Stanley Stellar 'Artifacts at the End of a Decade'
Premiered by Dazed Digital
Displayed at the Centre Pompidou
LGBTQ+ New York in the 1970s
Stanley Stellar's photos are an intimate queer time capsule of New York’s West Village before AIDS, human connection, and an Edenic era of LGBTQ+ history
On May 18 1981, the New York Native, the only gay newspaper in the city, published the first story on a new disease later identified as AIDS. After hearing rumours of a “gay cancer,” the paper’s medical writer Lawrence D. Mass contacted the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC claimed that word of a deadly threat descending upon the gay community largely unfounded – a pernicious start to what would become a longstanding pattern of malignant neglect by the federal government.
