As a young gay boy growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, Stanley Stellar always felt alone. “I didn’t have any friends,” he tells AnOther. “I would go up to the roof of my building, sitting there by myself, and thinking about the future. My greatest joys were looking at stacks of magazines. Images became my friends.”
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After studying graphic design at Parsons in the early 1960s, Stellar began his career as an editorial art director designing magazines and coffee-table books. “I’m a child of all media,” he says. “Inside my head are all the images of the second half of the 20th century. I was very aware of what was being done and who was doing it, along with the history of photography. After seeing so many other people’s work I wanted to take my own pictures.”
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In 1976, Stellar got his first professional camera and set forth on a mission to document Manhattan’s West Village, which was flourishing during the early years of the Gay Liberation Movement. “When I came out, the gay world was on the street. If you were a young gay man you had very few choices as to what to do, how to meet people, have sex or friends. I found Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street; for so many years that was the spot,” Stellar says.
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“I was invited to gay men’s apartments and seeing what their lives were like. It made a real impression on me; I needed to record us in ways that were not necessarily commercial. Images of men in society meant GQ or porn magazines on 42nd Street – that was it. I wanted to do what I had not seen.”
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