Experimental filmmaker, actor and writer Kenneth Anger, best known for his book Hollywood Babylon (1959), in which he exposed the hidden mysteries and perversions of Hollywood stars expressed with biting humor, has died at the age of 96.

Known as “one of the first American filmmakers to be open about his homosexuality,” he developed a reputation as an explorer of erotic and homosexual topics decades before same-sex sex was legal in America.

Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeier, as he was called, was born in 1927 to a middle-class Presbyterian family (his German-born father was an aeronautical engineer). In 1950, he was invited to France by Jean Cocteau, his artistic hero, who was impressed by Fireworks (1947), an experimental homosexual film made by Enger at the age of 17. Filmed at his family’s home in Beverly Hills when his parents were away for the weekend, the film is considered the first gay film made in the US.

Then, drawing on the scandalous stories he had collected over the years, he wrote a series of articles for the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma and in 1959 turned them into a book published in French under the title Hollywood Babylone.

A sequel to the book was released in 1984 after he announced his retirement from cinema due to his inability to direct the sequel to the 1972 film Lucifer Rising.

Kenneth Unger has described himself as a pagan practitioner of ritual magic (he is a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, O.T.O.) and refers to his films as “charms and incantations”. In the 1960s he was an exotic member of gallery owner Robert Fraser’s circle in London and a friend of the Rolling Stones.

According to Variety