West Side Piers, Alvin Baltrop, 1970s-80s

Alvin Baltrop primarily known as a photographer, he went largely underappreciated in his lifetime. Most of his work centered around Manhattan’s West Side piers, where disenfranchised and terrorized queer men built social playgrounds amongst the dilapidated warehouses and rotted wood, a lost era of gay history in pre-AIDS New York. Baltrop’s work, composed of architectural scenes showcasing the contrast of hollowed rooms, vast and melancholic, filled with graffiti (including work by Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz), and the sex acts that occurred in this setting were documentary in nature. Yet the attention to framing, lighting, and Baltrop’s existence as a voyeur transcribing the intimacy of his subjects testifies to a wider ambition. The piers were as much a cradle as a cage to its patrons, where people went to hide. “Although initially terrified of the piers, I began to take these photos as a voyeur [and] soon grew determined to preserve the frightening, mad, unbelievable, violent, and beautiful things that were going on at that time.” -Alvin Baltrop. He was a custodian of sorts who not only documented the piers but cared deeply for those who resided there. He didn’t attempt to glorify or demonize. Baltrop’s success as an artist was hampered by his race and a lack of sensitivity that existed in the formal art world toward his concept. Even among the gay community curators and galleries, his work was viewed as “vulgar” and "non-sensical."  He was accused of stealing images from white photographers, or it was implied as much. When discussing Baltrop, I think it's interesting to think about how the concept of "post-Blackness" relates to the projects he was indebted to. A term coined by Thelma Golden, the chief curator and director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, describes the attempts to reconcile the contemporary living experience of African Americans within the context of the lived experience of African Americans in earlier centuries. Post-Blackness seeks to expand what it means to be Black in America beyond an overtly simplified and often socially restricting definition set by the authors of popular culture. In the case of Baltrop and artists like him lacked a defined space as an ulapolagetically queer black man alienated from the Black community due to his queerness and from the mainstream gay community due to their inability to share power from the White-centric model, which seems to be displayed on a pedestal. What does it mean to discover the country that is your birthplace, which you owe your identity to, has not evolved a space for you? Bayard Rustin, the right-hand man to Martin Luther King Jr. and main organizer of the March on Washington, was nearly written out of history due to him being an openly gay man. At the height of the civil rights movement, the FBI, headed by J. Edgar Hoover, employed tactics to delegitimize and entrap MLK by insuiating he was a closeted queer man who, among other things, engaged in sexual intimacy with his peers, Rustin and James Baldwin included. These efforts ultimately amounted to Rustin being silently forced out of the movement as his sex life had become a cumbersome burden, threatening to tear down the movement altogether due to a prominent southern Baptist backing amongst supporters. Baldwin, an artist whose work tirelessly intermingled his racial identity with his queerness, refused to join the NAACP due to it often aligning itself with classist elitism. His publisher at the time of writing Giovanni's Room refused to publish it out of fear that its homoerotic subplots would dissuade his core audience and suggested that Baldwin should "stick to writing about the Black experience." How can one be asked to sacrifice their identity for the benefit of a cause that they're 'othered' from? While Baltrop's work is undenialably beneficial to the visual literacy of queer history, it begs the question if he had any choice in the matter. The memoir of Jeremy Asherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, delves deeply into what places like the West Side piers or the Stonewall Inn represent in gay culture and whether the loss of these settings represented an advancement or devolving in gay rights. These spaces existed as a safe haven at what cost? Throughout the book, you witness Lin age with the various milestones of his life documented in the setting of the gay bar and how his understanding and appreciation of such spaces changes as he ages. The gay bar historically existed as promising a sense of belonging while simultaneously tucking you away as a minority. If the ultimate goal is equality of rights, then exclusively queer spaces don't exactly fit into that equation. Near the end of the book, Lin describes the new bars that emerged out of the 90s and early 2000s as "airy, glossy, continental, and sterile." The days of the clandestine leather bar were over, yet there is the question of authenticity in a space designated not for community but for transactions. The piers were eventually torn down and replaced by luxury condos and entertainment centers, and Baltrop largely withdrew from the art world for the remainder of his life, passing from cancer in 2004. Posthumously, his work and life drew greater positive attention due to friend Randal Wilcox and Artforum writer Douglas Crimp.