Photographer Alice Austen was the queer star of the Gilded Age

Austen bought her final remaining possessions to a junk seller for $600. A preservationist at coronary heart, she gave hundreds of plates, negatives and private treasures to an acquaintance, Loring McMillen, director of the Staten Island Historical Society (now Historic Richmond Town), who declared the ladies “not broken in spirit but broken in health and finance.”

Austen and Tate lived collectively in a small condominium till Austen’s arthritis proved too debilitating. When they have been pressured to separate, Tate moved to her sister’s house in Queens, New York, and Austen to a house for the aged — and ultimately, at age 84, a literal poor farm. Ever devoted, Tate visited Austen commonly on the Staten Island Farm Colony.

But the 7,500 images and negatives Austen entrusted to the Historical Society would show a saving grace, and they’d guarantee her place as an eminent documentarian of a altering panorama within the immigration period.

In 1950, a Life journal editor stumbled on Austen’s images of nineteenth century American life — and discovered she was alive. Life ran a story the next yr, and Austen acquired a payment that allowed her to take up residence with a non-public caregiver.

Weeks after publication, the Staten Island Historical Society hosted “Alice Austen Day.” Overwhelmed and delighted to see the primary public displaying of her work at age 85, Austen attended with Tate and 300 visitors. “I’d be taking these pictures myself if I were 100 years younger,” Austen quipped.

In June, due to Austen’s worsening situation and a bureaucratic glitch, plans have been being set in movement to maneuver her to Welfare Island, then a location of public establishments for the aged and infirm. She wouldn’t make the journey. On June 9, 1952, Tate was making ready to make the journey from Queens to go to when the cellphone rang: Austen had been wheeled to the nursing house porch and easily handed away, quietly bathed in morning daylight.

Austen was buried at Staten Island’s Moravian Cemetery. Tate died 10 years later, at 91. Her household denied her want to be buried with Austen.

The couple couldn’t have foreseen that throughout the a long time and into a brand new millennium, future strangers can be moved to advocate for recognition of their devotion: from a 1994 Lesbian Avengers protest in opposition to institutional resistance to naming the pair as greater than “friends” to Munro’s mission to make sure Tate’s identify is discoverable in archival metadata, given a reputation past “unknown woman.”

Their story is housed throughout the clapboard and stone of their historic residence, now the Alice Austen House and a nationally designated site of LGBTQ history. Today, a customer enters to seek out Tate’s portrait in her rightful place in household tree documentation on the wall.

“It is imperative that we center her queerness and her identity and that we celebrate this beautiful, beautiful love story,” Munro stated. “People have now come back and visited the Alice Austen House and wept because they’re so happy to see this visibility.”