“There Were Some Guys Who [Came To Shoot With Me] Who Thought They Were On The Fringes Of Porn Stardom”: New York Photographer Stanley Stellar On Retrospective, Don’t Worry Boys

Visual remnants of the queer community’s late-20th-century West Village presence are scarce, but there will always be the images of Stanley Stellar. As a new book considers that 30-year archive, its editor sits down with the man behind the shutter.

Sometimes it was just sunbathing. Sometimes kissing. Sometimes fucking. Sometimes watching. Other times, one might find love at its most potent – unfolding, at least for the duration of an embrace – tucked in the quiet of one of the piers’ recesses. 

Whatever was happening, one might also find Stanley Stellar and his lens by the Hudson River waterfront, observing life in this queer enclave in Lower Manhattan during its late-20th-century heyday. The area had been a cruising ground for decades, but by the 1970s, as its industrial fortunes declined, there was an opening for it to be claimed by the community in earnest. “We had taken over this street that didn’t have any businesses really, so the businesses couldn’t complain to the police,” Stellar tells Jordan Hancock, editor of a monograph – Don’t Worry Boys, published Loose Joints – re-examining 30 years of the cult LGBTQ+ photographer’s cavernous archive. “It was almost like, ‘Here’s a free block.’” 

Stellar first found himself, as a “gullible boy”, blocks away from the piers on Christopher Street, home to the Stonewall Inn, in the years surrounding the 1969 riots. He moved to the neighbouring Tribeca with his partner Tommy, with whom he remains today, in 1976. By 1980, the progress of the gay liberation movement was tangible on Christopher Street and the piers as New York State’s sodomy law was overturned. “There was this explosion of freedom,” Stellar recounts.

In the intervening period, Stellar’s queer professional peers had made a name in fashion photography or fine art. Publishers would ask why Stellar couldn’t be more like Mapplethorpe. “They didn’t see value in my pictures at all. ‘We’re looking for really expensive lilies in an expensive vase, photographed in a square format…’ Nice and safe. But I was not safe.” 

Instead, Stellar had remained on the streets, with his West Village community, documenting this pocket of queer life in whichever human fashion it played out. “Stanley’s images are more a record of that time and place than the work of any other photographer of that period,” writer Andrew Holleran notes in Don’t Worry Boys’ introduction. “He said that?” Stellar asks when Hancock reads it out during their conversation for Man About Town. “That’s good!”  

Windows into this era of West Village LGBTQ+ history were never going to be abundant – a key draw of the closed piers was, after all, that they escaped the view of the world beyond. But the terror that encroached on those early 1980s days of hard-won increased freedoms is what makes Stellar’s vignettes of the characters that gathered in the vicinity – and the record that they were there at all – even more indispensable. Boys soon started to get sick and fade from the scene. Those with a diagnosis would sometimes call Stellar to ask him to capture their youthful physicality before AIDS left its mark. Couples would, other times, ask for portraits that immortalised their affections before sickness separated them. 

Stellar, now aged 81, mourns the lost rite of recalling those days with friends who could remember them too. “We could [say], ‘Hey, remember how we were and how it was?’” Instead, he details them to younger generations, including Hancock – the first person to ever be given carte blanche over his digitised archive. Hancock, a creative and photography agent and “amateur historian” of this strand of visual culture, found the exchange of stories that comprised Don’t Worry Boys’ creation to be as gratifying as seeing the finished product. 

There’s sweetness to the pair’s intergenerational coming-together. Hancock decodes what’s happening on the screen for Stellar as their Zoom call with Man About Town connects. But Stellar’s still as forthright and acerbic as you would imagine any born-and-raised New Yorker would be – not least one who has lived in such high definition. “As proud as I am of the book, what I’ve learned from you and our relationship, and what I’ll continue to learn from you, gives me even more,” Hancock tells him. “That’s because you think you know my whole story…” Stellar laughs.

Jordan Hancock: I knew of your work for a very long time via Tumblr. And then when I was asked to do a book by Loose Joints, you were the first person I presented.

Stanley Stellar: Oh yeah?

JH: I actually reached out to you randomly through Instagram, came over, and we immediately started getting to know each other and looking at your pictures. I realised that people are always coming over here to talk to you and look at pictures. I would love to hear about what that means to you – having people in your space all the time and different conversations? 

SS: Well, when I began to invite people to do my first studio shoots and come here, I realised pretty quickly that in letting gay men into my world in the late ’70s, I had to be prepared for all kinds of people. Smart people and not smart. People with big egos and people open and free. So I decided that I had to treat everybody accordingly by a certain set of standards. If someone was here and I had any intention of photographing them, I had to be really upfront and clear about the difference between what I wanted and what most other gay men wanted – there weren’t very many out-gay photographers in the early days – but everybody wanted basically the same thing: sex. [Guys] came here thinking this was going to be a sexual situation. They sort of expected that if you come and pose for Stanley, then you’re probably going to wind up naked. I used to have ads out that were looking for “nude dudes” – I wanted to do nude photoshoots so I could sell them to gay monthly magazines. 

All these implied implications about coming here and being photographed by me often resulted in them being in a state of semi-arousal just by being here. That would be enough. All of a sudden, these guys would have erections, no matter what I wanted. There were some guys who thought they were on the fringes of porn stardom, and I didn’t want that from them. They became disillusioned by being here with me, because I wasn’t giving them the cheesiest experience. I wanted to go somewhere different with them.

JH: It wasn’t what they were expecting from you. 

SS: Right. And I never tried to do that. And also, there’s this idea that I have in my head: crossing the line. Crossing the line is a real bad thing, because when I did cross the line, and there were many times I did back then, it resulted in my forgetting all about the pictures. Fucking up. No battery – whatever [laughs].

JH: In putting this book together, I went through 30 full years of what you have digitised at least, which was thousands upon thousands of images.

SS: And that’s just what I digitised. There’s so much more.

JH: The process took a full year, and you always say to me that I’m the only person you’ve allowed free rein over the hard drives, ever, which makes me feel so amazing, because I feel so connected to you. But it’s also surprising, because I find you to be the most open person to anybody who comes in the door.

SS: Correct. But [your access] came about because of your personality, and letting me know as soon as you walked in here that you had done your homework. When people come to me, and they have some sense of my history, that gives them a lot of entitlements. 

JH: It gives them a leg up with you.

SS: Yeah, because I’ve settled my story so many times, and explained who I am, and that I’m not a porn studio. I’m letting you in, and I want you to feel safe and respected, and that I have some degree of affection for you. Otherwise, I wouldn’t want to show you my work or photograph you.

JH: That makes total sense. Now I want to talk about the area. We’re in Tribeca, and you’ve been 50 years in this apartment. We’re staring at the wall where you’ve shot all of the portraits that are in the book. For this conversation, I’d love to group where we are in Tribeca now with the West Village and, as Andrew Holleran calls it, the “Lower West Side”. How has it changed since you came to this apartment?

SS: When we first moved here, this was a really rough neighbourhood. It was freight trucks loading produce and things like that. All these lofts had businesses still in them. I found this neighbourhood because of a gay man who was here maybe a year before [my partner] Tommy and me. He realised that he could try to act as a rental agent between gay men who wanted to inhabit this neighbourhood and stuffy old business and corporate owners. Some of the buildings architecturally are just fabulous. Nothing here looks like [what] they now call “modern luxury apartments.”

JH: When you moved here, in my mind, it was kind of the peak of the West Village – of the cruising and of the piers. But I want to go backwards a little because, really, the thing that sets you apart from so many of your peers and other New York artists and queer artists is that you are from Brooklyn. You’re from Flatbush. So you didn’t just see the peak. You saw all of it before. 

SS: Greenwich Village always had a history of some kind of queerness. Queer people didn’t know much – there was no internet. You could find somebody’s psychological evaluation of who or what homosexuals were, but after that, we were all on our own. But I always knew that the Village had been historically a place that some gay artists migrated to or lived in. My mother was a semi-professional painter, and Greenwich Village used to have this art show on the street twice a year. I was always thrilled to come to the West Village and hang out while my mother put her paintings on display. But I had no idea [where] the queer part was. They always put the paintings more around where NYU is – it’s a much safer section. So I knew that we must be here, but where, I didn’t know until someone picked me up and brought me to Christopher Street on his way to take me to someone’s apartment one night. And I remember him walking me down, saying, ‘You turn here.’ [And I thought], ‘Aha, okay – remember that, Stanley, so you can come back here another time without him.’ 

When I finally came back and had the nerve to come without telling my parents where I was going, I found other gay men my age, and even some from Brooklyn, just like me. We’d just be standing on the street in the evening, or leaning against parked cars, or leaning in doorways, or sitting on front steps of small apartments that were there, and that helped us all. All of us were basically there because we wanted sex. We wanted interaction. There was no other way to connect.

JH: When you first make that new discovery as gays, sex is the first, most natural way of making a connection. And then you slowly realise there’s so much more to it than that.

SS: Well, also none of us were getting it [laughs]. We were just young men with no experience, and for many of the people who became my friends, this was their first season in Greenwich Village at night too, along with me.

JH: And this would have been in the late ’60s?

SS: Yeah. It’s amazing how historical and how old this story goes back.

JH: Before we get into the piers, I want to talk very specifically about this picture, “Gay Pride Day, 1983”. When you talk about discovering this [area] in the late ’60s, you're talking about a sparseness of people. But in this picture, in the intervening 13 to 15 years, it had totally changed because this is the opposite of sparse. Obviously it’s on Pride, but it feels wall to wall. 

SS: That’s how hungry we all were to be in one place with each other. At that point, we were feeling really celebratory that we had eked out this one fucking Sunday a year where the police were not going to ban us from being together. Even in the earliest days on Christopher Street, there was constant foot patrol by policemen in uniform who would say, ‘Keep moving, boys. No loitering.’ There was no pretence at treating us just like citizens. So we kept walking around the same blocks over and over. [At Pride], we got to see who else was there, who else was horny, and who else was the safe bet that they wanted what we wanted. 

I remember being in that spot, taking that picture and being overwhelmed by how happy we all were. I didn’t know them. I knew a few people, but everybody was like, ‘Oh, I can just be out here in the sun, and you’re gay, and I’m gay,’ and we could talk about whatever – how it felt to get fucked, or how it felt to go for coffee.

JH: There are only seven blocks between Christopher Street and the river – it's so close. But there was a real difference in the vibe. When you got to the water, it was much more about sex.

SS: Oh, it was creepily about sex. All those freight trucks that loaded and unloaded from the shipping business, they would be empty [at night] of their produce, and would be unlocked. You start noticing that these gays are climbing into the backs of these trucks.

JH: So wild! 

SS: Into the darkness. And they went so far back these freight trucks, you couldn’t see past 10 feet. When you let yourself be in this blackness, everybody lined up their backs against the walls – this is really something else – there were some of us who just went around in the dark, with blindfolds, groping the men who were all lined up with their backs against the wall, and that led to whatever sex those people were motivated for. But it was always really creepy to me. It always smelled of piss and shit, and I thought, ‘I don’t want to suck somebody's dick that just came out of some unknown asshole.’ And ‘This guy is rejecting me because he doesn’t like how my dick feels through my jeans, and I can’t even see his fucking face?’ So, I wouldn’t last long, but that was the state of that strip down there with the docks. That was an early introduction to me of, ‘This is what gay life is.’ 

JH: What you said about the trucks leads me to your pictures of the piers. You’re really not and have never been scared of sexuality, even in its most intense forms. There’s nothing that is taboo to you. It’s all beautiful.

SS: A lot of reviews of my work, they always added the word ‘unashamed’ to it, which is not something you would say about a fashion photographer. So I kept thinking, ‘What are they talking about, “unashamed”?’ 

JH: It’s also not something anyone would say about Diane Arbus.

SS: Right. And she was an inspiration to me back then. Now I realise that it’s a compliment. And what the fuck do we have to be ashamed about? But I grew up – all of us grew up – in the culture of ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ ‘We don’t want to have to see you or hear you. We won't kill you… 

JH: …anymore.’

SS: Right. Anymore. ‘But you should be ashamed.’ 

JH: You’ve never been hiding, it seems.

SS: No, why should I? I felt entitled to let myself be as creatively free or unashamed or unembarrassed as I wanted to be, because it just coincided with the social liberation of the time. I think that’s a big thing that differentiates Peter Hujar and me. He was 10 years older than me. He came from similar circumstances but a time when it was the kiss of death to be known in New York City as a gay photographer. We were friends, and he looked [at me] like I was some kind of brave pioneer, putting out postcards of my work in colour with my name on them. And me going, ‘Yeah, this is hot, don’t you see it’s hot?’ And ‘How much can the police want to imprison me for looking at male nipples?’ Those were realities too about it. Nixon was the president then. 

JH: When I was going through your archives, the [image] that maybe we even inadvertently landed on is this picture in the piers of the two guys embracing in colour. You are really able to illustrate in many pictures that 1) you’re not afraid of the hardcore sex, but 2) you have an eye for the intimacy, even in that space. There is something so intimate about this picture. Even if these guys only met for 15 minutes, they were kind of in love for 15 minutes.

SS: And that’s what covered piers offered us. A safe, shielded place, even though we could hear the car zooming by on the West Side Highway. In the day, people would go, and they met [with] each other. It was so big, so you could say, ‘Let’s go and look for a place for us.’

JH: Yeah, and it becomes intimate.

SS: But at the same time, it was expected that if someone found you playing with somebody, it was up to them if they were going to stand there and look at you. 

JH: It’s one thing to live that intimacy, but to see it through a camera the way you do, you wouldn’t have been able to do that if you were a person who had any amount of shame around what was happening in there. 

SS: Why should we have shame for having the need to touch each other? Fuck that. They hated us so much that they made it illegal for us to dance with each other. What did we do to them?

JH: It’s interesting because the way that you’re feeling about that comes out in the pictures. It’s so romantic. It is because you love gay people.

SS: My friends have always been my family. And more of my family, on an honest level, than whoever my ‘friends’ might have been. Those guys on Christopher Street at night – we got to know each other’s stories and dreams, each other’s level of experience or naivety, each other's lives and deaths. 

JH: Once we had gone through everything, we spoke a lot about how the AIDS crisis plays out in this book. It was always our plan to cover it.

SS: The unbelievable Twilight Zone nightmare.

JH: It’s an unavoidable topic to cover.

SS: For people in my age group. I don’t think young people want to… they’d rather talk about COVID.

JH: But it was always my goal to, because of what I saw in your pictures, show that we can talk about AIDS and still show all of the joy.

SS: And we came together for each other. If you lived, that’s because of the help you had and the attention you had from your gay friends and lesbians. Lesbians were not afraid to be on our side and stand with us, as nurses and doctors and scientists, when nobody else would. 

JH: I want to talk about the story around the picture of the kiss in front of the church on Christopher Street, because you have told me how that relates to AIDS. It’s ’81, so it’s the very beginning.

 SS: Everyone I knew was walking on eggshells, because we knew people were getting sick, and there was no name for it, and it seemed to be mostly happening to us. ‘Gay men in New York and San Francisco.’ And we didn’t know if being ‘this’ close to somebody would just kill us. So many of my friends who got sick were the same friends who said to me out loud, ‘Oh, Stanley, I’m not going to get it.’ It was just so science-fiction-like. 

 By ’81, we had garnered the strength to have this one day a year: Gay Pride Sunday. And also, it coincided with the fact that we started having gay-owned medical institutions. Gay Men’s Health Crisis started with gay men’s money, and gay doctors and gay people needing a safe place to go. That’s the era of the beginning of the medical services we needed: that kissing picture. And they were raising money for Gay Men's Health Crisis.

JH: It’s a little bit exhibitionism, but even more than exhibitionism, it’s bravery. Everyone was a bit scared. And out of context, you think this is totally just voyeurism, but it's certainly not. There are so many more layers to it. Your work in the studio happened at the same time – and after – the AIDS crisis. It was always my feeling that that was somewhat coincidental. But from the outside, it actually reads as very appropriate. I’d love to talk to you about that timeline. Was there any correlation? 

SS: In my attempts at surviving and selling my photographs, mostly to gay publishers, I would take prints to galleries that I knew were gay-owned. But I would take what I thought were incredible boxes of images, mostly black and white prints, [taken] on the street. I would get the same reaction: ‘Oh, get off the street, Stanley! You're too gritty for us.’ And I didn’t know how to process it. That coincided with the era of Mr Mapplethorpe. 

So I had to move inside, because I wanted more than I was getting. I got really good at stopping people on the street and saying, ‘Work with me.’ We’d exchange phone numbers. I’d let them know that I’d get back to them, and I wasn’t going to exploit their picture or sell it to a lube company. Those were our categories: HIV meds, lubes. 

There were these lovers who were my friends, and one was British, and one was from Kansas, and they had a barbershop called the Christopher Street Barbershop. The three of us loved each other. No, I never had sex with either of them. They helped to style a lot of the people on the street because something about being gay in New York means you better fucking have a good haircut, otherwise you don’t belong here. So that garnered them a lot of power.

I could go hang out in their salon, and we’d all smoke weed and joke, at four in the afternoon, and they’d just be working away on somebody, and guy after guy after guy would come in and experience us interacting. Very often, Phillip and Michael would say, ‘You really should photograph him,’ and they would make the introduction. And I didn’t want to take their picture in the barbershop or on the street. I wanted something a little deeper that allowed me to look at their face, to see how beautiful I thought their mouths were, or the shape of their ass was, and you could only get a deeper level when the model was in a safer situation – and what’s more safe than your living room?

JH: Exactly. And something I think that is interesting is that the studio pictures illustrate your interest in the people over everything else. You loved the people. It’s another thing that Andrew says in his essay – even the pictures on the street, they’re so confronting. You care so much about the person.

SS: It wasn’t random. And by the time I was moving into the studio and hanging out with Phillip and Michael, everybody was starting to have awareness of HIV. We didn’t know who was sitting waiting for their haircut and had just come from the doctor's office. We didn’t talk about it all that much. I remember my friend Michael, with his British accent, walking in there one day, and him saying to me, ‘Oh, did you hear about little Freddie?’ And I said, ‘No’, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s in the hospital. He has some strange bird disease.’ And then Michael just laughed it off and said, ‘He’ll be better soon. He’ll be back next week.’ Of course, he never was. So, it was something we confronted, but we weren’t like, ‘Hey, let’s have a party where we invite everybody who thinks they’ve got AIDS.’

JH: My final question for you is – you’ve kept this passion for our community for your whole life. Even as the world has changed so much. And you’ve never stopped welcoming people into your home to look at the pictures. What is it like to have people of younger generations come to you with curiosity, wanting and caring to hear more? 

SS: It’s gratifying because I never had anyone like that in my life. And we don’t have role models, and I don’t think we ever have had role models, except for public role models like RuPaul, and that’s not a role model for me. So my role model is my humanity.

And 90 per cent of my peers are gone. I miss having the idea that I could’ve talked about everything with them now. Now I know it’s my role here, and what I can give gay people who come here – men and women – is my perspective on how we’ve evolved, what we’ve faced.

I’m a product of the city and this time, and the other creative people who have been here. The other creative people who got sick and started having seizures on the street. And I think it’s an honour to be able to have the life that I’ve had and that I can honour us. Honour that we had love for each other.

Don’t Worry Boys by Stanley Stellar is published by Loose Joints, available now at www.loosejoints.biz