Stanley Stellar -xingyu wang

New York native Stanley Stellar, the first artist featured in the Artifacts film series, contributed a colour Xerox of his photograph Men Standing on the Street with me on Sunday, July 1, 1979 in Front of the Cock Ring Disco, NYC to the project. The image is particularly poignant in light of the passage of time; soon after the photograph was made the Cock Ring Disco would close and become an AIDS hospice. But all this was in a future no one working on Artifacts could imagine at that time, least of all Stellar himself.
Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 60s, Stellar remembers the way the mainstream media portrayed the LGBTQ+ community in the years before Stonewall, casting a dark shadow over his childhood. “As a 10-year-old, the media let me know that I was terrible and I would be lucky if I wasn’t killed when someone found out who I was,” he says. “We almost didn’t exist, but inside me I knew that there was a queer history in New York.”
“As soon as I started taking pictures, I know I was photographing a special time in the history of homosexuality” – Stanley Stellar
After Stellar came out, he began traveling to the West Village, then the city’s fabled bohemian quarter. “Back then, there was nowhere for us to sit. We’d sit on the steps of a building or lean against a parked car – the only other place for us was in a mob-run bar,” Stellar recalls. “There would always be two patrolmen on foot moving us along. On one of my trips around the block I found Christopher Street. It was a dark, one way street that led to the Hudson River. At the end of it there were a couple of seedy leather bars that scared the shit out of me. The police didn’t care what was happening down there.”
Stellar began to feel at home in this new world, knowing that he wasn’t going to be seen by his parents’ friends passing by in cars. One night in the early 1970s, he had a revelation while walking down Christopher Street with an older man. “This was our first date. I thought this was the world of love and romance,” he says, smiling back on his youthful naïveté. “He took me to an apartment to have sex. I remember he was carrying a chain full of keys to different buildings around the city and I suddenly realised, oh wow! There are all these gay lives going on behind closed doors. That stayed with me my whole life, even now in my old age: What does it mean to have a gay life?”

“Brian Michaels in a cowboy hat with a friend, West Side Highway NYC” (1981)

For Stellar, photography is a way to explore this question in depth, one that he never fails to carry when he steps out of the house ever since he purchased his first professional camera in 1976. “So many people who don’t fit in develop a place to go within themselves. Some go to sports, some to music, and I went to the image,” says Stellar, who went on to study graphic design in school. “I liked it because images could be reproduced and influence society. People could see themselves or things they didn’t see in ordinary life. This was always my impetus in my personal life and as an artist.”
Documenting the vibrant LGBTQ+ scene began when Stellar recognised he was living in truly extraordinary times. “Christopher Street was a haven,” he says. “I realised I was a part of history, that there was finally a place for us. I would go in the afternoon, sit by the river, and hang out with my friends. It made you feel like a human being, that being queer wasn’t based on having sex in dark corners. As soon as I started taking pictures, I know I was photographing a special time in the history of homosexuality.”