Castro to Christopher: Gay Streets of America 1979-1986

A New York City native, Nicholas Blair dropped out of high school in 1977 and hit the road, landing in San Francisco, where he helped form an arts commune. With a Leica rangefinder camera given to him by a childhood friend, he honed his craft as a photographer amidst the explosion of LGBTQ life that was taking over from the hippie movement.

From the Castro Valley in San Francisco to the conga-line of Christopher Street that cuts through New York's West Village, there is a vanished world revitalized in the photos of Nicholas Blair. Now an internationally recognized photographer, Blair is compiling these images for the first time, exploring a time and place that altered the cultural makeup of America. Blair's photos of the streets are honest, revealing, evocative, and tender; much like the streets and their theater of play were themselves.

The timeframe of these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, marked a time when post-Stonewall exuberance--the grudging acceptance and tolerance of a life and culture once criminalized--flowered and overflowed in concentrated areas (San Francisco, the West Village, Fire Island) and life was out, in public and in the street. It was a community and world unto itself, before that world became torn apart by the epidemic onslaught to come.