The epiphany struck at two in the morning. Hal Fischer was reading Jack Burnham on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of signs in The Structure of Art when the connection clicked. “Bandanas, keys!” The Castro dress code, with its colored fabrics hanging from back pockets, earrings, and key rings clipped to belt loops, suddenly revealed itself as the secret lexicon of homosexual desire. A grammar accessible only to initiates, of which he was now part.
The young photographer arrived in San Francisco in January 1975 to pursue graduate studies. He settled “on the outer edge of Haight-Ashbury” where his sexual ambiguity was short-lived. “After a few months in San Francisco—including a memorable Halloween with a young Marlon Brando look-alike—I gave up any pretense of bisexuality. I was gay and loving it.”
The Castro neighborhood had “the feel of a gay village 24/7.” “The city’s relatively temperate and sunny climate was conducive to young men hanging out on the street,” he notes. In this context of cruising and play, his photographs emerge as “a form of performance art” combining conceptual rigor with wry irony.
“I was deliberately making images that were very prosaic or banal, nonthreatening,” he explains. “You’re going to see that from a distance and go, ‘Well, that’s pretty innocent,’ and you’re going to walk up and start reading this text from a different distance. And then you’re going to read the last line and laugh.” In 1970s America, where homosexuality was considered a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, Hal Fischer’s humor is also redemptive.
His best-known work, “Gay Semiotics” (1977), describes with mock-scholarly precision how gay men signaled their sexual preferences. Beneath the appearance of a catalog, Hal Fischer’s work tells his own life and that of his circle. “Bill, who was ‘Basic Gay,’ is still a friend and worked in the local photo shop two blocks away,” the artist recalls, while “Tinker the ‘Hippie’ hung out at Gus’s Pub, which was my coming-out bar.”
This strategic banality quietly introduces queer semiotics into galleries still uncomfortable with Robert Mapplethorpe’s more transgressive images. In the same spirit of discretion, the artist replaced the bodies in his BDSM diagrams with dotted silhouettes, softening the shock a mainstream audience might have felt facing images deemed explicit.
But Seminal Works isn’t limited to “Gay Semiotics.” The series “Boy-Friends” (1979) comprises ten framed black-and-white portraits of men. Each is accompanied by text in which Hal Fischer describes his relationship with the photographed man: one-night stands, deep friendships, tumultuous love affairs. As if out of modesty, he placed a small black bar over their eyes in the image.
The book also showcases Hal Fischer’s early, little-known works. The inclusion of these youthful images—juvenile self-portraits, documentary tableaux, conceptual experiments—reveals some remarkable gems. Self-Portrait, State College (1974) testifies to an artistic identity in formation. Spaceship, Pennsylvania captures the surrealist strangeness of deep America. It shows a massive industrial machine, an “incomprehensible monument to a space age that never quite touched down.”
The 1978 assassination of gay activist Harvey Milk and progressive mayor George Moscone, whose election Hal Fischer had celebrated a year earlier, brings us brutally back to earth. The event marked the end of innocence. Two years later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first clusters of unusual pneumonia.
The AIDS epidemic pulverized the libertine ethos animating the neighborhood. “By 1985, Castro Street was a sea of empty parking spaces and deserted sidewalks.” But the fatal blow came in technological form. “The advent of internet chat rooms in the early 1990s” allowing “a liaison could be engineered without leaving the house” made street scenes obsolete.
Yet Seminal Works refuses nostalgia. “People never think they’re living in a golden age,” Hal Fischer observes. “That’s a label applied after the fact.” His photographs above all capture “an era that presents itself as joyous, liberating, and uncomplicated,” while acknowledging the exclusions inherent to the time: racism, misogyny, class privilege allowing white gay men to “assimilate economically in a way that others could not.” This dual vision of the photographer, both participant in this community and distant observer, animates each image and gives the book its edge.
The spirit of the Castro has vanished and San Francisco has become “one of the most expensive cities in the United States.” What remains are these photographs, at once tender and unsparing, witnesses to an era when being “young and gay in 1970s San Francisco was to be part of an evolving community in the exhilarating throes of liberation.” A golden age unaware of itself.
Hal Fischer’s Seminal Works is published by Aperture and available at the price of $65.
