1. John Robert Stillman, billed professionally as Jack Wrangler, was an American gay pornographic film actor, theatrical producer, director, and writer.
22 Facts About Jack Wrangler
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Open about his homosexuality and adult film work throughout his career, Wrangler was an icon of the gay-liberation movement.
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Jack Wrangler was born John Robert Stillman in Beverly Hills, California.
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Jack Wrangler's father was Hollywood film and television producer Robert Thurston Stillman, who produced such films as Champion, Second Chorus, and Home of the Brave and produced television series such as Boots and Saddles, Rawhide, and Bonanza.
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Jack Wrangler's mother, Ruth Clark Stillman, was a former dancer in Busby Berkeley musicals.
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Jack Wrangler became aware of his homosexuality when he was 10 years old.
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Jack Wrangler played a former prostitute from Arkansas who becomes a bad go-go dancer in California, in a role which required extensive nudity.
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Jack Wrangler finally settled in New York City and found work as a bartender and go-go dancer.
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Jack Wrangler was approached to appear in gay pornographic films by Magnum Studios, the pioneering gay adult film studio and magazine publisher, after studio heads saw a poster for Special Friends featuring him semi-nude.
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Jack Wrangler told Terry Gross of NPR that the film crew knew he was gay and cheered him on while he lost his heterosexual virginity.
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Jack Wrangler quickly made a number of well-known and popular straight-adult films, including Jack and Jill, Roommates, and The Devil in Miss Jones 2.
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Jack Wrangler was a favorite of director Chuck Vincent, the critically acclaimed, openly gay director of some of the top straight-adult films of the 1970s and 1980s.
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Jack Wrangler co-starred alongside playwright and actor Robert Patrick in Patrick's 1979 play T-Shirts at The Glines theater in New York City.
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Jack Wrangler became a board member of the Johnny Mercer Foundation after its founding in 1982, and worked to promote Mercer's music.
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Jack Wrangler wrote and produced a 1985 cabaret show for Whiting which featured Mercer's music, and in 1996 co-wrote and produced Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: The Jazz Concert.
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Jack Wrangler conceived the idea of a ballet based on Mercer's 1946 musical St Louis Woman, which was performed by the Dance Theater of Harlem in 2003.
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Jack Wrangler was a promoter of the cabaret singer Carol Woods, writing and producing several shows for her between 1984 and 2001.
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Jack Wrangler authored a column on health and fitness, "Jack Wrangler's Weights and Measures", for the short-lived, gay-lifestyle magazine Au Contraire in 1979.
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The couple was strongly criticized for the relationship, and Jack Wrangler was accused of "turning straight" and entering the relationship simply for money.
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Nonetheless, the early years of their relationship were difficult, as Whiting and Jack Wrangler struggled with the latter's homosexuality.
21.
Jack Wrangler would have my bags packed and sitting outside the door when I got home at night and things like that.
22.
Jack Wrangler died on April 7,2009, at the age of 62 from complications from emphysema.