I Would Like to See It: Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (Patreon)

Sometimes the history of outsider sexuality in art feels like sand running through your fingers. You look at Claude Cahun’s slender, starving frame or Greer Lankton’s lovingly bizarre and deformed dolls, at Mapplethorpe’s photos of nude Adonises in ballet flats or Tom of Finland’s muscular leather daddies with their massive cocks and butch pushbroom mustaches, and you can feel their struggle to take shape through art, their simultaneous influence and introspection as they carve out space in a world which actively refuses to reflect them. Watching Sick, Kirby Dick and Bob Flanagan’s documentary about the latter’s life, work, and death, there is a powerful, almost overwhelming sense of just this species of erosion and construction co-occurring. Diagnosed at a young age with cystic fibrosis, Flanagan spent his life publicly pushing his body to its limits through his practice as a masochist and submissive, and the body of work derived from that extreme sensory exploration both on his own and in collaboration with his dominatrix, wife, and creative partner Sheree Rose has the unmistakable feel of heritage, of legacy. For queers and freaks, so often childless, raised in large part by straights, these works of art can be the connective tissue which joins one generation to the next.

Sick is punishingly honest not just in its depictions of Flanagan’s physical struggles and decline but in its two-fisted excavation of the workaday joys, frustrations, and failures of his life. We see him whine. We see him pick fights. We see he and his wife Sheree at their least appealing as they, perhaps attempting to create emotional distance from the increasingly imminent fact of Flanagan’s death, bicker on camera over marijuana use and their increasingly unsatisfying D/s dynamic. Perhaps the film’s most affecting element, though, is its depictions of Flanagan’s relationship to younger people struggling with CF. Summer after summer he works as a counselor at a CF camp, bringing his gallows sense of humor and ready charm to bear on groups of kids struggling to make sense of their own painful and foreshortened lives. His Make-a-Wish Foundation meeting with teenage fan Sarah Doucette is equally tender, though still earthy and grounded, and Sheree’s gentle needling of him to include Sarah in some form of light D/s play feels more familial than sexual.

There is, for the world’s freaks, a sense of having been parented as much or more by one’s idols in the same traditions as by one’s flesh and blood, and Dick and Flanagan seem to understand this. Amid the present moment’s terror at the mere thought of queerness in proximity to children, it’s deeply painful and beautiful to see this fearless connection between a man famous for his deviancy and the young people who look up to him. Perhaps that intimacy with his own death is what connects Flanagan so strongly to the next generation, or what inures him to the world’s criticisms and anxieties. Perhaps it’s merely some quirk of his upbringing and genetics. His recitation of a spoken-word poem in which he lays out possible points of origin for his masochistic tendencies conveys the hopelessness of parsing anything so essential to how one navigates love, sex, and the body. Flanagan’s art is incendiary, Dick’s curation of his difficult, improbable, painful life and work a thing at once hard-edged and shatteringly tender.