Hello friends and fans of Todd Trexler. As you probably know, Todd passed away just a few years ago. As you can imagine, those who knew him, had to take some time to themselves. Now it’s finally come time to rebuild and carry on.
Todd came to my design shop (Pixels Graphic Design) in 2012 with the desire to share his work. After spending many years taking care of others as a nurse, Todd felt in his retirement, that he should return to his true love. Art! Todd wanted to have his first web site built with all of his, still attainable, art to be shown and available for reproductions. This turned out to be a long process. Todd’s work was scattered across museums and private collections. After months of letters, emails, and phone calls, one by one the originals came home to their creator.
I digitized (scanned, photographed, ect) each of his originals. We repaired the blemishes and removed aging. Then Todd chose paper, colors, and sizes that he felt best represented his works. The original ToddTrexlerPosters site was built over the next month or so, until everything was just the way Todd wanted.
I worked with Todd personally every time he came in to visit or to update something. Over the next 2 years, we made small but steady improvements to the web site and reproductions. We added greeting cards about a year after launch which were well received. Yet there was still more to do.
Sadly, we never got to finish his ideas. Apparently, I was the last person to see or speak with Todd. We met on a Friday to discuss his latest projects. Including t-shirts from his NEW original art. The plan was for me to prep the demo over the weekend and we would meet back up on Monday to get all of his new art printed in prototype form. Instead, I received a phone call letting me know that he had passed away over the weekend! I was shocked and so was my staff. He was just in my shop, full of new creative energy!
The final request of his estate was that we do our best to continue this web site. And if possible, use the proceeds from sales to maintain and carry-on a sort of Legacy of Todd Trexler’s art. However, without the dedication Todd put behind his art, progress halted and all we could manage was to continue to pay to keep this site active. I felt this was less than what should be done. From our many discussions about his art, I felt and knew that Todd would want to finish adding his new ideas and art to the site.
Here we are now. A new year. A few dozen/s of hours to available at the moment… to rebuild! I hope you enjoy the new site and watch out for some new ways to share the art of Todd Trexler as they get added.
Kevin Smith
Owner/Designer
Pixels Graphic Design
Monterey, California
PS. I do have one new original sketch in progress, safely stashed away, that has yet to be shown anywhere! This is the art Todd left with me to digitize “that” weekend. Perhaps his last piece. We’ll try to figure out something special for it.
MONTEREY – Todd Trexler, poster artist, AIDS nurse, and legendary bon vivant, died February 9, 2014 at the age of 70 from natural causes. Todd’s work came to define a period in gay pop culture. Todd opened perhaps the first gay business on Castro Street in San Francisco. He was an exceptional artist who illuminated the lives of all who knew him.
He held a Masters in Art and a Masters of Science in Nursing. His MSN thesis was written on homophobia in nursing. He worked 30 years at Community Hospital where he contributed to the well being of many.
Todd’s gratitude list included Joseph Zaccarella;
Nelson; his dog, Jack; and his friends in the fellowship.
Memorial Services will be held at St. James Church, Monterey, on March 15, 2014 at 1:00 p.m. A Reception will follow.
As the daily headlines show, this year has been a momentous period for the LGBT community. But every breakthrough is built upon that which came before, and one man who was both a witness and, in his own inspired way, a contributor to our history is artist Todd Trexler.
Trexler’s work came to define a period in gay pop culture after the Stonewall riots of 1969 — particularly within the San Francisco region. As he saw history unfold, he worked with a plethora of famous individuals.
A native of San Mateo, Calif., a small town on the San Francisco peninsula, this visual craftsman said his interest in art was ignited back in high school.
“In biology class, we had to draw plants — and I was good at it,” he recollected. “So you could say the seed was first planted there.”
On weekends, Trexler would travel into San Francisco to work downtown.
“I loved the city from the start and moved there at age 19 as an undergraduate at San Francisco State,” he said, adding that not long after, in 1965, he took up permanent residence in the city’s renowned Castro neighborhood — just as it was becoming the center of a vibrant counterculture movement.
Trexler even opened perhaps the first gay business on Castro Street, called the Peaches Dream Galleries, in 1969. He was determined, he said, “to dedicate my art to the expression of post-Stonewall gay life in San Francisco during the ’60s and ’70s.”
During this time, the designer, who also holds a master’s degree in sculpture, began displaying his imaginative renderings at the Upper Market Street Gallery, one of the most progressive art salons in the Bay area. He went on to design posters for their edgy exhibitions and events.
Trexler was soon to succeed beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings. He met Milton Miron, an associate of legendary rock promoter Bill Graham, who called himself “Sebastian.” A cinema enthusiast, Miron had begun holding midnight screenings of old movies every weekend that soon gained popularity as “The Nocturnal Dream Shows.”
“Having secured the use of the Palace Theater in the North Beach section of the city every Friday and Saturday at 12 o’clock, Sebastian’s plan was to show some of his favorite little-known and often bizarre films,” Trexler said. The audiences for these shows, he said, were “a mix of beatniks, hippies, intellectuals and gays.”
To advertise each month’s selections, Sebastian asked Trexler to craft catchy, yet inexpensive handbills for which he’d be paid with bags of weed.
“My line drawings then were influenced by Aubrey Beardsley [an English illustrator”> and the Art Deco style of the ’30s,” explained Trexler. Although the style was simple, their unique vintage appeal did indeed help bring in crowds. As time passed and the success of the shows increased, his posters evolved from pen-and-ink sketches on white paper to lush multicolored images, incorporating illustrations and photos.
Sebastian also worked with a local producer-director named Steven Arnold, who had made a movie that featured a group of hippie drag queens.
“Their drag was a huge departure from traditional drag, where men attempted to look like real women,” Trexler said. “They had beards and extreme makeup and wore imaginative costumes that were more surreal.”
The group members called themselves The Cockettes, and from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, this pan-sexual drag troupe regularly performed outrageous parodies of the movies being seen after-hours. Eventually, they started writing and enacting their own original musicals (likewise borrowing from arcane and often quirky films), ultimately gaining a substantial cult following for their efforts.
Along the way, Trexler’s posters promoting it all were themselves developing a life of their own and could be found decorating the walls of free spirits, flower children, trendsetters and gay men alike throughout and beyond the city by the Bay.
The late-night extravaganzas even caught the attention of a Baltimore-based underground filmmaker by the name of John Waters. In fact, Waters was so impressed by the group that he introduced them to his “star”– a 300-pound cross-dressing force of nature named Lady Divine, who joined them to “strut her stuff before the footlights” on several occasions.
Moreover, Divine’s San Francisco appearances provided a terrific opportunity for Trexler to take his design talents to a whole new level.
“Working with Divine was memorable for sure!” he said. “And that gorgeous Vice Palace poster is one of my all-time favorites.”
The sultry black-and-white image promoted the Cockettes’ last musical, a 1972 stage spectacle that was based on Edgar Allen Poe’s classic “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which Divine portrayed Signora Divina.
“The day that we took the photos for the Vice Palace poster, we drove around San Francisco trying to find a good backdrop, and we ended up at the Palace of Fine Arts,” Trexler said. “Divine was in makeup and wearing bib overalls with the sides split to accommodate her impressive size. When she got out of the car, she took a couple of net prom dresses and just wrapped them around herself as I shot pictures.”
Another member of the group who went on to success was a soon-to-be disco diva named Sylvester– who is best remembered for one of the 1970s major dance hits, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” Many of Sylvester’s concert posters were also created by Trexler, and on occasion, he even accompanied the recording superstar and his group, The Hot Band, on tour. He fondly recalled several gigs in the Midwest.
“The concert in Detroit was spectacular, and the audience went wild,” Trexler said. “Then he played Dayton, Ohio, on Saturday night.”
The following morning, Trexler and “Baron” Michael Miller (co-owner of the Upper Market Street Gallery, who had also gone along) went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, leaving Sylvester to sleep in.
“The restaurant was filled with conservative-looking people, all dressed up, who had come there after church services,” he remembers. “So we ordered and tried not to attract attention. Suddenly, Sylvester appeared in a long woman’s chenille bathrobe, making his way to our table, singing “Good morning, girls!”
Leaving the Golden State for a time during the ’80s and ’90s, the man whose talents captured such magical bygone times turned his attentions to serving a more pressing need by becoming an HIV/AIDS educator and activist. But given the interest from younger members of the LGBT community, he feels the time has come to turn his attention back to his emblematic artwork.
“I love how young GLBTs have embraced their heritage of artists like Sylvester, Divine, and the Cockettes,” he said with a smile. “When I returned to California, I was contacted by author Strange de Jim regarding his wonderful book San Francisco’s Castro, and it was then I started thinking about my life in the city and my posters.”
Upon donating a collection to the GLBT Historical Association of Northern California, he considered publishing an art book himself, but later decided that a website could reach many more people.
“Finally I decided on a website where the posters could not only be viewed, but where reproductions could be made available,” Trexler said. “So I’m centered on the resurrection of my San Francisco poster art through this website.”
Now these eclectic and historic masterpieces of gay pop culture can be anyone’s. For more information or to order copies, check out toddtrexlerposters.com.
Divinely iconic: From Todd Trexler’s poster for “Divine Saves the World,” 1973
SUPER EGO One of my supreme happy places, apparently, turned out to be the packed dancefloor of an underground fundraiser for Radical Faerie Burning Man camp Comfort and Joy, right around 3am a couple Fridays ago, when the drag queen DJ dropped “Rock the Casbah” and some behooded elfin rogue’s giant LED rainbow wings lit up and blinded me. Joe Strummer smiles from heaven, surely.
Alas, that drag queen, mi amiga grande Ambrosia Salad, will soon join the current nightlife exodus to Los Angeles, to follow her twinkling star (and cheaper rent) along the path to immortality — or at least an all-night churro cart. Can we get one here please thanks. But just when I despair of the city emptying of its precious idiosyncracies and after-dark characters, someone amazing pops up to charm the hotpants off of me and remind me of both San Francisco’s resilient weirdness and its cyclical subcultural nature.
“Oh, I moved out of the Castro when the drones moved in. Everyone started wanting to look the same, dress the same. It really took the fun out of the gay scene, these marching costumes coming in and stamping out the magic.” That’s twinkle-toned Todd Trexler, poster artist, AIDS nurse, and legendary bon vivant, speaking over the phone — not about about the samey-samey Wienerville the Castro has become, but the Castro clones of the mid-1970s. For all the renewed interest in the workboots, cut-offs, and mustaches of pre-AIDS SF gay culture (see local director Travis Mathews’ exciting, upcoming, James Franco-starring Interior. Leather Bar, which imagines the lost orgy footage from classic homoerotic/gay panic slasher flick Cruising and wowed ’em at Sundance last week), it’s good to remember there were also some fabulous butterfly dissenters to that macho wannabe world.
Divine in Vice Palace – poster by T. Trexler
Trexler was a player in one of the seminal moments of alternative gay culture — after snagging an art degree from SF State, he designed the posters for the queer-raucous, acid-kaleidoscopic performance troupe The Cockettes’ first official shows, as well as the Midnight Movie series, later the Nocturnal Dream Shows at the Palace Theater in North Beach in the early ’70s, back when North Beach was a magnet for free-lovin’ freaks and nightlife oddities. (See, anything can happen). Now, he’s reprinted many of those iconic and visually stunning “Art Deco revival meets Aubrey Beardsley louche meets underground comics perversion” ink-and-photo masterpieces for surprisingly affordable purchase at www.toddtrexlerposters.com.
Divine in her iconic, kooky crinoline (“Basically she just threw on a bunch of stuff from the trunk of our car and voila, Divine!”) outside the Palace of Fine Arts for the “Vice Palace” play and, later, starring in Multiple Maniacs and “The Heartbreak of Psoriasis”; Sylvester looking his sultry best for a New Year’s Eve concert, and featured on a controversially explicit piece for decidedly hetero rock outfit the Finchley Boys; Tower of Power, Zazie dans le Metro, Mink Stole as Nancy Drew, the Waterfront gay bar — Trexler’s platinum stash of memorabilia will reinvigorate anyone zoinked out by our increasingly conformist, consumerist moment. (Trexler was prodded into reprinting by my favorite classic SF eccentric, Strange de Jim.)
Mondays – Fridays, 11:30am & 10:30pm and Saturdays & Sundays at 10:30pm on Comcast Hometown Network Channel 104 in Northern California.
Episode # 172
Monday — Friday, January 7 – 11, 11:30 am & 10:30pm
Saturday & Sunday, January 12 – 13, 10:30pm
David Perry chats with Joe Wolosz, co-owner of Gentleman Farmer Wines. Perry also speaks with Todd Trexler, a poster artist whose iconic works feature such legends as Sylvester and Divine. www.comcasthometown.com
When Todd Trexler arrived in the Castro district in 1965, the neighborhood was a quiet, Irish Catholic enclave with lots of families.
Ten years later, it was the epicenter of San Francisco gay life. Bars like Toad Hall, the Midnight Sun and the Elephant Walk opened their doors. Long-haired men walked hand in hand down the street – dressed in leather, feathers or not much at all – celebrating an unabashed sexuality that obliterated the neighborhood’s former identity.
“I later got blamed for the whole thing,” Trexler, 69, joked recently.
Artist Todd Trexler is making his historic posters available for the first time in 40 years.
BY Diane Anderson-Minshall December 18 2012 4:00 AM ET
If you are old enough to remember these posters for the Nocturnal Dream Shows at the Palace Theatre in San Francisco, it will be a happy (if maybe dizzy from drugs) walk down camp memory lane. If this is your first view of these historic pieces, they are a great record of the most delirious days of post-Stonewall San Francisco nightlife.
