I’m looking for work these days, so creating this blog has given me a sense of purpose as well as a creative outlet. I like to keep the blog fun and hopefully educational, but the preservation of these images is what’s most important to me. As an LGBT individual, what does compiling all of these photographs for the larger community mean to you? There is something very reaffirming about seeing these vintage photos of gay couples, seeing that we’ve always been around. I still buy original photos, but they are getting so expensive that I’m just about priced out of the market. I started looking on Google Images and discovered that these sorts of photos were all over the Internet. I rediscovered them in a box a few years ago that’s what got me interested again. In 1952, he was prosecuted for homosexual acts and was found dead in 1954 from. I collected them for years and years, but during one of my many moves they were stored away and forgotten. It is also the sweet stinging on my lips left by a man who has just been. The book is a companion to Lifshitz’s 2012 film, Les Invisibles.Ĭomplement The Invisibles with history’s most moving LGBT love letters and Edie Windsor on what equality really means.The Huffington Post: How did you come across all of these photographs? Jeffrey Gent: I started noticing vintage photos of male couples at the 26th St. Looking back over the first half of the twentieth century, Lifshitz set out to interview gay women and men born between the two World Wars, seeking to understand what life was like for them - people like the great Edith Windsor, who belongs to that generation and has done for marriage equality more than any other individual in history. He found himself fascinated by such family albums by openly gay couples and was surprised by the freedom and happiness they exhibited in those photos, despite living in eras of extreme social intolerance toward LGBT people. Each couple, Diane Ackerman wrote in her sublime natural history of love, gets to redefine love, and these are some humble and humbling, beautifully human, immeasurably yet quietly courageous redefinitionsįor Lifshitz, the project began somewhat serendipitously: As a longtime collector of vintage amateur photos, he chanced upon a photo album that belonged to two elderly women, “very bourgeois, very ‘old France.’” It didn’t take him long to realize that they were in a lifelong lesbian relationship.
That’s precisely what French screenwriter and director Sébastien Lifshitz explores in The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride ( public library | IndieBound), a remarkable collection of archival photographs - sometimes poignant, sometimes playful, invariably tender - of gay and lesbian couples privately celebrating their love in the early twentieth century. Toklas, but also experienced by a great many ordinary men and women alike. It was the role photography played for the LGBT community between the time of the medium’s invention and the first-ever Pride parades as it came to document, and validate by making visible, the love of queer couples - love reserved not only for such famous lovers as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Oscar Wilde and Sir Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B.
Perhaps that is why photography, in its dawning decades, had a particularly poignant role for individuals and groups who were largely invisible to society. Before photography turned into excessive “aesthetic consumerism,” long prior to the narcissistic golden age of the selfie, it was a miraculous medium that granted one simple, fundamental human wish - the desire to be seen and, in the act of seeing, to be understood. Any form of excess can usually be traced to the seed of a basic human longing.