Sam Ashby’s “Sanctuary”

Sam Ashby’s film Sanctuary (2024), which forms the centerpiece of this solo exhibition, examines the architectural and psychic remains—and perhaps under-explored potential—of a queer spiritual community founded, in the seventies, by onetime film director Christopher Larkin. When Larkin’s 1974 directorial debut, the gay romantic drama A Very Natural Thing, met a lukewarm critical and audience reception, he reacted in the way gay men throughout history have confronted such disappointments: by packing his bags and fashioning himself a new identity.1 Larkin lived nomadically for much of the remaining decade, sustained by family money and the liberating atmospheres of Fire Island and San Diego, before re-emerging as the sexual guru Peter Christopher Purusha Androgyne Larkin.

The pursuit of all-consuming spiritual ecstasy by means of fisting, and other anally focused activities, formed the basis of his teachings. These were inflected equally by New Age pop psychology and, more improbably (or not), by his experiences as a young Catholic monk. The prophet set forth his doctrine in his book The Divine Androgyne According to Purusha (1981), a remarkable document of then-nascent fetish culture which documents his quest for “cosmic erotic ecstasy in an Androgyne bodyconscious,” seeking extreme sexual pleasure as a method of obliterating received binaries of gender and sexuality. This laid the groundwork for Larkin’s goal of establishing a spiritual community in rural New Mexico, where likeminded souls would live in divine erotic harmony.

Ashby’s previous films have been stylish, unobtrusive excavations of lesser-known gay and queer histories. Screening within a pentagonal structure evocative of Larkin’s own architectural designs for his fisting oasis, and accompanied by photographic prints and posters which heighten the film’s sense of historical vividness, Sanctuary continues and deepens this mode. In richly textured documentary footage shot with filmmaker Mariah Garnett, a cast of subject-collaborators, seemingly speaking mostly from their own homes, expound a range of perspectives on what Purusha has represented for those who seek and have sought sexual liberation beyond its familiarly commodifiable configurations. The film emerges less as a reflection upon a lone historical figure than a speculative study of how the glimmers of utopian potential of Purusha’s project might yet be extracted: a “portrait in absentia” which speaks resolutely in the present tense, as well as in multiple voices.

One subject recounts having his worldview exploded by meeting Purusha (and his Prince Albert piercing) in a hot tub after a conference, while others muse more abstractly on the meanings of Purusha’s work on gender, homemaking, or political freedom. Ron Athey shows up, vamping for the adoring camera. A trans former sex worker speaks of the complex negotiations of penetration and domination in relation to Purusha’s ideas around gender binaries. (While the film loops without credits, or any explicit markers of its beginning or ending, these subjects are all named as collaborators in the accompanying materials.) Purusha’s on-screen presence is mostly via copies of The Divine Androgyne—a neat example of Ashby’s ceding of the film’s perspective to his speakers, who each hold up Purusha’s story to the light of the present day.

Purusha’s cultural status is encapsulated in Mark Thompson’s much-loved 1991 anthology Leatherfolk: “Regarded as a sexual metaphysician ahead of his time by some,” he was “dismissed as a kinky California crazy man by others.”2 The sweetly reverent, even wistful Sanctuary falls into the former camp. But Ashby masterfully avoids the potential pitfalls of such an approach—such as reiterating generations-old clichés about the afterlives of pre-AIDS sexual utopianism, or didactically confronting the knottily “problematic” elements of Purusha’s pre-queer-theory ideas—by grounding the film’s visuals in the environments of its present-day speakers. At its core, the film is an exploration not of the credos by which Purusha lived, but of what he might yet offer to those of us in search of repositories of historical potential to draw from, that might help us navigate the conservatism and complacency of gay culture’s stiflingly liberal present.

Alienated and out of sync with his time, Larkin took his own life in 1988, after two years living with AIDS. Sanctuary’s latter sequences briefly detour into melancholia (“AIDS ruined his business plan and it ruined his theology,” says one subject) before landing on its most indelible image: a kiss between an elderly couple, sitting on their living room couch. It’s the sweetness and innately collectivist ethos of the film’s approach—which mirrors its focus on the communal, liberatory underpinnings of the sexual experimentation it celebrates—that make it such a moving work of intergenerational queer testimony. In the immortal words of one of the film’s subjects: “There are people who recognize destinies but don’t do anything about it. That fucker did it.”