Sunil Gupta's best photograph: cruising for sex in New York City
This shot was taken on Christopher Street, New York City, on a weekend afternoon in the autumn of 1976. It was an extraordinary time to be a gay man in the city: sex was everywhere.
Christopher Street was the home of the Stonewall Inn, where riots against police brutality and homophobia in 1969 helped kick off a nationwide movement for LGBT rights. For a period in the 1970s, the street was almost exclusively populated by gay men. For the first time in history, people like me felt able to live proudly, publicly, without shame. It was the first time in my life experiencing that, and it changed me irrevocably.
I was in New York to do an MBA, but I soon realised that my future wasn’t in finance. I ditched the MBA and enrolled in photography school. The whole gay movement was inescapable. I’d been part of gay causes at university in Montreal, but the scale of what was going on in New York was utterly unlike anything I’d seen.
It was literally too many men, not enough time. The city became one giant open air bar. People were just having casual sex with whoever went by.
You could be walking your dog, going to a gallery, picking up groceries, and you’d meet someone. There were trucks stationed along the piers where you could go and hook up any night of the week. The drugs weren’t as serious in those days, so you could keep going. And we were younger, I guess. It all seemed more possible then.
I was in a semi-monogamous situation so I had to tone it down, and for me, the camera became a substitute: instead of sleeping with them, I was getting their picture. It was a vicarious thrill to go up to someone and shoot them. Almost as good as having had the sex.
This guy was just one of many men I shot in those days, but his charm was in how regular he was. Around that time, gay men turned en masse to a look that became known as the “clone” — all checkered shirts and moustaches. This guy didn’t. He just looked like a college boy, a little scruffy, quite athletic, but with a gay edge that I loved.
Really, I was shooting guys I fancied. I wasn’t trying to observe something in a neutral way. I was engaging as a participant. I wanted them to know I’m gay too and that I was drawn to them in some way.
In those years, sex wasn’t just sex. It was a force uniting a political movement. The whole idea of gay liberation in 1970s was to promote promiscuity, to stick a finger up at heteronormativity, family life, procreation and mortgages. It was about being generally “bad” and proud of it.
Looking back on these images now, there’s a poignancy they never had at the time, almost like looking at photos of families before the Holocaust. A few years later, the Aids crisis took hold. The public nature of gay life was forced back into the shadows. Thousands of men died. New York shut down its bathhouses, gay parties became private, and this whole world became hidden again.
Since then, we have come under pressure to lose the aggressive, hedonistic aspects of gay identity, to stop asserting our difference, our promiscuity, and our refusal to change. It became replaced with this need to be just like straight people, to get married, have kids and buy houses. “Just make it legal and accept us” became the most important political demand of the modern gay movement. To some of us, that was a terrible, awful climbdown.
But that period changed me. As a gay Indian boy who had grown up in New Delhi, I arrived in a situation that I had never thought of and that wasn’t available in the place I had left. For me, migration wasn’t so much a departure as an arrival.
• Sunil Gupta’s Christopher Street 1976, is published by Stanley/Barker. Sunil Gupta’s CV
Born: New Delhi, India, 1953. Studied: The New School, New York City; the Royal College of Art, London.
Influences:Duane Michals, Arthur Tress, W Eugene Smith.
High Point: “Establishing a presence as a gay Indian photographer in the history of photography.”
Low Point: “After I left the RCA, I waited for a string of curators to come and knock at my door. Nobody came.”
Top tip: “Do what you like to do. That’s probably what you’ll do best.”