The magazine of the photo-essay
September/October 2023 back issue
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
Castro to Christopher
Gay Streets of America 1979 - 1986
Between 1979 and 1986—after Stonewall and before the darkest days of the AIDS
epidemic—there was a period of exuberant and burgeoning gay life in places even
then known as “gay paradises.” There were others, but the best known were San
Francisco’s Castro District, New York’s Christopher Street and Fire Island, and
Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Blair’s revealing, evocative, and celebratory photos are a window into the outburst of
pent-up celebration and (occasionally) riotous ebullience of theretofore closeted
persons who had suddenly felt the door of tolerance opening a crack, and who were
now leaning in, hard, to live life openly as their true and genuine selves.
by Nicholas Blair
