NYC Street Photographer Stanley Stellar gets big show

That one buried the lede.

another

nipples

I'm fascinated by this era and would love to see this exhibit! Hopefully there'll be another showing and/or more online.

I'm happy that there seems to be a resurgence of interest in gay Manhattan in the late 70s and early 80s, particularly now that survivors of the plague are telling their stories before they die (thankfully of old age and not AIDs). There's a Facebook group for Gay New York of the 70s and it has been a real joy and a simultaneously heartbreaking read as these courageous men detail living through it all and with receipts in many cases. Someone posted a picture of the original hand-lettered sign for the dress code at The Mineshaft and it was one of those pieces of art that you can see while everything has changed, nothing has changed; it was even dated late 1976 with the clear advanced notice that the code wouldn't take effect until 1978. The stories these men tell are exhilarating. I can only imagine what it must have felt like living through what this taste of freedom felt like. The pictures, however, are all tinged by the looming pandemic and all that it cost the gay community specifically in New York but obviously world wide. It's impossible not to look into the eyes staring back at these cameras and not see more than was there, knowing.

I had dinner with my husband's two older brothers (middle brother straight, the eldest gay) quite a while ago when the topic of dream vacations came up. Hubby and I have traveled some and lived out several, but I surprised his older brother who lives in Manhattan still (moved there in 1980) when I said if I could set the time-space continuum aside, I'd love to go to Manhattan in the summer of 1978. I'd hang out at the piers, all the popular bars in Chelsea and HK, and go, at least once, to both Studio 54 and The Mineshaft. He said it wasn't all that and then we proceeded to have a half-hour discussion because it was all that; he said by the time he moved to NY it was only a few months before the announcement of GRID scaring everybody and the era came to an end, but oh, what a glorious few months it was.

Did only beautiful boys hang out at the piers or were there fat, ugly men there?

They were all gorgeous, R8, even the fat ugly ones.

Why is it weird seeing blonds in NYC?

It's interesting to see how grimy and rundown that neighborhood was back then. It 's so upscale now, with boutiques and apartments that cost millions.

[quote]It's interesting to see how grimy and rundown that neighborhood was back then.

Gay men always moved into bad neighborhoods and made them better: the West Village, Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen.

[quote] It 's so upscale now, with boutiques and apartments that cost millions.

You can thank Michael “middle class people don’t have a right to live in NYC” Bloomberg for that. In 12 years, he sanitized the entire city and sold out to every developer who wanted a piece of the action.

People always blame Rudy Guiliani, but he really only cleaned up Times Square. During his administration, the Meat Packing neighborhood was still deserted. The West Village began to be flooded with wealthy NYU students which drove up rents and forced gay culture up into Chelsea. Then Chelsea Market became a tourist spot which attracted Google to the neighborhood and that pushed gay culture further north into Hell’s Kitchen.