‘The Wonderful World That Almost Was’ Excerpt, Peter Hujar

The first time anybody cruised Peter Hujar, he was 16. An older man was following him down Lexington Avenue one Friday evening, when Peter swung round and requested, “Are you following me?” “No,” the person lied, however they made a date to see one another anyway. Peter was “in love with him right then,” he stated later. “All I could think about was how I was going to see him tomorrow.”

When Peter confirmed up the following day, the person answered the door in a inexperienced and brown turtleneck and a pair of inexperienced shorts. He should have regarded like an unripe squash, quivering on the sight of this stunning boy standing exterior his condominium. Peter thought he was good-looking however didn’t mistake his attraction for real love, solely the start of a approach for him to be in love. A fleeting second with a person, the primary of many, was typically all he needed or wanted. For a time, they noticed one another on Sundays, when he lied to his mom about going to church. Picking up guys and bringing them dwelling grew to become rather a lot simpler when he moved to Thompson Street. That’s when his intercourse life kicked into gear.

By 1970, he guessed that he might need had intercourse with not less than 15,000 folks. “If he had five minutes,” Fran Lebowitz remembered, “he’d go somewhere to have sex.” Peter puzzled how his flings from Christopher Street may look when photographed. So far, his portraits of lovers had probed character greater than sexuality. Sexuality — and sexiness — was in any other case unimportant to a studying of his photos; you didn’t essentially have to know what anybody obtained as much as in mattress, even when it helped to study that the nude blond boy on the zebra was a lover.

There had been few photographers who labored with homosexual male eroticism in any critical or direct approach on the time. But by the mid-’60s, Peter embraced the homosexual world rising to the floor. Already, he had captured such a variety of his personal expertise, so homosexual males — homosexual males who lived unafraid as homosexual males — had been an unavoidable topic for him, particularly when he noticed them all over the place. Inevitably, these males — their wishes, their sexual practices — would discover their approach in entrance of his digicam.

“I do want some of my sexual pictures to be hot,” Peter stated. “I’m not doing them with the idea of doing ‘artistic’ nudes. I want people to feel the picture and smell it. I want the picture to be seductive. I don’t think about it, but it happens anyway. Yet I don’t want the picture to be hot because that’s too easy to do. Then it gets to be standard porno pictures of some guy doing whatever. I want to have the photo contain the same elements that could be found in any good portrait.”

Sometime in late 1966, when Peter was 33 years outdated, he invited two leather-based queens, Jay and Fernando, each sporting tight pants, black shirts, and biker caps, into his studio. During the session, Jay and Fernando admire each other’s uniform, gold chains, gruff poise. At ease, turned on, they contact, style, toy with each other. One man’s cock is pierced. It rises from wiry pubic hair in a number of close-up pictures. The youthful of the 2 males strips. He poses with statuary confidence. Otherwise, they barely discover the digicam. Nothing Peter had shot earlier than was ever so specific.

The contact sheets yielded no particularly nice pictures, however then it was in all probability an exploratory shoot, apply for the longer term. Shortly thereafter, Peter photographed one other leather-based queen, the poet Kirby Congdon. Congdon poses towards a wall, removes his shirt, then his pants. Peter shot him mendacity down, posing bare towards the wall, ass going through the digicam (we additionally see his ass in a good shot). His erect penis is proven up shut. These are higher, Congdon just a little hotter.

Mostly lacking from these first “hot pictures” is that really feel and the scent, the seduction. Jay, Fernando, and Kirby Congdon are nonetheless seen at an emotional distance, even after they draw close to to the digicam and naked all of it. Their kink insists upon a efficiency of heightened masculinity and of a sexual theater that falls considerably flat for Peter’s digicam, with its eager sensitivity to uncooked and unvarnished individuality, his at all times searching for what lies behind the efficiency, backstage. If the success of Peter’s sexual pictures rely on their possessing the weather of a superb portrait — that “blistering, blazing honestly directed towards the lens,” as considered one of his sitters as soon as described it — then these early scorching photos, particularly of Jay and Fernando, considerably miss the mark, besides as an evaluation of a sexual sort. This would change shortly.

After the upheaval of the Sixties, nobody was fairly certain what would come subsequent — and for some time, it felt just like the Nineteen Seventies hadn’t began in any respect. The be-ins, the marches, and the riots had largely subsided, leaving an odd quiet of their place. For many homosexual males, the brand new decade was a revolution of the physique. It performed out in bedrooms, on the piers, in golf equipment. After a long time of repression, an entire technology all of a sudden felt free to discover what had been forbidden. In New York, that freedom erupted on the West Side, the place intercourse was sportive, social, and unapologetically open.

For Peter, a summer time day in 1975 may start on the piers. By then, many of the waterfront was derelict, reduce off from the town by the elevated West Side Highway, forgotten by the municipal authorities, and largely unpoliced. The piers’ isolation made them a preferred cruising floor: concrete flatlands for sunbathing and, within the collapsing buildings that jutted onto the water, hidden alcoves for furtive encounters. On this city seashore, a hookup was as simple as a handshake or passing a joint. You won’t even must say something. Eye contact alone might sign to somebody he ought to observe you into the shadows.

What thrilled Peter concerning the piers was the sensation of somebody’s eyes on the again of the pinnacle, that unwashed scent. He was a “genius about sex,” Lebowitz remembered. He strove to seize what he might of it in his images. He by no means introduced his digicam to the golf equipment or vehicles — that may have violated their sanctity — however he did shoot Christopher Street and the piers, when the ruins changed into sprawling out of doors events. In the mid-’70s, he photographed all types of men gathering on the waterfront, buddies and lovers, lots of them half-naked, in brief shorts, speaking amongst themselves or smiling for his digicam. A younger child hanging from ship ropes like a makeshift hammock. Boys mendacity in one another’s laps. One 1976 photograph of Pier 42 — taken on an astonishing tour of the town on Easter — is a superb tableau of this now-lost New York. A bunch of good-looking males stand and sit on a picket barrier, an ailing ship anchored behind them. A shirtless Black man in mirrored sun shades stands beside a bearded white man, fingers in his pockets.

Almost each man within the image is distracted by what is occurring out of the body — strangers strolling by, automobiles slowing all the way down to scope out the scene. It’s an excellent portrait of the piers at their top and an ode to images itself. To cruise is to look and admire as a lot as it’s to the touch and be touched; these males had been dwelling cameras. Their eyes snap away.

As Peter immersed himself within the homosexual scene, his “hot” images grew extra daring. One raunchy session from 1975 with a lover named Mike Karton begins with Peter worshipping Karton’s jockstrap in his Second Avenue loft. Peter sits with Karton on his mattress, speaking and laughing, earlier than Peter mounts him. The digicam catches the second of penetration, Peter’s hand reaching again to regulate Karton’s cock. Another man joins them; they fuck in pairs.

Someone pulls out a big double-sided dildo. Karton and Peter stand bare on a towel, their backs to 1 one other, as they insert the dildo of their asses. It goes on.

His topic had grow to be intimacy in all its uncooked varieties. He photographed himself within the baths, a solitary cruiser, eyes lifted in anticipation of who may come by the door. He photographed himself having intercourse within the piers. He photographed lovers and buddies bare and turned on. With his digicam, he cruised their our bodies, searching for their eroticism, their pleasure — our bodies of all types, too, from chubby H.M. Koutoukas to the lithe performer Robert Levithan, Hujar’s lover within the mid-’70s.

In the summer time of 1976, he photographed Bruce de Ste. Croix sitting in a chair, admiring his personal erection. The ensuing triptych was exhibited within the backroom of the Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery for a 1978 group present centered on the male nude in images. The New York Times famously sniffed that there was “something to be said for old-fashioned prudery when the unclothed human body is a man’s body.” But The Village Voice singled out Peter’s picture as a spotlight of the present, even when the gallery “timidly” hid it in a field. The Voice ran the picture uncensored. “Thanks for Le Temps Perdu,” learn the headline.

The session with de Ste. Croix was simple, intimate. Bruce adopted Peter’s directions as he would any choreographer’s, he later recalled. He stripped bare, masturbated on Peter’s mattress, sat within the chair, performed with himself. In the images taken that day, Bruce has a spectral magnificence, as if conjured out of the air. Only when he stares at his onerous cock does he lastly appear to come back into focus; his gaze intensifies — and concentrates — his presence within the room. “He dug through my nakedness and found an innocent part of me,” de Ste. Croix stated.

The images carry a temper of discovery, as if this weren’t solely de Ste. Croix’s first erection however the first erection of any man. The triptych — now considered one of Peter’s most beloved works — is an homage to male sexuality in its purest, most distilled type. It is deeply horny. Nor was it merely erotic however a part of an mental train, impressed by a dialog Peter had with de Ste. Croix concerning the disappearance of the erection from western artwork after antiquity. Peter remembered seeing a Caravaggio portray of a younger boy — “quite beautiful, quite sexual” — and being struck by how refined its eroticism was since Caravaggio’s boy shouldn’t be fondling himself. It prompted a query in him: “Why can’t you have someone … touching himself and still have the same artistic considerations?” With his digicam, he needed to revive the erection to its once-revered place. “He liked breaking down barriers,” de Ste. Croix stated.

In the summer time of 1974, Peter was invited to point out a few of his photos of nightlife, the Catacombs, and Candy Darling on her deathbed on the Floating Foundation of Photography, a dingy barge stuffed with handmade furnishings docked on the 79th Street Boat Basin. The Village Voice known as Peter’s work “outstanding,” and his buddies at Rock Scene declared by the top of the yr that he had grow to be “New York’s favorite photographer.” After seeing his work on the barge, the gallerist Alex Coleman invited him to current a portfolio at her Foto Gallery in August. These exhibits marked a shift in Peter’s interested by his work. He had needed his photos to be stunning, even extraordinary — however he had not at all times allowed himself to consider them as artwork. “The art thing was just an inkling,” he stated. That was altering. Nothing bought on the Foto. But the dearth of gross sales didn’t sluggish his momentum. In early 1975, he signed a contract with Samuel Mitnick of Da Capo Press for a e-book with a $3,000 advance. He thought Susan Sontag’s identify would assist with gross sales, and she or he agreed to jot down the introduction. “I really would love to make money off it,” he advised Linda Rosenkrantz. “And also to have it get around. You know I’ve always had a star thing, wanting to be … a star.”

If he had learn any of Sontag’s current essays on images, her argument had not but put him off, even when her concepts contradicted his personal. She was nonetheless just a few years away from publishing the divisive On Photography in 1977. At a second when Peter was starting to see his photos as artwork, Sontag largely refused to countenance images as such as a result of “time’s relentless melt” ranges all photos, skilled or beginner, into mere objects of curiosity. There is one thing silly and complicit a couple of photographer, she argued. She says the operator of a digicam is akin to a magician who can solely partly comprehend his trick. This is what Peter was up towards, what all photographers had been up towards, even with buddies. (Still, she was hotter and extra gracious towards the thought of photographic artistry in her introduction to Peter’s Portraits: “I am moved by the purity and delicacy of his intensions. If a free human being can afford to think of nothing less than death, then these memento mori can exorcise morbidity as effectively as they evoke its sweet poetry and panic.”)

Reading On Photography now, you could be tempted to wonder if Sontag had ever requested Peter about his work. There was a lot she might need discovered from him.

“He was a teacher,” his boyfriend Robert Levithan stated. “He taught me to trust my eye.” One approach Peter taught images was by administering a take a look at in his loft. On his eating desk, he would lay out his photos, hand you an eyepiece, and ask, “What do you think?” Which was the appropriate picture, the higher print? He knew, however he was inquisitive about your eye. When he requested John Erdman to guage some contact sheets early of their friendship, Erdman realized Peter was vetting him. Did he belong to his tribe? Membership didn’t require any particular experience; normally you simply obtained it intuitively. You understood his anger, his love, his need, his humor — like how he may begin calling hearth hydrants hydrangeas. Coming from efficiency, Erdman knew what it regarded like when somebody got here alive onstage or inside a body, sufficient for him to be a superb decide of a portrait. How you take a look at images, not solely the subject material however the composition and the standard of the print — as a result of there are critical variations right here — says rather a lot about who you’re, Peter thought. “You had to reveal yourself to him in the act of looking at his work,” Steve Turtell stated.

Sontag ought to have requested Peter concerning the portrait he made from her for his e-book. That dialog might need modified her thoughts. In it, she is mendacity on his mattress, her fingers behind her head, eyes gazing upward. So a lot of the which means of this {photograph} was refined within the darkroom. Peter burned the background wall of his loft so it grew to become a sort of sky, whereas rendering the undulations of the blanket extra pronounced so the picture is a sort of seascape with Susan drifting on his mattress like some grand ship. He additionally adjusted her hair — a lot of the grey disappears from the unfavourable within the last print, with just a few strands displaying close to her temple, a prophetic salute to the well-known white streak of later years. She is extra Susan Sontag than Susan Sontag ever was in 1975.

The portrait is a proficient and tender demonstration of Peter’s expertise as a photographer and printer, and it flies within the face of the creator who wrote that images exist out of a “quasi-magical, quasi-accidental” relationship between the digicam and the topic. Peter stated he assembled Portraits in Life and Death like a novel. The e-book is split into two elements: 28 portraits adopted, with out a break, by 11 photos from the Catacombs.

Many of the portrait topics within the e-book would have been acquainted to these dwelling within the East Village. For probably the most half, they had been Peter’s neighbors, the folks he noticed round city. José Rafael Arango from the Palm Casino, the director Charles Ludlam, the playwright H.M. Koutoukas, the composer Alan Lloyd, the actor Lola Pashalinski, the dancer and poet Edwin Denby, Ann Wilson, Bob Wilson. Others had been already verging on nationwide fame. John Waters — the primary portrait within the e-book — was a sensation with Pink Flamingos (1972), and Sontag was nearly a family identify. John Ashbery, one other topic, had simply printed his celebrated Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. “A lot of emotion went into picking people who are in the book and who aren’t,” Peter stated. The performer Bette Bourne summarized what Peter was on the lookout for in a session: “You had to reveal … blistering, blazing honesty directed towards the lens. No pissing about. No posing. No putting anything on. No camping around. Just flat, reveal-who-you-are … You must strip down all the nonsense until you get to the bone.”

The key to the portraits is what Peter known as their “isolation.” They share a lonely ambiance, and “aloneness is what’s frightening.” Most of the images had been taken in a sudden burst in 1975, when Peter stated he was feeling solitary — the start of one other a type of depressions from which he had suffered his entire life, solely this one would show a lot deeper than the others, nearly with out backside. He focused on the human face as if trying into his topic’s eyes — and seeing demise in these eyes — would regular him.

He was happy with Portraits. It encapsulated his achievement as a photographer and stood for one thing larger: the philosophical and creative energy of images itself. The e-book didn’t promote nicely in his lifetime, although it will definitely achieved cult standing as a landmark picture e-book of the twentieth century, mirroring the remainder of Peter’s profession: as somebody who was at all times extremely regarded by a small group of admirers and buddies, all of whom knew what that they had on their fingers — even when it took the remainder of the world time to catch on.

One of these admirers and buddies was David Wojnarowicz, who was stunned when he slept with Peter in September 1981 that he was assembly the photographer of that particular e-book. “I knew it, knew it well,” he wrote after that evening, when Peter pulled a replica from his shelf to point out David. At 28, David dreamed of making work as highly effective as these pictures. “Maybe I want people to faint at the meaning of my work,” he wrote in his diary the following day, echoing Peter, who as soon as stated, “I want to be discussed in hushed tones.”

An excerpt from the e-book The Wonderful World That Almost Was © 2026 by Andrew Durbin, printed by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 14th, 2026, and Granta Books on April twenty third, 2026.