The work of queer photographer William Gale Gedney (1932-1989) went under-appreciated during his lifetime, which was cut short by AIDS, though in recent years his photographs of life in the Haight-Ashbury just before the Summer of Love have resurfaced thanks to a 2021 book of his work.
It's not often that gay people get glimpses of their forebears from the years before the first Gay Liberation Marches and Pride parades. The 2020 book Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love uses found photography to document gay romances from the 1850s to the 1950s, with some of the photographs more obviously and indisputably gay than others.
But many younger queer people may have a hard time imagining queer lives existing before they splashed out into the media with events like the Stonewall Rebellion in New York in 1969 — or the earlier, much less well documented Compton's Cafeteria Riot in the summer of 1966 in SF's Tenderloin.
William Gedney, taking some inspiration from the work of Walt Whitman, was drawn to documenting the lives of everyday people, and celebrating the architecture of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he did in a series of works in the late 1950s. He was friends with photographer Diane Arbus, who reportedly tried to get him to take over teaching her classes at Cooper Union. At age 34, in 1966, Gedney was established enough in his career as a photographer that he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He used the money to take a cross-country journey that landed him in San Francisco in October 1966.
His series of photos from his six months in SF were taken partly in a communal house called "The Pad" that he landed in in the Haight, not far from the Grateful Dead's house. They show glimpses of out gay men in both public and private spaces, being affectionate and open. One photo in particular depicts two shirtless men in a park — presumably Golden Gate Park — with one lying with his head in the other's lap.
Another shows a shirtless man embracing a younger man, sitting at what might have been an outdoor concert in a park. And another captures a moment of two men kissing at what appears to be a party or the outdoor area of a leather bar. Taken together, they are dispatches from a queer history in SF that was not well photographed, by a man who himself kept a low profile, and may not have been very "out" in his lifetime.
Gedney would soon return to New York, and by 1969, when Stonewall happened, he was a professor of photoraphy at the Pratt Institute, where he would remain employed until the time of his death — he was reportedly denied tenure there in 1987, after 18 years at the school.
He assembled eight books of his own work, none of which were published in his lifetime. One collection published posthumously in 1999, titled What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney, was some scholars' first introduction to Gedney's work.
In 2021, A Time of Youth: San Francisco 1966–1967 was published by Duke University Press. Gedney wrote of the collection that it was "an attempt at visual literature, modeled after the novel form." Aperture Magazine covered the publication, noting how the photographs serve as "a witness to a time before a time," those months before the legendary Summer of Love, and "In this way, he was as ahead of his time artistically as the young dropouts and hippies who had arrived on the cusp of the counterculture."
Gedney was friends with queer composer John Cage, whose comment about the subjects of the photographs is included in the text, "They seem to be doing happy things sadly, or maybe they’re doing sad things happily."
Below, several more of the images from the collection.
[h/t: Lilium's Compendium]
