Vintage gay

But when he died, he chose a group of people to continue his work. We have houses out here. Simply having photos developed that reflected homosexuality could get you arrested. Take a step back in time to the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s with a queer throwback of decades past.

I felt like, oh my god, I'm looking into the faces of people I know today. There is a transient community in Cherry Grove, people who just come for the day to enjoy the beach and the bars. In the s, it was dangerous for queer people to document themselves.

When we started scanning images from the s, we were immediately blown away by joy. It's really wonderful.

Homobilia Vintage Gay Physique : These images depict same-sex couples and groups expressing affection, friendship, and intimacy — decades before it was acceptable

Whenever people show something in a documentary or in a book, most of the photos of gay life start at Stonewall and goes on from there. And queer people were not allowed to congregate. The longtime residents, who were mostly straight families from Long Island, used Cherry Grove as a fishing spot and for the amazing beach.

We have a lot of lost history that was thrown away, so these photos from the archives add so much to our knowledge of what gay life was like. We've always been here — 13 gay photos from the dawn of photography As long as there have been cameras, there have been gay folks recording our queer lives!.

Lots of families. There are a lot of people who rent [a house] for one week or a month. It's easy for us as a newer generation to think they must have just been living in hell — but to look back at these photos, the people in them are happy. Of the 15 other communities on Fire Island, most of them are straight.

Check out a gallery of retro gaylenes after the jump!. They are joyous. As queer men were ostracized from society in the early 20th century, some came together to form a community on a secluded strip of beach just off the coast of Long Island.

There's this idea that before Stonewall, everyone was repressed. As a trans woman, I definitely felt like I was not present in Cherry Grove at that time, but gay men and women were there, carving out space that I get to inhabit today. As the area evolved over the years, one man made it his mission to save artifacts from this community, eventually forming the Cherry Grove Archives Collection.

What makes these photos so wonderful is that they are very rare. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. This is the time of the McCarthy era and the Lavender Scare, when men couldn't dance with men, women can't dance with women.

Secret Photos of Gay :

We saw that we had this new element to add, these photos that people had not seen before. What began in the s as a simple collection of photos has become a treasure chest of queer history that includes house signs, playbills, and films that show the daily life and fabulous events of the Grove.

When we saw these photos from Seeley's collection, we saw that it was adding something to the lexicon of gay life. BuzzFeed News spoke with Sargent over the phone about why this collection is important. They may not have been highly affluent, but they had enough income to rent these basic little cabins out on Cherry Grove.

And since then we've been trying to catalog and digitize everything he collected.