11/13/2026/FRIDAY/4:44AM
RICK CASTRO: PDF MAG 2026
@pdf_mag_ editor @lukeabby
ISSUE 2 UNDER THE INFLUENCE
This issue begins with a simple chain: thinking → feeling → acting → being.
We absorb ideas images and narratives every day.These shape how we feel.
Those feelings inform how we act. Over time those actions shape who we become.
Influence operates within this entire process. What influences us? What motivates us?
What moves us in ways we don’t always recognise?
Luke: Hey, Rick.
Rick: Hi. How are you?
Luke: I'm good. I'm here with my 11-year-old Chihuahua.
Rick: What's his name?
Luke: His name's Stinky. Well, his name's Alfie, but he's got multiple names. He's got an armpit fetish.
Rick: How sweet.
Luke: How has LA been treating you?
Rick: Well, I'm from here. Third generation, I know the city very well. I'm not too excited about the people, but I love the city. Today is the local California elections.
Luke: So let me ask you a couple of questions.
Rick: Did you grow up in London?
Luke: I thought I was asking you the questions! I grew up in Kent, in the countryside. It was very suburban and dull, and I needed to leave. I moved to New York and lived there for a while.
Rick: I did too in the '80s. I kept going back and forth, but I had an actual place there for a year or so. So I was bicoastal, like Peter Allen. You're too young to know who that is. He was married to Liza Minnelli for a second, although he was gay. He used to call himself Mr. Bicoastal.
Luke: I loved New York, but then I thought it was time for a change.
Rick: In the '80s, New York was very small, you know, pre-internet, pre-cell phone. Like-minded people always went to the same things, and it was pretty easy to get in. At that time, there wasn't all this hierarchy and restrictions and guest lists. For example, Keith Haring would have a party and people that knew would just go, whether you knew him personally or not. That's how it worked. Everybody went out every night, including me.
Luke: How is your relationship with Berlin? Have you been recently?
Rick: Yeah, I was there. You didn't go to my solo show last year, did you?
Luke: I did not. Shame on me. I didn't know about it.
Rick: I guess we weren't friends online at the time because I post everything. Like clockwork. Unless I'm traveling or something. Daily I post stuff from the past, but whenever something's happening for me, I post it. I have a hard time with censorship. I can't post what I want anymore. They've always fucked with me, but now they really fuck with me. So I have to be careful. For example, I posted some photos I did of Ron Athey back in the '90s for Drummer magazine. Meta removed them and gave me this stern warning.
Luke: Are you coming to Europe anytime soon again?
Rick: My manager and I are organizing it right now, but everything's so chaotic worldwide these days, so plans that were supposed to happen didn't happen. And then we're paranoid here about all the different TSA rules the travel bans with ICE, and it's really fucking everything up. I'm an American citizen, but that doesn't seem to matter anymore.
Luke: What's one of your daily rituals to keep it together?
Rick: I get up early. I get up at 4 or 5 every morning without a clock. I just get up, and the first thing I do is facial tapping.
Luke: Well, that's nice because it gets you into your body, right?
Rick: Yeah, but it's to relieve stress. I walk a lot. When I go out to walk at 5 in the morning. I could be on Hollywood Boulevard. It'll just be me and a couple of homeless people, and there's a little hour window where you feel like you have the entire city to yourself.
Luke: This leads me to my next question. Since the theme of this issue is Influence, what is Rick Castro under the influence of?
Rick: For a big part of my life I was under the influence of fetish. Now in my golden years I am under the influence of the right to have peace.
Luke: Another lifestyle you would have chosen?
Rick: Gardening and growing produce. I do that on a small scale. I have a friend that lives in Inglewood. She's a lesbian with a backyard. There was a time that we had a victory garden! It has kind of gone to ruin now. It's amazing how much you can grow and sustain yourself if you know the seasons. And then it reminds you how far away we are from taking care of ourselves in that way.
Luke: What still excites you visually?
Rick: I'm a visual person. I have a photographic memory and a photographic mind. I take in everything. It made perfect sense that I became a photographer. I started as a wardrobe stylist, but before that I was a fashion illustrator, then a wardrobe stylist, a costume designer, and then photography.
I left styling to work on my film Hustler White with Bruce La Bruce. That was my last job besides co-writer/director I did styling and wardrobe for Hustler White.
Luke: I was sad to read that you were attacked on the way to your gallery on Valentine's Day some years back?
Rick: I got PTSD bad, to the point where this chair I'm in right now, I sat in this chair for months and was afraid to go to the kitchen or even go to the bathroom. But that was then. It was pretty harrowing.
Luke: How is it getting past something like that and not allowing it to affect how you move through the world in a negative way? Sometimes people struggle to bounce back from tragic things like that.
Rick: You know what Bette Davis said, “Old age ain't no place for sissies.” Someone embroidered a pillow and there's a picture of her with it held up on the internet. I've had my highs and lows in life and tragedies. As far as romance, I'm not involved in any relationship and I'm not that interested, quite frankly.. I am in love with just life.
Luke: Is there something you've photographed that you really loved capturing but haven't shared much?
Rick: Next year I'm going to have an exhibition at the Los Angeles Central Library. It's all my political images. I used to work for The Advocate and for the local gay rags here in LA. One was called Frontiers, the other was Edge magazine. I was a photojournalist, and I would do, you know, also portraits.. I did all the ACT UP protests and the early Queer Nation. I photographed the first flyer for Queer Nation here in Los Angeles.
Tthere were protests for Pete Wilson, who ran for governor and won because he campaigned to be pro-gay. This is in the '80s. Once he was elected, he was anything but pro-gay. The same people that got him into office got him out, because that's when street protests really mattered. I have a documentation of that.
Luke: Let's talk a bit about Joel-Peter Witkin. I know you were working for him years back. Are you guys still in touch?
Rick: I haven't seen him in person for a long time. He doesn't really come to LA, and he was extremely reclusive. I worked with him a lot in the '80s, helping get everything together. Art direct—I would find locations. Sometimes we would use my place as a location, other times, like, for example, Gods of Heaven and Earth. That's a pretty well-known image, that was at Herb Ritts' studio. I also worked with him during that era. He was generous with me.
Luke: How old were you, would you say, when you really became interested in fetish and wanted to explore that?
Rick: Quite young. 10 or 11. I didn't know what it was called.
Luke: I'm not sure if you feel a difference between the American fetish scene and the European one. But do you feel like there's a difference?
Rick: Folsom Berlin is still pretty interesting. I noticed it's been taken over by furries and pups. So maybe the traditional Leather Daddy is a thing of the past, which I guess in a way it should be. I mean, come on, you can't do the same thing forever, right?
Europe has always had a healthier relationship to sexual and fetish in general. Especially the Brits. You guys are kinky mother fuckers. The Brits loved me.
Luke: Yeah.
Rick: America continues to be immature and hypocritical when it comes to sex and fetish. Not only are they denying fetish, they're denying sex. So there's nowhere to go with that. When I think of the regulations on social media, it's more McCarthy than McCarthy, and I don't mean, republican hack Kevin McCarthy. I mean, McCarthyism of the 1950s.
Luke: Let's talk about your gallery that was running for 13 years.
Rick: Yes. Antebellum! Right off of Hollywood Boulevard, next to the Egyptian Theatre.
I started with a partner, Mark Harvey. He was the graphic artist for my second book, Thirteen Years of Bondage. He's an incredible artist. But he bailed out within a year, maybe even less than a year. It was too much for him. I think that we both assumed that we would close, but I just stuck with it. I made it work from 2005 to 2017.
At the end of that time is when I was attacked. That changed everything because I couldn't walk, so I couldn't open the gallery. And it was just—it, you know, Trump. Trump had just been elected the first time. So the vibe... Hollywood Boulevard is always sketchy, I can function in chaos. But it got really dark, people were not buying. That was the end of an era.
Luke: What was your favorite aspect of running the gallery?
Rick: To be able to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and to show whatever I wanted with zero censorship. I remember when I was barely opening, I was installing my very first window, and this guy pulled up and parked right in front of my gallery. At first I thought he was kind of handsome, but then he says, “What are you doing!?” You can't put that art like that in there.” I said, “Yes, I can.” He goes, “Maybe do it in Palm Springs, but you can't do it here.”
I say, “I can do whatever the fuck I want.”
Just imagine strangers were telling me, “You can't do that.” And I did. I love the idea that nobody could tell me what I could or couldn't do.
I knew the programmer for the Egyptian Theatre, who was my neighbor, and I asked her what she thought about having my fetish art gallery. She said, “This is Hollywood. You can do whatever you want in Hollywood.”
And that's been the truth about Los Angeles. When I started my photography and styling, I discovered you could do whatever you want because there wasn't any attention paid to LA. It was all about New York, Paris, maybe London.
LA was dismissed as being behind the times or tacky or too California. There was always an incredible art scene, an incredible fashion scene, and a good fetish scene. We just didn't get the press.
But maybe that's a good thing, because once you get the press, then there goes the neighborhood.
Luke: What's something that you haven't done yet that you would like to do?
Rick: I would like to write a book, and boy, it would be a doozy!
Luke: I was talking with Joey Arias and he was like, “I have some really crazy stories.”
Rick: I know him. He used to work at Fiorucci in New York. I used to sell my clothes to Fiorucci in Los Angeles.
My clothing line was called “I Love Ricky.”
Michelle Lamy was my first customer. She bought all my hats. She had a clothing shop called “Too Soon to Know,” which used to be in Boystown in West Hollywood. That's how we met. She spoke hardly any English. She still has that heavy accent now. Just as heavy as back then.
Luke: Rick Owens brought you up initially before, while I was photographing him. I was nervous, but he was so lovely and calm, and his energy was just very calm. He mentioned you dated back in the day.
Rick: Back in the '80s. I like how it happened in the '80s. A lot's happening now, but everyone seems to be more interested in the past. What's happening for me in my career is all about now. I had a career in the '80s, but I was a wardrobe person. My photos were not liked in the '90s at all by anybody. By the fashion people or the fetish people, definitely not the art people. So that's all changed now. Now everybody loves them.
Luke: Would you say that you are a collaborative person?
Rick: I have been quite a bit with styling, but with photography, if I want to do the kind of photos that I have been doing, with the bondage and all that, it works best one-on-one. But those days seem to have come to an end for me because it's really hard—back in the day, you could just go down the boulevard and pick guys up. That's what I did in my '67 Mercury Cougar in those days. Now you have no choice but to meet people online. And online is flaky.
Luke: I used to have similar chats with James Bidgood, actually, about this topic. But he also felt that he was just treated the worst hand in life and couldn't get anyone to listen to him. I loved Jim dearly.
Rick: He's coming from a time when it was illegal to be gay. I had it light and easy compared to that generation of queer men.
They would literally destroy your lives back then. For everything that you and I are doing right now, their lives were destroyed.
When I had my gallery, I gave some of those people a platform. Like, for example, John Palatinus was an incredible photographer in the '50s and '60s, and he got raided by the Vice in New York. And not only did they take all his photos, they took his negs, they took all his camera equipment, and then they published his name in the New York Times. So he lost his career. He was a window dresser for —Bonwit Teller the huge department store of that era. And he was fired on the spot and had to go into hiding.
When I presented him at my gallery, that was the first exhibition he ever had in his life. He was in his late 70s when we had this exhibition. I had more of his photos than he did because I was able to find some of his original little photos through a collector. I owned more of his photos than he did, because the vice destroyed his negatives. So we took my photos and made scans off of those digital prints to have in the gallery.
Luke: Last question. What is your favorite everyday object?
Rick: This is an object I like very much that is always next to me. It's made out of cast iron. It's a little—
Luke: It looks heavy.
Rick: It is. It's a partridge. it's very old and has a weight to it.
Luke: Where did you get this?
Rick: I don't remember. But I've had it for a very long time. I was drawn to it because of the weight, and I love holding it.
Then this is a beautiful painting that my late artist John Blackburn painted in 1966. I call it Robin, even though I have no idea who the boy is. John is no longer with us, he was one of my artists when I had the gallery. All his work was in the '60s and early '70s.
Luke: Well, Rick, thank you so much for the time. Have a lovely rest of the day.
My Chihuahua was telling me he wants feeding.
Rick: Okay. Be good.
