news travels immediately.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, he identified himself, and that was the end of his education career.

But now he was famous, so yay.

And he said, like, it's a great way to start a career, right, in the press room.

So, what is he trying to start?

Okay, so here's how Robert Opal spent his 15 minutes of fame.

He went on the Mike Douglas show and he sat next to B.

Arthur.

I was going to guess that.

I can't believe it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a great clip of B.

Arthur being like, oh, you know, everyone thinks you did it on purpose.

And he was like, no, no, 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 Opal streak this party for Rudolf Nureev.

Oh, my God.

He did a stand-up show in Philadelphia at a place called Cafe Erlinger.

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.

And that's 1974 for you.

Okay, so then a couple of months, like three months after the Oscars, Robert Opal did a second streak.

Okay, so there was 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 like 400 people in the council chamber, and

in comes Robert Opal, the Oscar streaker,

in a jumpsuit.

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.

Oh.

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 Opal didn't come there to make love to the city councilman.

Nice.

In his testimony on the witness stand, Opal 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.

Wow.

God.

This is just making me think about kind of

what nudity means in this context.

And it does feel like such a sort of gentle, spoofy way to protest in a time of such serious problems.

I don't know.

This feels like a message from the establishment kind of saying that no matter what kind of protest you engage in, we'll respond the same way.

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 uh 15 minutes right after the nixon resignation robert opal announces his candidacy for president of the united states oh nice you know i'd vote for him

his platform is complete disclosure

and his campaign slogan was not just another crooked dick

and you and you know because you can see it so you know it's that really is about transparency.

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.

Aw, I really like the pterodactyl part.

I mean, these are all reasonable points, I really think, so far.

I mean, he's having fun.

He's good at getting attention.

He's sort of 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 like real couples would send in like stories about their sex lives and like photos and stuff.

So it was kind of 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 Opal's manifesto of nudity.

And I'm going to send you part of it to read.

Oh my gosh.

Okay.

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.

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

I mean, how do you connect this to the basic premise of

believing in gay rights on any level at this time, which it feels like, you know, are even more radical than any kind of manifesto about taking your clothes off.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing.

This was the era of 70s gay liberation post-Sonewall.

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, you know, separate from.

heteronormative society or should you try to kind of assimilate and just blend in and be, you know, quote unquote, normal?

And Opal 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 kind of like Mr.

Peanut, but a big penis.

And he had like a big costume he would wear.

That year at the Christopher Street West Parade, which was the...

the LA Pride parade, he was warned not to show up as Mr.

Penis, but he did anyway.

Yeah, so he showed up.

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 of the parade, and he was handcuffed and jailed for three hours.

So he was like really in your face.

He was pushing the envelope even more than the kind of establishment LA gay community necessarily wanted him to.

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

Yeah, exactly.

You know, and LA at the time, you know, this homophobic police chief, Ed Davis, was running things, and it was not without physical risk to really get in people's faces and, you know, push buttons like that and be sort of publicly.

lewd and outrageous.

And this is going to be an important quality of Opals 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, like on Halloween that year, he did a cover story on the cycle sluts.

Is that a specific group?

It is.

And they're sluts on cycles.

Okay,

I like it when it's self-explanatory.

But Drummer was under real duress because of Police Chief Davis.

They had a charity event, which was an SM slave auction.

And Police Chief Davis actually tried to prosecute the publisher on charges of slavery.

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

Exactly.

So

Drummer was kind of getting pushed out of town.

Opal was kind of 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.

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

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.

Wow.

The place he went and settled himself was actually not the Castro.

He went to the south of Market, Soma, and that was kind of the center of the leather community.

And he opened up a storefront art gallery called Fei Way,

which was kind of a pawn on Faye, like Limperist Gay, and also a pawn on Faye Ray, the star of King Kong.

I love that.

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.

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 Patty 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.

Well, all of that sort of, you know, being persecuted by the government for his obscenity was in Robert Mapplethorpe's future.

He was just a kind of little-known photographer from New York City who got, you know, this was one of his first showings in California at all.

And what is his work like for people who haven't experienced it?

I mean, I think the classic images are just like these beautiful black and white photos of male bodies.

Yeah.

You know, and much like Robert Opal, they sort of, they celebrated nudity and they celebrated celebrated male, gay male sexuality.

So it's not unsurprising that they found each other.

But the person who linked them up is actually the editor of Drummer Magazine, whose name is Jack Fritcher.

He's wonderful.

He is like in his 80s now, and I talk to him a lot because he's like a former SM, like gay leather man who is just now just an old gentleman who like loves talking the dirtiest possible way.

One of the reasons that Opal moved up to San Francisco, he told me that Opal reminded him of a sybaritic pan.

And at the time, he was dating Robert Mapplethorpe.

Do you find yourself thinking kind of 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, you know, the period when there was sort of freedom and safety to be a promiscuous gay man in San Francisco, it's a period of like just a handful of years, just like 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.

Yeah, I mean, I think in retrospect, because of AIDS coming right after this in the 80s,

it's sort of thought thought as this sort of Eden, like this horny Eden,

and

from which like 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.

Because of course, because I'm doing that right now, you know, I'm like, what there was a moment when things were okay.

And it's like, come on, were they?

Are things, could things have possibly been okay of course not no of course not and so this was an era when the San Francisco Police Department was rounding people up and like beating them with nightsticks in the park and you know raiding bars yeah 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 you know doing her anti-gay crusade and and it was out of this this conflict that Harvey Milk emerged as a major political figure.

And that was really happening at the same time.

You know, one thing that interested me is how Harvey Milk and Robert Opal kind of were these mirror images of each other.

You know, they were both people who started out in a kind of conservative milieu.

Milk actually campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964, around when, you know, Opal was working for Ronald Reagan.

They both kind of became radicalized in the 60s, and they both came to San Francisco.

They both had storefront businesses.

Opal had his studio, Faye 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 Opal 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.

It's like,

what is the messaging here?

What are we trying to say about the candidate?

Exactly.

Harvey Milk, he'll pierce your nipples.

Well, anyway, shortly after this, Harvey Milk, of course, was elected.

He 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 Opal.

But the Briggs Initiative happens, which is a proposition.

that would ban gays and lesbians from teaching in schools.

This was something that really got under Opal's skin as someone who had himself been, you know, 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 and the Castro till 4 a.m.

And then 11 days later was Jonestown.

And Jonestown was, had been based in, you know, the People's Temple in San Francisco.

Of course, the Jonestown was in Guyana, but you know, it was something that really hit hard hard in San Francisco because a lot of people were just 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.

What was his position?

He was in government too.

Yeah, he was one, he was elected at the same

election as Harvey Milk to the board of supervisors.

And, you know, I guess we don't need to go into all of the nitty-gritty of why Dan White murdered these two people.

He was a former cop.

He

was very sort of clean-cut looking and conservative and extremely homophobic.

You know, there was, he had sort of lost his job and then been promised his job.

He kind of,

you know, quote unquote snapped and snuck into City Hall with a gun and shot them.

And it was Diane Feinstein, one of their other colleagues, who had to break the news to the public and the press that the murderer was, 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.

In what way?

You hear the gasps.

I mean, you hear

just the absolute gasps of disbelief.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

And the guy who killed them was not some rando.

It was like another

elected official.

Yeah.

And I, I mean, and Jonestown is something that it's, I think it has been tricky to absorb in any real way in the past 45 years or so.

And so the idea of, I think if these two tragedies were to follow each other so closely, it really would create a feeling of, you know, God, what next?

Maybe it'll just be an endless string of these.

Maybe no one will ever be safe again.

Yeah.

And it really galvanized Robert Opal as well.

So he, you know, a lot of people had a lot of different, you know, conspiracy theories about how this had possibly happened.

And he was telling friends that he was collecting,

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 kind of 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 Opal got a girlfriend.

Wow.

So, her name is Camille O'Grady.

She was like a punk rocker from New York City.

She had actually been a lover of Robert Maplethorpe'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 Patty Smith because she said her band, Leather Secrets, played at CBGB before Patty Smith did.

Ah, Leather Secrets.

And Patty Smith was apparently very possessive of Robert Maplethorpe, so she didn't like Camilo Grady and said, Oh, there's only room in this town for the two of us.

We did check with Patty Smith when I was writing this with a New Yorker, and Patty was like,

kind of gave me a Mariah Carey, like, I don't know her response.

It's also just thrilling to think about having to contact Patty 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?

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

But that's what you get for being culturally relevant.

Another fun fact about Camille O'Grady is that she was also really into the leather scene and she had a leatherman alter ego.

She had a drag alter ego named Jack Savage, who was like her Leatherman persona.

That's fantastic.

And she would dress up as him and like sneak into leather bars in New York City.

Wow.

So she moved to San Francisco in late 1978, and Mabelthorpe told her to look up Robert Opal.

And she goes to Fayway Gallery, and they had like a four-hour mind-melt where they were just made for each other.

They became lovers.

He invited her to perform at the gallery on New Year's, and she almost immediately moved in because this gallery had like like a back, like a living space in the back, like a little apartment.

And so, Camille and Robert were suddenly kind of playing house there together, and they were a couple.

Um, 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.

Hmm.

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.

The 70s do sound fun.

Yeah, and part of how he got his footage was he was interviewing John Waters and Devine, who, when they passed through town.

Yeah, he's kind of like Forrest Gump, actually.

I think in many ways.

However, he was also selling PCP.

I guess Forrest Gump didn't do that.

So on one level, like, you know, Opal has big plans.

On another level, he's, you know, starting to associate with some unsavory types.

One of them was this guy named Dana Chalman, who was selling him Quailudes.

Camille hated Dana Chalman.

She found him just really oogy and kind of,

he seemed dangerous.

She was getting worried about Opal because

he was like going on these drugged out frenzies where he'd 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 kind of a throwback to the streaking, streaking, but a little darker this time.

Yeah.

And he's kind of starting to lose it.

And on top of this, in May 1979, was the Dan White verdict.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

Yes.

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.

Yeah, there's a great maintenance phase about it.

But

I would love for you to talk about it.

I mean, 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, you know, murder.

So his defense was diminished capacity, meaning that his lawyers argued that he was suffering some severe depression and basically just kind of 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 is some evidence it can, you know, that 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, you know, he got this, you know, basically slap on the wrist.

That, you know, if you're a, you know, 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.

I mean, it feels like what really happened is actually more egregious in a way, right?

Because if there was some kind of like red 40 defense or something, we were saying, well, you know, if you eat too many Twinkies, sometimes you just, you know, you just snap.

Then that would be ridiculous, but it seems actually less dehumanizing than saying, well, we can see by his Twinkie consumption that that's kind of evidence that he was depressed.

And when you're depressed, sometimes you kill a gay person.

It's not that big of a deal.

And, you know, really what happened was that the jury was.

extremely conservative.

You know, some of the jurors were openly weeping when Dan White gave his testimony.

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.

I cannot believe you said that because that is exactly how Robert Opal felt.

No, we're really, we're vibing.

I'd be his girlfriend.

So Opal was, like everyone, absolutely enraged.

You know, this verdict was met with rioting.

It was called the White Knight Riots, very famous, you know, gay uprising.

You know, police came into the Castro and smashed up bars and

people.

Opal was incensed and he was not just that, but he was really activated by it.

He was angry.

So Diane 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 like leather and a Nazi emblem and starts shouting at Feinstein that he wants to, like, 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, like a piece of performance art called The Execution of Dan White.

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

No, no, no, no.

There was no way this was going to work.

It was, 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?

ex-cop, would he get away with murder?

This trial, this result, beyond the Twinkies, it sort of 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 found, they had a friend who looked exactly like Dan White.

And that was part of this too.

He started writing to diane feinstein saying that you know he would love her help in this in this show trial that would attract worldwide media attention and be a great cathartic event presumably she did not respond to this invitation

um the people who were in charge of the parade started warning him like please don't do this please don't do this but he uh insisted that he would do it and so uh on the day of this pride parade uh he came in on his handmade float and uh they stopped at united nations plaza Opal 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.

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 kinds of protests and one of the kind that makes the most sense to me is this kind of, you know, 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.

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

Yeah.

We're now going to go to two weeks later, July 8th, 1979, and we're going to talk about the death of Robert Opal.

That night, Camilla Grady was at a club with a friend of theirs called Anthony Rogers, who went by the nickname Harmodious.

And she had a bad feeling and she said,

Anthony, we've got to get back to the house.

9 p.m., they were back at Fay Way

with Robert Opal, 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.

Opal 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 Opal 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 Opal, he doesn't really know when to stop himself.

Yeah, he's kind of 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.

Yeah.

So he starts snarling back at these guys.

I want you out of my space.

Get out.

Camille and Harmodius are back in the kitchen.

They hear a shot, like a warning shot.

They hear a second shot.

And Opal 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 Harmonius.

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 like,

this might be connected to something else.

But they untie themselves from the telephone cord and they go out and they see that Opal is on the floor bleeding he's been shot above his eye and he is pronounced dead at 1040 at San Francisco General Hospital man

yeah and how old is he 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 militants slain in

porn art gallery.

Okay,

settle down.

And then the Los Angeles Times said, you know, the Oscar streaker has been killed.

And they said he owned a sex paraphernalia shop.

Like, everyone just got it kind of wrong.

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

Right, right.

Like, you know, he was part of this seedy underbelly of this and that.

And like, of course, this happened.

Yeah.

You know, you know what?

You just, you get too liberated and it leads to murder.

And that's the story we'll sell.

Now, that was kind of 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 like, okay, this is too weird.

You know, he had just done this really provocative performance art piece two weeks before about Dan White.

We know that the, you know, 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.

You know, and she thought back to that thing that the gunman had said to her.

you know, you will be killed.

Yeah.

So she started to think this had to be connected to something bigger.

Like he, you know, this wasn't just a random drug stick up.

Like this was, this was like, what if the, what if the police are in on it too?

What if, 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 had come to town.

And they saw this box of evidence that was labeled homicide.

And after they saw that, Dana Chalman, 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 like sold them bad drugs and blamed it on Opal.

So she's starting to think,

are you connected to the cops?

Like, what's going on here?

Also, the two guys were arrested at the airport, but then like the next day, Maurice Keenan, who was the guy who shot Opal, just walked out of his cell and left.

And they, like, found him in Miami and brought him back.

But, you know, so no matter what's going on, there's this unspoken conspiracy to not take Robert Opal's murder all that seriously on the part of the cops, it seems like.

Yeah, and in fact, the main detective on the case was someone who was involved in like cops for Christ.

You know, 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 know, you'll be killed.

And then

because her address was also the murder site, like the scene of the crime, the gallery, it appears in the papers and she has to flee.

Oh, God.

And so she's going, she's like 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, you know, people taking pictures.

And remember, I said earlier that she had this drag

called her ego, Jack Savage, the leather man.

Jack Savage to the rescue.

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

I love her.

Very sadly, I, you know, I spent two days with Camille when I was researching this story in 2019,

and she was a real like old punk.

Like, 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 was, you know, he passed away years and years ago from

AIDS in like the early 90s.

Yeah, there is, there's so much history dying with people every day,

which is just a side note that if you if you want to talk to people and record history you should because we always need more yeah and I feel really lucky that I got to hear her tell this story so Maurice Keenan was tried for the murder of Robert Opal the trial was in 1982 he showed it to proceedings like completely high on LSD that had been smuggled to him in jail god bless his wife Linda who was into black magic she had driven the getaway car car and she would show up in court and try to cast spells on the jurors, like cast hexes.

You know, I mean, it's one of the only constructive things you can do, I guess, in that position.

There were all these stories about how he and his wife Linda had sort of egged each other on.

They were kind of this like crazy, druggie Bonnie and Clyde couple that just sort of brought out the worst in people.

She had these mob connections in Florida and was doing her black magic.

You know, 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, you know, this guy actually just wanted money for drugs and was out of his mind on speed.

I mean, 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.

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, well, 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 he had like, there was this one older woman who had been the holdout in the death penalty and the gay juror kind of 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 like in a, in a set 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 Opal had asked in this, you know, fateful piece of performance art at the Gay Pride Parade about Dan White and Harvey Milk.

Yeah, yeah, there's something very haunting about an artist's work in a way anticipating their death and in a way that doesn't, you know, 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 I also, you know, 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 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 sort of 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 sort of because it's Tuesday.

You're targeting gay people as a cop because it's your job and because you like it, probably.

So I want to close out his story by sending you another thing to read.

This was a personal statement that Robert Opal made and after his death it was printed in Drummer, the Leather magazine, alongside a picture of Opal holding a skull, kind of Hamlet style.

Beautiful.

I am Robert Opal.

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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So how do we feel about this guy, the streaker?

I love him.

And I feel that.

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 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 uh 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 that

a line worthy of David Niven.

Well said.

Yeah.

And, you know, in terms of Oscar history, this is just not how this moment is remembered.

It's sort of like this kind of kitschy 70s weird thing that happened.

But but Jack Fritcher, the guy from Drummer, 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.

Ah, that's so true.

We got a hat.

Let's, no more slapping.

Let's bring back the streaking.

Make love, not war.

Undress.

Undress.

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 in 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.