A teen photographer’s gut-wrenching response to 1960s homophobia
Anthony Friedkin stood up for his subjects by chronicling gay culture
When a photographer is able to successfully pinpoint the crest of a social movement, the resulting pictures can become an important historical document. If he is an artist, they can be transcendent. Anthony Friedkin was only 19 when he realized the importance of documenting the emerging gay rights movement. It was 1969, the Stonewall Riots had just happened, the Gay Liberation Front was emerging, and Los Angeles, where Friedkin was born and raised, was home to an LGBT population at once thriving and necessarily secretive.
Homosexuality was still illegal in California, but the young cameraman was already intimately sympathetic to members of the state’s gay community. “We had gay people coming into our house all the time,” Friedkin recounts, describing his upbringing as the son of a Hollywood screenwriter father and dancer mother. “It just seemed natural to me that gays needed better treatment.”
Being gay in America in the sixties was dangerous. Assault was a constant threat, and congregating at known LGBT hangouts (before the term LGBT was widely used) was a sure way to be targeted. This is one reason camaraderie was so crucial to the community — an aspect that Friedkin’s images celebrate explicitly. Friedkin, who is not gay, spent two years immersed in the scene in L.A. and San Francisco, visiting nightclubs and movie houses, public demonstrations, and, most important, the private spaces of a population of men and women at odds with the dominant culture. His approach meant making himself vulnerable — to his brave subjects and to the risk they confronted on a daily basis. At one point Friedkin even found himself looking down the barrel of a gun, pulled on him by undercover vice cops he was photographing during a male prostitution bust.
Friedkin approached his subjects with the gentle respect of someone who listens and cares deeply about the humans he engages with. He also sensed the urgency of making this culture known to the mainstream public. “I was surprised that more hadn’t been done [on the topic]. Gays had to live a fearful, anxiety-ridden life. I wanted to celebrate how gays were special, … to celebrate their own sense of personal freedom.”
Perhaps most striking is his subjects’ refusal to be defined solely by their sexuality. More than gender or orientation, what comes across in The Gay Essay is their flesh-and-blood personhood, thanks to Friedkin’s eye. He focused on his subjects’ presence, refusing to allow preconceptions or easy identifiers to upstage the figure at the center of the frame. The people in Friedkin’s portraits exude defiance. By putting their faces to the camera, they stake a claim to individual agency, responding to oppression with willful resilience, as if to say, “This is what pride looks like.”
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