Stanley Stellar – Don’t Worry Boys

A Brooklyn native, Stellar picked up a camera in 1976 and pointed it, almost immediately, at his own community: the West Village, Christopher Street, the abandoned piers that served for a few short years as a sunbathing ground, a cruising ground, a stage. Here, Stellar developed a vernacular language that carries both a pornographer’s frankness and a documentarian’s patience; a regular contributor to the literary Christopher Street magazine, the gay newspaper New York Native and the panoply of queer flesh magazines of the time, Stellar contains a high-low fluency that gives his work a grit and a candour most of his contemporaries never risked. Against the background of New York in its most unkempt and precarious, sex is everywhere and unapologetic: men frolicking and screwing in full daylight, skimpy clothing leaving little to the imagination, balanced against a natural, authentic record of Stellar’s milieu through intense, unguarded portraiture.

Images of "Don’t Worry Boys" by Loose Joints. Images courtesy of Stanley Stellar.