About Peter Hujar's Come Out!! Poster for the Gay Liberation Front
Hujar achieved little recognition during his life but he played a pivotal role in queer history.
Cover photo: Detail of Come Out!!, silver gelatin print, 1970, by Peter Hujar, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York City, New York, United States (2019).
Introduction
Come Out!! is the most famous work created by New York photographer Peter Hujar. The photograph — staged on Wooster Street in Lower Manhattan — features seventeen men and women marching in total jubilance and solidarity.
The group’s full bodies are visible, reflecting Hujar’s commercial and fashion photography interest. Like all his work, Come Out!! is monochromatic, encouraging viewers to focus on the composition, with the group in the center of the street, in the middle of the city. The text near the bottom reads “Join the Brothers and Sisters of the Gay Liberation Front”.
The work was created as a recruiting poster for the first-ever gay pride march in June of 1970, to commemorate the first anniversary of the riots at Stonewall Inn bar, now considered the beginning of the modern queer rights movement.
Young people celebrate outside the boarded-up Stonewall Inn after riots over the weekend of June 27, 1969, silver gelatin print, by Fred W. McDarrah (1969). Via The New Yorker.
Stonewall
While homosexuality was legal in New York, gay establishments were refused liquor licenses by the state. Gay bars were therefore operated by the mafia and suffered frequent police raids. Police would confiscate the illegal liquor and arrest patrons. In the early hours of June 28, 1969, patrons of the Stonewall Inn chose to fight back after years of police harassment, igniting six days of demonstrations.
The Gay Liberation Front was founded in direct response to the Stonewall Riots. The group organized the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March which would become the first gay pride march. Activist Craig Schoonmaker suggested the idea of pride. He explains, “The poison was shame, and the antidote is pride.”
Hujar was dating civil rights activist and Gay Liberation Front co-founder Jim Fouratt at the time. Fouratt recalls that after the Stonewall Riots, “We looked at each other in a very different way. We saw full human beings, not potential sex relationships. And that moment changed my life.”
It was Fouratt who asked Hujar to conduct the shoot. Thanks in part to Hujar, the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March was an astounding success. On June 28th, 1970, only a few hundred people gathered on Christopher Street, just outside the Stonewall Inn, but by the time the group arrived in Central Park, the crowd numbered in the thousands. This would be the beginning of annual pride marches across the world.
Come Out!!, silver gelatin print, 1970, by Peter Hujar, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York City, New York, United States (2019).
Coming Out
Come Out!! became an iconic image of queer pride, later usurped by Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag which was unveiled in 1978. Of Hujar’s Come Out!!, Hannah Abel-Hirsch writes for photography platform 1854, “it brings the queer community out of the domestic realm and other covert spaces, into the public sphere”.
In his personal blog, Fouratt writes, that “for people to be out running down the street proclaiming their same sex love and affection fused with erotic pleasure was both dangerous and very courageous”.
The idea of “coming out” originated during the last century, inspired by traditional debutante balls in which young ladies would come out into society as women ready for marriage. Coming out successfully reframed the idea that accepting and revealing oneself as gay was not a shameful admission but an act of joining a proud and welcoming community.
Museum label for Come Out!! by Peter Hujar at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York City, New York, United States (2019).
The Intersectionality of Queerness and Race
The descriptive label at the Leslie-Lohman Museum argues that Hujar’s Come Out!! “leaves the impression that gay liberation was primarily for the young, the white, and the cis-gendered.”
Fouratt takes umbrage with such an interpretation. In his personal blog, he writes, “The story of who and why these people were in the picture and why they are all white is a story of the reality of racism and dual oppression. They all self-selected to be in the photo.”
According to Fouratt, several black men were interested in posing but ultimately determined that participating would be too dangerous. Of one man, Fouratt notes, “he could very well lose his job if anyone saw this photo so he turned around and went home.” The absence of people of color highlights the intersecting and compounding struggles of queerness and race.
“My work comes out of my life. The people I photograph are not freaks or curiosities to me,” Hujar once proclaimed. “I photograph … people who cling to the freedom to be themselves.”
Self-Portrait in White Tank Top, gelatin silver print, by Peter Hujar (1975). Via the Morgan Library and Museum.
Personal Life
Hujar’s own childhood was characterized by abandonment and abuse. He lived with his Ukrainian grandparents in New Jersey after his father disappeared, and then moved to New York City to stay with his mother and her violent second husband, prompting Hujar to leave home at the age of sixteen.
Hujar was accepted into the School of Industrial Art, from which he graduated in 1953. He apprenticed at several commercial photography studios and traveled to Italy on a Fulbright scholarship. The trip inspired the only book Hujar published in his lifetime, Portraits in Life and Death (1976).
In 1967, Hujar took a class taught by fashion photographer Richard Avedon and Martin Israel, a former art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Hujar also worked briefly with artist Andy Warhol and writer Susan Sontag. He met artist David Wojnarowicz in 1980, who would be his life partner until Hujar’s death.
Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987. Peter Hujar Foundation director and friend, Stephen Koch recalls, “It is painful to say, but a fact... the day Peter was told he had Aids, he never shot another photograph. It stopped.” Hujar died later that year. Wojnarowicz lived in Hujar’s loft until his own death — also of AIDS — in 1992.
David Wojnarowicz: Manhattan-Night (III), silver print, by Peter Hujar (1985). Via Swann Auction Galleries.
Legacy
Hujar remained relatively obscure during his lifetime, enjoying little commercial success. Joel Smith, the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Morgan Library & Museum, observes, “the slow maturation of his art had left him behind the curve of such nakedly ambitious peers as Robert Mapplethorpe.” Compared to the titillating and voyeuristic works of Mapplethorpe, perhaps Hujar’s work felt too vulnerable and authentic.
“He refused to compromise ever,” explains fellow photographer Nan Goldin. At his funeral, friend Fran Lebowitz revealed, “Peter Hujar has hung up on every important photography dealer in the Western world.”
While Hujar did not live to witness his own commercial success, or the landmark victory of Obergefell v. Hodges which resulted in marriage equality across the nation, he remains a pivotal figure in queer history and his work continues to inspire. As states contemporary photographer Alec Soth, “The word that I would use for Hujar is ‘tenderness.’ That’s the feeling that I get from Hujar over and over again.”
