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Armin didn’t become Peter Berlin-he inhabited him like a 24-hour, nonstop character performance, and the appreciation of the artistry was to perceive him, to lock eyes on his form with a mix of shock, scandal, and lust. This uninhibited, highly sexual, and unambiguously queer figure was the stuff of fantasy, a Tom of Finland drawing come to life, a porn film in the flesh, a lean, muscled, stylized European cosmopolitan dandy that seemed to emerge simultaneously from two very different petri dishes of decadence: the palace and the gutter. By the time he was in his late teens, he began cultivating a personality that would lead to his arrival in the street-cruising mecca of San Francisco in the early 1970s, and presto, a public persona like no other was born: Peter Berlin.
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Born Armin Hagen Freiherr von Hoyningen-Huene during the war in German-occupied Poland and raised in Berlin, the future Peter Berlin experimented with clothing, arousal, and exhibitionism from an early age. In the 1970s, Peter Berlin became an object of obsession as big-and as larger-than-life-as Marilyn Monroe or Mae West, making him arguably the first openly and overtly gay sex symbol of the modern age. Illustrations from Tom of Finland Foundation.