Amid the AIDS crisis, this photographer documented a sunlit haven for gay men

CNN

8 hours ago

In a grassy outcrop along Lake Michigan's deep blue waters, two young men pictured in a color slide photograph relax on towels, shirtless and curled against each other. Along the rocky ledges, other men chat and sunbathe, bicycles and shoes abandoned on the ground. A vintage Cherry Coke can — one of the image's only markers of time — gives the intimate scene a subtle feeling of an idyllic advertisement, and a sense of nostalgia.
Decades later, that feeling is more acute: the gay beach in Chicago where it was taken no longer exists, memorialized today by a 2.5-acre garden in memory of those who lost their lives to AIDS.
The image, shot by then-aspiring photographer Doug Ischar, is part of his series 'Marginal Waters,' capturing the summer of 1985 as gay Chicagoans gathered at the Belmont Rocks, which became both a site for pleasure and solace as the AIDS epidemic devastated LGBTQ+ life. The lakefront stretch was a haven until the early 2000s, when it was demolished and refortified to prevent coastal flooding.
'(The photos) document a way of life that I thought was very particular and also feared was, in a sense, doomed,' Ischar said in a video call with CNN. Pockets where gay men could be open and relaxed in the US were rare, and the disease, ignored by the government for years, only stigmatized the community further during a time of peril. 'I feared the life of gay men would be forced back underground and hidden away, as it was for centuries,' he added.
At the time, Ischar, who made the series during his graduate studies at California Institute of the Arts, found there was little interest in his work. But, decades later, encouraged by gallerists, he began bringing them out of the archives. Now, some of those images, including of the unnamed couple, are included in the exhibition 'City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago' at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The expansive group show, which opens in July, positions the city as an underrecognized hub for LGBTQ+ art and social action. According to the show's curator, Jack Schneider, US cities beyond New York City and San Francisco are often overlooked in their contributions to queer history; 'City in a Garden' aims to broaden that scope.
'('Marginal Waters') were some of the first artworks I thought of when I started to think of this exhibition,' Schneider said. 'I find them profoundly melancholic. They're bright, leisurely and romantic at times. But beneath this surface-level serenity, the AIDS crisis (had) ravaged this community.' In 1985, and four years into his presidency, Ronald Reagan had only just publicly acknowledged the epidemic for the first time, and effective treatments were still years away. As Ischar recounted, people within the community were dying every day.
'It was a really dark time, and yet, what Doug so beautifully captures in his images is how people at the Belmont Rocks still found time to just live their lives and to do so enthusiastically,' Schneider explained.
What made the Belmont Rocks unique among gay beaches was its visibility, Ischar noted. He had traveled to others around the country and abroad and found that none were as centrally located and overt. In Chicago, a mix of sand, grass and concrete beaches stretch up and down the densely populated eastern side of the city, near an expressway that serves as a major artery.
'It was unmistakable. People drove past the place on Lake Shore Drive hundreds of times a day,' he recalled. 'Chicago's version was uniquely frank and open and in your face.'
Though Ischar is a gay man, he was still an outlier there, documenting as a fly-on-the-wall rather than a participant in the scene — a 'resident nuisance,' as he described himself. He didn't know the couple relaxing with the Cherry Coke, nor had he ever seen them before. He was struck, however, by the 'lovely juxtaposition' of the position of their bodies and their skin tones, and the sweet nature of their young love. 'They're so tender with each other,' he said.
Looking at the image, Schneider notes how their coiling form feels symbolic. 'It's a nice visual metaphor for what homosexuality is — not a meeting of opposites, a meeting of likeness,' he said.
In other instances, Ischar captured similar moments of romance and desire: closed eyes, tilted heads, encircled arms, narrow gaps of space for low murmurs to travel. (Despite the sexual freedom the Rocks fostered, he never photographed any blatant sex acts, he noted). But other forms of intimacy were abound, too, in the casual ease of people sunbathing together, and the closeness of Ischar with his subjects as he moved in to snap each scene — intimacy that transfers to the viewer.
Many of the days that passed that summer were unremarkable, Ischar said. But, visually, that was the point. Ischar set out to photograph images of gay men he had 'never seen,' he said — that is, out in the real world, going on about their lives. It was a departure from the staged, often dramatic studio portraits of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar, or earlier, George Platt Lynes and James Bidgood.
In the 2010s and '20s, other queer archives of the 1970s and '80s have been discovered, rediscovered, or published anew, from Tom Bianchi's Polaroids of gay men summering at Fire Island, to Donna Gottschalk's images of a lesbian-separatist commune in California, to Patric McCoy's portraits of Black gay men in Chicago — the last of which is also featured in 'City in a Garden.'
Ischar's own images languished for many years, he noted, but he hopes that is continuing to change. 'I really wanted to leave a hopefully beautiful and penetrating portrait of this time and these people,' he said.