José Rodríguez Soltero (1943-2009) was an experimental Puerto Rican filmmaker and performance artist whose work was mostly based around the 1960s queer art scene of New York City and the underground film community.
[10] He directed three films while living in the United States: Jerovi (1965), Life, Death and Assumption of Lupe Vélez (1966) and Diálogo con el Che (1968)[11] and was part of the queer underground art and film scene of New York City during the 1960s,[12] where he collaborated with Puerto Rican Warhol superstar Mario Montez, playwright and theater director Charles Ludlam, underground cinema pioneer Jack Smith[13] and Venezuelan performance artist and actor Rolando Peña.
[16] Produced while he was a student at the University of Puerto Rico in 1964, El pecado original was a surrealist film made as an homage to Luis Buñuel.
The short-film is a queer reimagining of the myth of Narcissus and was banned from the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1965, because it was perceived then as pornographic for its depiction of male nudity.
[19] Shortly before his death in 2009, Rodríguez Soltero's films received an increased attention for his role in the development of the underground queer cinema of the 1960s and he gave consent to The Film-Makers' Cooperative to remaster his surviving works.