CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/28/2019

Celebrating Stonewall, 50 Years of In-Your-Face Pride and Alvin Baltrop with 'The Piers'

Featured image is reproduced from Alvin Baltrop: The Piers, TF Editores' classic collection of black-and-white photographs by the former sailor who returned from Vietnam to document the rough, anonymous gay "pier scene" on Manhattan's west side during the 70s and 80s. "Baltrop’s pictures show a gone world," Glenn O'Brien writes in his Foreword, "but the ghosts that inhabit these images retain the power to haunt our own time. In The Spectre of Promiscuity, Christian Klesse wrote, 'The spectre of queer promiscuity haunts the national imagination... Anti-promiscuity discourses are part of a wider and complex network of power that encircles queer sexual and intimate lives.’ In fact anti-promiscuity discourses seem to be an essential part of the power networks that define all sexuality. The tendency is to ignore the evidence, even that of the recent past, while what some call heteronormativity seems to be increasingly mistaken for a sudden leap in evolution. We should be thankful that the art of Alvin Baltrop exists to advocate a history that has yet to be written and to propose questions that are inconvenient and difficult, to say the least."