Some artists have referred to the film, for example Bruce LaBruce with the short film collection It Is Not the Pornographer That Is Perverse... (2018). A prolific and controversial filmmaker, von Praunheim has centered his directorial efforts in documentaries featuring gay-related themes. In the early 1970s he lived for some time in the United States where he made a series of documentaries about the post-Stonewall American gay scene. In Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts (1979) he took on the American gay and lesbian movement from the 1950s until the late 1970s. He was also interested in the underground theater in New York City, which was the focus of some of his films of this period including Underground and Emigrants (1976). In 1979 von Praunheim won a German Film Award for Tally Brown, New York, a documentary about the singer and actress Tally Brown. In the USA von Praunheim worked with camera people like Jeff Preiss, Mike Kuchar and Juliana Wang. Back in Berlin, he made feature films such as Our Corpses Are Still Alive (1981) and Red Love (1982). In 1983 von Praunheim's revolutionary film City of Lost Souls (1983) with Jayne County and Angie Stardust was released: "This riotous and massively ahead-of-its-time intersectional queer-punk musical has gone on to greatly influence transgender politics." (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) These films were shown at film festivals worldwide. His feature film Horror Vacui won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for best experimental film in 1985. Anita: Dances of Vice (1987), the life story of a scandalous nude dancer in Berlin in the 1920s, attracted international attention. The film was shown, for example, at the New York Film Festival and the Chicago International Film Festival. With the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, von Praunheim worked on films about the HIV-related disease. A Virus Knows No Morals (1986) was one of the first feature films about AIDS internationally: "A Virus Respects No Morals, a savage, imaginative, scattershot Brecht-like allegory set largely in a gay bath, became one of the earliest and most provocative attacks on the hypocrisy, ignorance, politics and economics surrounding the AIDS crisis." (Los Angeles Times) The documentaries Positive and Silence = Death, both shot in 1989, deal with aspects of AIDS activism in New York. Fire Under Your Ass (1990) focuses on AIDS in Berlin. For the so-called AIDS trilogy, von Praunheim was awarded