Friday, June 13, the de Young is opening "The Gay Essay," an exhibition of work by Los Angeles-born photographer Anthony Friedkin.
"The Gay Essay" (a great way to ring in your Pride month, in case you were wondering) features some 75 portraits, plus assorted documents and ephemera taken by Friedkin in San Francisco and Los Angeles from 1969 to 1973.
The Gay Essay is the name of a project Friedkin undertook to portray queer lives during those years, and it catalogs (beautifully, in black-and-white) not a single community but a range (across genders, across race, across class) of lives lived outside the margins of the sexual center. The project will also be available for free, online, here (eventually).
And if you catch it this Friday at Friday Nights at the de Young (6:30 to 8pm on Friday in the museum atrium), you'll get to see the exhibition introduced by San Francisco's Honey Mahogany.
The exhibition catalog is being published by Yale University Press and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and releases in a couple of weeks for $45.
