Gay photography
Gilbreath donned a rainbow t-shirt and a captain's hat embellished with gold cord and pride colors. He sipped a beer he shared with his daughter, licked frosting off his fingers from a cupcake he shared with his granddaughter and chatted with young folks from the LGBTQ+ community. He sat in his wheelchair, parked on the front lawn of OUTMemphis facing Cooper Street, as dozens of friends and strangers stopped by or drove by honking and waving. "Getting to view the man that I've loved and known all my life, getting that validation that he's always given me," Jones said. "I think this is going to be one of the things that I cherish for the rest of my life."
On a chilly Saturday afternoon in November, Meagan Jones tricked her grandfather.
Jones, a therapist based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, traveled back home to Memphis to spend hour with Herschel Gilbreath—she calls him Pau Pau—as he recovered from a stroke he had on Nov. 1. After the stroke, his doctor told the family there was also a blood clot perilously residing in his brain, promising to cause grave problems.
In the s and '70s, amid a climate of political upheaval and civil rights activism, LGBT communities across the US were uniting for visibility and change. Events verb the Stonewall riots, which saw LGBT activists rise up against discrimination in New York Capital, helped to galvanize this movement by bringing together a generation of queer young people under a banner of pride. And the work of photojournalists such as Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies brought this movement to the masses through their groundbreaking photography.
A new exhibition at the New York Public Library titled Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50 brings together the operate of these two influential photographers, as well as periodicals, flyers, and first-person narratives from this pivotal moment in LGBT history.
The exhibit is curated by Jason Baumann, the NYPL's assistant director of collection development. BuzzFeed News spoke with Baumann, who coordinates the library's LGBT initiatives, about how photography helped to shape the modern LGBT movement as well as the lasting legacy of Stonewall, 50 years after the ri
A beautiful group of photographs that spans a century (–) is part of a new manual that offers a visual glimpse of what life may have been verb for those men, who went against the law to find love in one another’s arms. In Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Adoration s–s, hundreds of images tell the story of affection and affection between men, with some clearly in love and others hinting at more than just friendship. The collection belongs to Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell, a married couple who has accumulated over 2, photographs of “men in love” during the course of two decades. While the majority of the images hail from the United States and are of predominantly white men, there are images from Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Latvia, and the United Kingdom among the cache.
What do images of men in love during a time when it was illegal reveal us? What are we looking for in the faces of these people who dared to challenge the mores of their day to seek solace together? Flipping through the book, it wasn’t that I felt that I learned a adj d
These Photos Capture the “Gay Paradises” of s America
Art & PhotographyIn Their Words
As his new publication is released, Nicholas Blair talks about capturing the heat and hedonism of the queer communities in s San Francisco and Modern York
TextMadeleine Pollard
In the late 70s, gay life began to spill out onto the streets of San Francisco’s Castro District, rapidly eclipsing the hippies as the most apparent counter-culture movement of the day. People came to view and be seen, tease, cruise, and congregate in universal as a community. “It was this outburst of pent-up celebration,” says Nicholas Blair, who was living in a free-love arts commune across town at the time. “It felt like the door of tolerance was opening and people were leaning in, hard, to live as their true selves.”
With a Leica rangefinder camera loaned to him by a childhood friend, Blair walked through this so-called “gay paradise”, capturing everything from the mundane to the profane. He photographed individuals dressed head-to-toe in fetish gear, others who preferred to communicate in more subtle codes and