1970s gay street fashns and other vtage disveri 'Photography and Language' - Los Angel Tim

Contents:

• REVIEW: 1970S GAY STREET FASHNS AND OTHER VTAGE DISVERI ‘PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE’
• POIGNANT, EXUBERANT PHOTOS OF GAY LIFE THE ’70S — JT TIME FOR PRI
• DICK LESCH’S GUI TO SEVENTI GAY SLANG
• DISVERG THE “GAY LIFTYLE” THROUGH 1970S MAGAZ
• VTAGE GAY FASHN

REVIEW: 1970S GAY STREET FASHNS AND OTHER VTAGE DISVERI ‘PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE’

)And while the nickname was ially pejorative, the clone perd marked perhaps the first time that gay men prented themselv wh a queer-signalg uniform that was a direct rponse to societal stereotyp. “The clone was a reactn to thgs you would see movi of gay men beg flty and nelly, ” says John Calendo, a wrer who lived LA and New York Cy throughout the 70s and 80s, and worked as an edor at the clone-cubatg sk mags Blueboy and In Touch for Men. ”) “That’s the kd of imagery”—backwards stereotyp that basilly villaized queer people—“that a lot of my generatn who beme the clone people grew up wh the ccible of the 60s, ” Calendo ntu, when the civil rights and gay liberatn movements were expandg ias of equaly and eedom.

Drsg like a clone, he says, was a rejectn of those olr gay ’s not so easy to ppot precisely who origated the clone ial, guys who were alive at the time ually brg up Al Parker, an adult film star turned producer and director who worked om the 70s to the early 90s. “The clone look was certaly about a whe gay man’s rponse and engagement wh those archetyp, ” says Ben Barry, the an of the school of fashn at the New School’s Parsons School of Dign, whose rearch foc on fashn’s relatnship to masculy, sexualy, and the body. Amid the flurry of rabow-lan rporate logos, sponsored events and news ems about gay pengus, is difficult to turn on a televisn or set foot public durg June whout the remr that is Pri Month for LGBT and queer people.

Gee Dudley, a photographer and artist who also served as the first director of New York Cy’s Llie-Lohman Mm of Gay and Lbian Art, documented scen om pri paras New York Cy om the late 1970s through the early ‘90s. The years saw Ana Bryant’s homophobic csa through the “Save Our Children” mpaign 1977, the electn and assassatn of Harvey Milk 1978, and the Whe Night rts the followg summer after the lenient sentencg of Milk’s murrer, Dan Whe. “The guy a drs wh a beard, nng ont of the task force banner, ptur a lot of the atmosphere of the early gay liberatn muny, bee so much of me out of the hippie movement, ” says Saslow.

POIGNANT, EXUBERANT PHOTOS OF GAY LIFE THE ’70S — JT TIME FOR PRI

Sli 1 of 13, A ftg acpaniment to the NYC Pri celebratns around the cy this weekend, the Llie-Lohman Mm of Gay and Lbian Art on Wooster Street has an exhibn up this season centerg on a sgular era gay history: the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS 1970s. But that didn’t stop the mastream om dismissg as a gay rag—skewered a 1993 Sefeld episo and the 2003 movie Zoolanr—even as the talog raked $100 ln at s height (mostly fueled by straight women buyg for their men) and h 3 ln hom wh quarterly 1986 vers. Courty of ALL MAN: The Internatnal Male Story, © Brawn,, Internatnal Male never said was a gay publitn, but that “also speaks to the general tenncy of the fashn media to really mouflage, to some extent, their ntent, ” Filippello says.

“[The imagery] would appeal to gay men, who then were able to vt their intifitns and their erotic fantasi those imag, ” Filippello ntu, “which the end beme part of queer cultural herage.

The doc tracks the way Internatnal Male shaped and reflected male body image, om the lanky look of the ’70s to the mcle-bound bodi of the ’80s and ’90s, which were a direct ntrast to the ail forms of dyg men durg the early days of the HIV and AIDS might be temptg to look back now, as we’re reexamg masculy this post-#MeToo culture, and assume that the staff was on some vert missn to advance gay rights, one paisley top at a time. Durg the ’80s and early-’90s heyday of male molg, the pany would hire mols h om Versace nways and logne ads (though some mols wouldn’t work wh Internatnal Male, sce was looked at as a “gay” brand). ’ ”At the time, though—and even more so when Burkard and others left, after the talog giant Hanover Direct purchased Internatnal Male, 1988, and tried to make mastream the ’90s—there was a tightrope walk when me to tryg to not “appear” gay.

DICK LESCH’S GUI TO SEVENTI GAY SLANG

It was there that Vermazen first heard discsn of same-sex marriage—an outrageo thought at the time—and the first time he met the late Sheldon Anlson, the Universy of California’s first openly gay regent. ) And while the nickname was ially pejorative, the clone perd marked perhaps the first time that gay men prented themselv wh a queer-signalg uniform that was a direct rponse to societal stereotyp. ”In 1959, when Lesch was twenty-four, he left his fay home, Kentucky, for New York Cy, where he found work as a pater, a bartenr, a rator, a journalist, and as the unpaid print of the Mattache Society, one of the first gay-rights anizatns.

When the Stonewall rts broke out, three years later, he was the only openly gay reporter on the scene, verg the event for a new gay-focsed magaze lled The a recent Friday eveng, Lesch’s buzzer rang. ” Some of the fns were more nuanced: an “ntie, ” Lesch had wrten, was “an ageg or middle aged homosexual, offtim effemate character, ” or “a person of settled meanor who utns agast temperate acts.

DISVERG THE “GAY LIFTYLE” THROUGH 1970S MAGAZ

Photograph by Rebec FudalaNext up was Lesch’s llectn of magaz and newsletters, cludg After Dark (“Oh, bls you—they’re real llector’s ems, ” Bmann said); Christopher Street (“We have the archiv”); Female Mimics (“That’s fabulo”); the 1969 Time issue on homosexualy (“Cute”); and the monthly bullet for the Mattache Society. Beg open helped gays and lbians fd each other and, soon, ci across the untry experienced surg the number of gay neighborhoods, which spng up New York, Los Angel, San Francis, Chigo, and workg-class bar dyk to lbian femists (many of whom were bisexual but embracg the radil, polil choice to be wh women a patriarchy fed by what Adrienne Rich termed "pulsory heterosexualy"), plenty of queer women the 1970s and early '80s found themselv the pany of other women. Gay and bi men embraced the new openns too, darg to venture to public spac and explorg nontradnal relatnships, newfound sexual eedoms, and an pe om the tyranny of rtrictive mascule rol.

Others felt forced to choose between the endurg qut for their sexual eedoms (as gay rights were thought of then) or women's rights and the eedom of genr exprsn, or an pe om racial or sexual vlence, and raw the new dawned, herg the 1980s' generatn of greed and power, men who had sex wh each other, at least some of the time, began gettg sick.

But harst h, pecially those early days, were gay and bi men and the transgenr women who had sex wh disease that later beme known as AIDS was first intified medil journals 1981 (Print Ronald Reagan's first year office). Facg annihilatn, gay men took upon themselv to found anizatns like Gay Men's Health Crisis (1982) and AmFAR (1985) to save their own liv and bat the the background, religo lears like Rev. Jerry Falwell told followers "AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals"; policians like Lyndon LaRouche suggted people wh HIV be quaranted; and Reagan's own munitns director, Pat Buchanan, argued that AIDS was nature's revenge on gay men.

VTAGE GAY FASHN

In the 1970s, even the heads of the largt progrsive gay and lbian group, the Gay Natnal Task Force, Charlie Brydon and Lucia Valka were at odds, wh Valka tellg gay men to keep their pants and argug that gay public sex was hamperg the qut for civil rights. Patrick KellyPatrick moved to New York at 18, where he sold vtage Louis Vuton luggage and some of his signs before movg to, Patrick took Paris by storm, and he beme one of the few Black gay fashn signers.