Joe Dallesandro

About Joe Dallesandro

Joe Dallesandro's still hangin' . . . after battles with drug addiction and alcohol, brushes with the law, three broken marriages and numerous love affairs, plus the suicide of his only sibling Bob. One of the most beautifully photographed wild guys to come out of the Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey "Factory" era, the slight and slightly androgynous Dallesandro became an improbable pioneer of the male sexual revolution and the first film actor to be glorified as a nude sex symbol. The Morrissey/Warhol movies were known for their bizarre, amateur standing, yet Joe and his completely uninhibited, walk-on-the-wild-side demeanor managed to hold an entire underground audience captive. Joe's dangerous street mentality and raw erotic power became a definitive turn-on to both gay and straight audiences and his fame eventually filtered somewhat into the mainstream.Born humbly as Joseph Angelo D'Alessandro III in Pensacola (located on Florida's panhandle) on New Year's Eve in 1948, his parents, Joe II and Thelma, were teenagers when Joe was born; his father was a Navy man stationed there and his mother had a wild streak of her own. Joe (then age 5) and younger brother Robert were placed into a New York adoption facility after Thelma was given a five-year prison sentence for auto theft and the father decided he was unable to care for them alone. Brought up in a series of foster homes, Joe became notorious for his delinquent behavior at school -- which was often ignited by his short stature and even shorter temper. Frequent runaways, he and his brother eventually returned to live with their grandparents but Joe quickly drifted towards a life of crime (thievery, burglary, etc.) via his association with street gangs.At 15 "Little Joe" was caught stealing a car and sentenced to a juvenile rehab facility in New York's Catskill Mountains. During this time he started his famous "Little Joe" tattoo body markings. He escaped from the facility and lived a nomadic life in Mexico for a time before returning to the US (Los Angeles), where he gained unexpected acceptance in the California gay scene. The wanderlust teen found it profitable to exploit his sulky good looks and smoothly-muscled physique by posing nude for various photographers in the mid-'60s. Sometimes billed as "Joe Catano", Dallesandro hit many of the underground studios in both California and New York, working most notably for Robert Henry Mizer, who founded the Athletic Model Guild (AMG), and Bruce Bellas, aka Bruce of Los Angeles. A little magazine called Physique Pictorial, which was passed off as a bodybuilding publication, was, in truth, geared heavily toward its gay subscribers. Many were clients of Mizer, who photographed thousands of buff young men (some even out-of-work military servicemen) in various stages of undress from 1945-1993. Joe became Mizer's most famous model and can be seen featured in Thom Fitzgerald's docudrama Beefcake (1998), which chronicles the Mizer AMG era.Back in New York during the summer of 1967, the 18-year-old, while visiting a friend in Greenwich Village, was invited to sit in and watch Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey shooting an impromptu marathon movie in Warhol's building apartment. Morrissey's camera quickly found its way toward the ambivalent, good-looking Joe and the rest is history. Joe wound up shooting a wrestling scene with another guy clad only in his underwear. A year later that 23-minute footage found its way into The Loves of Ondine (1968), an 86-...

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CITIZENS - (trailer) alex monty canawati, todd geyer, joe dallesandro

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