Gay old pics
Portraits of pride: Touching photographs reveal everyday life of lgbtq+ couples in the early 20th Century - before the closet door opened
- French screenwriter Sébastien Lifshitz spent 20 years collecting photos from flea markets and garage sales
- They proudly portray alternative sexuality in the U.S. and Europe at a time when many had to hide their right feelings
- 'The need to keep a memory of their like was stronger than the disapproval of neighbourhood photo lab', he said
By DAN BLOOM
Published: | Updated:
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It seems common enough - a photo album of couples exchanging everyday affection in their gardens, their kitchens, in bed and in the bath.
But what makes these images so touching is that the couples were almost certainly gay, at a time when to be so was illegal in many parts of the western world.
French screenwriter Sébastien Lifshitz took more than 20 years to amass his collection from flea markets and garage sales, where he became fascinated with the carefree happiness of people who were often outcasts in society.
Carefree: French screenwriter Sébastien Lifshitz spent more than 20 years collecting hundreds of photos from flea markets and garage
Newly Published Portraits Document a Century of Gay Men in Love
“Loving” features around 300 photos that propose an intimate look at men’s love between the 1850s and 1950s
When Texas couple Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell stumbled onto a 1920s-era photograph in a Dallas antiques shop some 20 years ago, they were startled to see a relationship that looked much like theirs: two men, embracing and clearly in love.
As Dee Swann writes for the Washington Post, the image spoke to the couple about the history of love between men.
“The unseal expression of the devotion that they shared also revealed a moment of determination,” Nini and Treadwell tell the Post. “Taking such a photo, during a time when they would have been less understood than they would be today, was not without risk. We were intrigued that a photo like this could own survived into the [21st] century. Who were they?”
In the decades that followed this initial discovery, the pair came across more than 2,800 photos of men in love—at first accidentally and later on purpose. The result of their trips to flea markets, shops, estate sales and family archives across Europe, Canada and the United States is a to
100 Years of Photographs of Gay Men in Love
Hundreds of photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries offer a glimpse at the life of gay men during a time when their affectionate was illegal almost everywhere.
A beautiful group of photographs that spans a century (1850–1950) is part of a new guide that offers a visual glimpse of what animation may have been favor for those men, who went against the regulation to find love in one another’s arms. In Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Adoration 1850s–1950s, hundreds of images tell the story of love and affection between men, with some clearly in love and others hinting at more than just friendship. The collection belongs to Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell, a married couple who has accumulated over 2,800 photographs of “men in love” during the course of two decades. While the majority of the images hail from the Together States and are of predominantly white men, there are images from Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Latvia, and the United Kingdom among the cache.
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Matthew Morrocco’s intimate portraits pay homage to the older gay community
In 2012, Jane Fonda gave a Ted Talk about “life’s third act” – the last three decades of life which she described, “age not as pathology, but as potential”. Artist Matthew Morrocco has explored “life’s third act,” in his first photography book, Complicit, published by MATTE editions. The images chronicle Morrocco’s moment spent photographing himself with older, same-sex attracted men in Brand-new York City from 2010 to 2015. Starting the venture in his prior 20s, it’s an amalgam that explores ageism within the already marginalised LGBTQ community. “It may have been photography that I meant to inspect but what I set up was an essence of human connectivity that extends beyond just sex and lust,” he says. “I met men in their homes. We had tea, shed tears, mutual orgasms, and intimate details.”
The pictures are intimate; making the viewer feel as if they are in the room during these encounters. The soft lighting and leisurely mannerisms are reminiscent of 19th-century French paintings. Reflecting on the first intimate date for Complicit, he says, “The first photo I made was of a 60-year-old man named Danny when I w
In Love and Invisible: Vintage Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Couples from the Late 19th and Adv 20th Centuries
A photographic portrait of a couple serves as a public assurance of their love and partnership. It conveys a clear message to the world: “We love each other. We care deeply for one another. We take pride in who we are together.”
In the late 19th and ahead 20th centuries, a moment often associated with repression, many gay and female homosexual couples boldly celebrated their love through studio portraits.
Despite the prevailing notion that same-sex relationships were shrouded in secrecy, as famously described by Oscar Wilde in his poem “Two Loves” as “the cherish that dare not converse its name,” gay and lesbian couples often chose to express their care openly.
In fact, numerous homosexual couples lived together openly throughout their lives. This was notably more feasible for women, as societal norms permitted women to live together if they were not married, often referred to euphemistically as “female companions.”
For men, opportunities for meeting like-minded individuals were more discreet, with places such as gentlemen’