Before you or I or anyone in San Francisco for that matter could spot a bear blocks away in SoMa, there was the revelation of Hal Fischer's Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men (1977).

“I was exposing something and I was celebrating it by using text and a certain way of photographing in a very deliberately artificial way to disarm it, to not make it threating,” Slate quotes him.

Now Gay Semiotics: is being rereleased by Artbook this month, Vice reports. It's a depiction of "the ambiguity, the way of being able to code things and communicate, and not have it be misunderstood," Fischer says.

One can easily imagine the young photographer, a 25-year-old transplant from Highland Park, Illinois who arrived in San Francisco during 1975 to study art, making sense — and fun — of his surroundings and fellows in his life and work.

"Your basic gay look, was really adopting certain masculine signifiers, like flannel shirts and jeans," he explains. "Out of context, maybe if you wore that in Billings, Montana, it wouldn't necessarily have read as gay. That's because these things were all adopted from mainstream culture."

Though Fischer's typological, nearly anthropological assessment may show its age thirty-seven years from its original publication, it does so — in my opinion — super charmingly. And, not least, it preserves a moment made all the more poignant in the contemporary imagination, one that recalls the devastation of AIDS to come and the march toward equal recognition and rights for gay men and women to follow — and what some would call the simultaneous march toward total assimilation.

Fischer still lives and works in the Bay Area. His rereleased work is available from Artbook for $25.

From 'Hal Fischer: Gay Semiotics.'