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La Vie en Ruffian: Fetish Tea Time

Ruffian From The West Coast

Ruffians Brian Wolk and Claude Morais are back in the Big Apple after several weeks on the West Coast. This week, they share their interview with Rick Castro of Antebellum Gallery and discuss fetish tea, Tony Ward and more!

“The art of fetish is an age-old craft spanning epochs, cultures, socio-economic strata. It has been studied by figures ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Sigmund Freud. Rick Castro, owner and curator of Antebellum Gallery, simply defines fetish as human obsession, which can manifest itself in love for shoes, leather, bondage—or perhaps the ritualistic drinking of tea.

Mr. Castro is a Renaissance man living in Hollywood, and his extraordinary aesthetic background in photography, fashion, and film is evident in his tremendously sophisticated curatorial skills. Trained under the likes of Herb Ritts and Joel-Peter Witkin,
he is not only a collector, but also a highly respected photographer. His work appears in many published volumes including
13 Years of Bondage and, most recently, in the Dior Homme editorial for FLAUNT, 2002. We were lucky enough to be invited to high tea in the garden of his jewel box gallery. We were served in grand style, and of course, no fetish tea would be complete with out a pig mask-wearing butler who was at Master Castro’s beck and call whenever he rang the bell.

Brian: I was reading about the great events that changed your life in your Wikipedia entry. Let's start with your love of tea.

Rick: My tea master BRYAN MULVIHILL aka TROLLYBUS lives in Vancouver. He has served tea to the Queen, and orchestrated the world tea party that was held globally . I became obsessed with tea after I went to London for the first time in 1996, but my tea master is the one who taught me all the ins and outs. There are so many different ceremonies.

(tea for three @ antebellum)

Claude: You also cited A Clockwork Orange as a life-changer...

Rick: I read it first in my aunt Nicky's new & used bookstore in
El Monte, CA. It must have been 1969. Reading it was an epiphany for me in language, and the violence was portrayed as glamour. It was beautiful and scary, and it made sense it would become the future and norm in our culture.

Brian: Fashion is definitely a fetish—a commercial fetish, perhaps. In terms of your process, is it different when you do fashion photography verses your art fetish photography?

Rick: I never intended to do fashion. In the 80s, I was a stylist, a costume maker and a designer.
Incidentally, Rick Owens was my patternmaker. When I decided to go into photography, it was a reaction against fashion. I started to explore photography, and fetish as my subject matter was a natural choice.

Claude: Did you have a mentor when you went into photography?

Rick: As a stylist, I worked with Herb Ritts and observed his lighting, which is an important part of my work. He was obsessed with golden light, which is also known as the magic hour. I also worked for George Hurrell, from whom I learned a lot about glamour photography. A hard light diffused makes everything look incredible. I asked Joel-Peter Witkin,
(whom i was also working with) to take me to buy my first camera, and he took me to a camera shop in Albuquerque,
where he lives.

It’s a Nikon FG and I still have it.

Brian: Do you miss film now that you use digital?

Rick: I don’t miss the trouble and the expense. I never enjoyed being in the dark room. Digital is cleaner, but you can never replace a nice fiber print. But you have to respect digital for what it is—a different art form.
Would you like a cookie?
(Rick rings the bell and the pig servant returns and pours more tea)

Brain: Tell us a little about Hustler White and your collaboration with legendary film maker Bruce La Bruce.

Rick: When I started to take photographs, I discovered that street hustlers were better than real models.
One of my favorite subjects was Zack, who I met while I was pulling out of a Carl’s Jr. drive-thru.
I saw him exiting the bus with a cowboy hat, bandana, and his "wife-beater" shirt was stuffed in his back pocket. He told me stories of his time in prison, and saving Charles Manson from a fire. These tall tales are also known as “yarns”
(due to their often fictitious nature) and became the inspiration for my first zine. It was pre-internet, and queer kids created their own world because they had nowhere else to go. When I met Bruce in 1991, I told him I had been documenting these street boys on VHS and was going to name the documentary Hustler White.
The reason for the title is they used to wear white jeans because at night, you can see them on the avenue,
and the white color emphasizes the baskets.

Brian: Wow, what a great piece of urban fashion anthropology!



Rick: Bruce said he would like to collaborate and make it into a feature-length film, so we wove the stories into a narrative.
We originally cast a real hustler for the lead role named Monty, but within 3 weeks he had stolen a john's car, a guitar and paintings, married a girl, and got another girl pregnant, so we decided he was a security risk. So at that point I called my friend, Tony Ward, and pleaded with him to take the role. Remember, this was post-Madonna sex book, and he was pretty famous at this point, but he read the script and said yes. I thought he was the modern day Joe Dallesandro. He was perfect for the role.

Brian: Tell us a little about your interest in bondage…

Rick: I've been into it since I was four. As far as photography, I am interested in capturing the moment. When I photograph, I have to worry about the lighting, the position, etc. When I shot the Dior Homme editorial, the look of the ropes and they way they were tied over the clothing was critical.

(bondage & briefs by rick castro, search & destroy one-of-a-kind- underwear by the late/great- wil munroe)


(dior homme editorial by rick castro- flaunt magazine- 2002)

Claude: Why did you open the gallery?

Rick: I opened the gallery in 2005, and it was a life-long dream to specifically open a fetish art gallery. I consider myself a fetish person. I understand obsession, so I thought I was the right person to bridge fetish to mainstream…to fuse art with fetish. I like to show contemporary art mixed with vintage erotica. I don’t have a roster of artists that I use over and over. I like the discovery process and mixing things together in an eclectic way for each show.


(orginal painting by allen hatch on a vintage violin)


(original photograph by john palatinus- circa 1957)


(jesus saves- art & display by jesus silverlake)


(hot-cross-buns by charles dimont)

Brian: Tell us about your salons…

Rick: Well, (over the years) I have had tea salons with human furniture, bondage demos, a fetish book club, and fetish film nights at the Egyptian theatre just behind the gallery.

Claude: Were there any events or people in your childhood that affected your work?

Rick: I had my aunt Nicky who owned a bookstore, and that was one of my first exposures to literature and art.
My mom worked there and used to pick me up after school. That was where I had some of my first experiences with erotica, as they used to keep nudist magazines under the counter in brown paper bags. Incidentally, next door at the Karmel Korn Shoppe, where I used to buy caramel corn, Bob Mackie used to be the counter boy, which I recently confirmed this year when he came to the gallery to pick up a piece of art a friend purchased for him.

Brian: How did you meet and discover Tony Ward?

Rick: It was 1984, I was thumbing through Intouch (a naughty boys magazine at the time) and saw a picture of Tony while I was working with Albert Sanchez, who was the West Coast photographer of Interview magazine. I called his "agent" and he said,
“If you can pay for his bus fare then ya got him." He came up from La Jolla and we hit it off immediately. He was my first subject on my first photo shoot, and we have been friends ever since.
In fact, we have the only Tony Ward-themed toilet which I will give you a tour of now.”


(plaque of the TWT)


(the one-of-a-kind, original- TWT, (TONY WARD TOILET)