Joe Dallessandro-The Valentino fo the Underground
One of the 10 most beautiful men Scavullo said he ever photographed. The "Little Joe" of Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side." The Valentino of the Underground. The crotch on the Sticky Fingers album cover. The only guy at the party willing to return a punch from Norman Mailer. The actor whose performance made George Cukor understand what it meant to be a drug addict. The beauty wily enough to catch a fainting Tennessee Williams and then get out of the hotel bedroom while the going was good.
He’s more than just a body, though. If that were his only appeal, his legacy would be a footnote. Dallesandro was an innately charismatic and sincere presence on screen. Audiences could project their fantasies onto him. They not only wanted him physically, they wanted to take care of him. Fans wrote letters offering to help him out, naturally assuming that the young man named Joe who played young men named Joe in all his movies—movies that were improvised, no less—had to really be the person they saw up there on the screen.
Ambivalent about his fame as a Warhol Superstar, he cannot escape the power of his allure in those films, nor the power his image has wielded over each succeeding generation to discover him during the last 40 years. As the first openly eroticized male sex symbol of the movies to walk naked across the screen, he not only transcended the convention of being an actor, but he spoke to our fantasies and liberated the male nude as an object of beauty in the cinema. He likes to tell interviewers that all he ever had to do in a Warhol/Morrissey film was show up. He’s right. He’s a natural.
Source:: Little Joe , Superstar - The Official Joe Dallesandro Webpage
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