The Wild Magic of Fire Island, c. 1979
There's a critical difference between Tom Bianchi's Polaroid camera and how we use the one on our phone today.
On our coffee table sits Tom Bianchi’s “Fire Island Pines”. It’s a book of Polaroids, taken during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Bianchi and thousands of other gay men escaped Manhattan, or whatever other place, for that strip of sand in New York.
The book was a gift, in that 1) someone gave it to me and 2) it’s a treat to flip through this rollicking, wild era.
The photos remind me that we – the large We, as in, queer people – have existed all along, but that you won’t learn our history passively. You have to go and find it, learn it, and celebrate it. (Bonus: photos of erections count as art if you present it as such.)
What strikes me the most in looking through the photos is how happy people are, how much joy is vibrating off of their bodies, whether drinking at tea or, often, stripping down to nothing. (One of the heavy parts of the book is that the photos were taken right before the AIDS crisis, leaving you to wonder what happened to the beautiful, joyous men in the photos.)
Bianchi’s camera is alarmingly intimate – there are LOTS of naked men – but equally as tender. It doesn’t feel voyeuristic or creepy; it illustrates a slice of queer life exactly for what it was, almost with a shyness despite the swinging appendages. In one photo, I had to count the number of legs to comprehend how many men were piled up against one another, but, with its hazy lens and the late afternoon sun splashing across the porch, it reads more meditative and humorous than salacious.
This all feels different than how we document our Big Gay Vacations today. Recently, I was in Los Angeles with friends. It was the full LA experience – Airbnb with a pool, dinner at a vegan Mexican restaurant, a 60 minute car ride to stay at a house party for 30 minutes.
Of course, the vacation also included quick breaks for post-worthy photos.
The last few times I went to LA, I couldn’t go anywhere without tripping over people taking photos next to, say, a giant pink wall. Or putting their toes in the sand and practically oozing live laugh love. Of course, this isn’t unique to that city; it was, and is, happening everywhere. But, as Sheryl Crow once said, this is LA. It’s a place run on fame where everyone has a dream. Sure, that dream was once to be on the silver screen and now it’s to be on a screen in our pockets, with a ceiling-less need for more followers. But it’s a dream nonetheless, and god dammit if I’m not going to post about it.
This is not what we see through Bianchi’s work. The camera is a trusted documentarian rather than a tool for fame or validation. (Also, I get the feeling that Tom wasn’t behind the camera the whole time.) He writes that he kept the pictures in an old shoebox, too painful to open and revisit after the AIDS crisis hit. When he finally did, 40 years after the photos slid out of the camera, those men and those memories came dancing back to life. He was inspired to publish them as a book.
We’re lucky for it. The naturalness and intimacy of his images is what makes them so moving, and so special. Today, in creating – setting up, posing, shooting, posting – for social media, we treat the camera less as a friend and more as a hired PR machine. At that point, the documentation we have is just, well, filtered.
It’s why the greatest irony of it all is that, 40 years later, Bianchi’s photos look better than our best Instagram posts. We may think that we’re living a new era when in fact, it’s been done before, and with alarming intimacy.
At some point in the future, someone may curate unseen, amorous photos from current day and share them with the world. It will be someone who knows the value of the lens on their phone, someone who treats it as Bianchi did his Polaroid camera. This person will share it as history, for art and education, rather than an upload for immediate engagement and personal validation.
Perhaps that person will be you. After all, if you’re paying attention, you know that we’ve been here all along – and only we can tell that story.
Photos from Tom Bianchi’s “Fire Island Pines”