When film historians speak of the first screenings of Louis Lumière’s “The Arrival of a Train,” they describe the Paris audience flinching in their seats to avoid being struck by the image of a locomotive rushing toward them on screen. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, but it makes me wonder how those who attended the 1971 premiere of James Bidgood’s iconic queer classic “Pink Narcissus” must have reacted to its, er, climactic moment.

A gauzy, softcore reimagining of Disney’s “Fantasia,” with well-endowed (live-action) hustlers in place of dancing cartoon hippos, “Pink Narcissus” unspools like some kind of erotic visual concerto. Ogling his rough-trade star Bobby Kendall, as the muscular young man admires his own ephemeral beauty reflected in countless mirrors, Bidgood stacks one super-saturated sexual fantasy upon another until such point that the film can’t contain itself any longer, erupting directly into the camera — and by extension,...