Hustlers, Selma Avenue, Hollywood, Anthony Friedkin, 1971

Historically the setting in which queer people have been photographed is often related to scandal, spectacle, or satire, it wasn't till artists like Anthony Friedkin or Joan E. Biren came about whose photo series depicting queer people across the US brought about a visual shift. While she did document both women's suffrage and queer rights movements extensively, it's very hard to feel like you don't have any history outside of struggle. There was no need to describe the triumph or suffering of protest in the late 20th century any more so than what had already been done. In Biren's case, the women she photographed were so much more than their resilience. These people had unapologetically ordinary lives, sleeping, singing, laughing, mothering, and working. Biren's work, revolutionary for the period, was a threat to those she photographed in the sense that the barrier of doubt was being dismantled. Whatever facade held to the outside world was no longer useful. Though in her own words, "a movement can't be built inside a closet". Anthony Friedkin's work exists in a similar vein although much more broadly in scope. Primarily working in the greater Los Angeles area of the 1970s Friedkin toiled to assemble a collection of work preserving the artifices of gay life in the city including notable bars, neighborhoods, and figures such as the dragqueen Divine and founders of the Gay Liberation Front, Morris Kight, and Don Kilhefner. The 'Gay Essay' as it was titled works to establish a common ground for more exclusively the working class gay man more prone to harassment in their day-to-day affairs, particularly by the LAPD. Growing up in Hollywood Friedkin's initial encounters with queer life presents a unique perspective not so different from David Hockney's, another artist working out of Los Angeles whose work deals with the idealization of the wealthy gay man. The fantasticalness of Hockney's glimmering pools and sterile hillsides perpetrates the mythos of the socially acceptable gay man who exists in a bubble of disassociating and delegitimizing movements like the GLF out of fear of losing their assumed place among the deciders of social norms. Friedkin approached his subjects with a kind eye, in doing so he established what exists today as cultural tropes.