To come out was to risk one’s job, children, and safety. For these communities, “the party was the victory”
“This generation decided to party as hard as we were protesting,” says photographer Phyllis Christopher of her time spent documenting LGBTQ life in San Francisco between 1988 and 2003. Indeed, Christopher’s magnetic images oscillate between party and protest: in one, a cop in riot gear slams an activist’s face to the floor; in another, lesbians dance in a crowded nightclub. Christopher was photographing during the height of the AIDS crisis: a time when queer individuals faced rampant homophobia and political vitriol with little to no legal protection. To come out was to risk your job, your children, your safety. And for these communities, “the party was [also] the victory”.
These communities’ triumph lives on in a new exhibition of Christopher’s work, Contacts, at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art until 20 March 2022. In it, her dreamy photographs capture lesbians in moments of safety and danger, celebration and dissent. “The sexual openness in San Francisco felt revolutionary, but it also felt completely natural,” she says. In her charged images of protest, sex, intimacy, and community, Christopher paints a picture of lesbian life in an irreplicable moment in time.
In San Francisco, “a huge community of women came from all over the country to live healthy lesbian lives”. Lesbians built a “queer economy”: women would hire each other to work at gay newspapers, magazines, shops, and clubs to ensure no one lost their job from coming out. It was the “gay mecca,” as Christopher put it; upon arrival, lesbians “just said yes, I am beautiful – photograph me”. One image [above] pictures six topless women slung over a windowsill waving down to Christopher. They clench their fists in symbols of power. Movement fills the photograph: objects flying from the window, bodies bursting into the frame. However, although these women are unselfconscious, naked, playful, free, their precarious position upon the windowsill evokes the figurative and literal dangers of being “out”.