Artist, Hal Fischer: My name is Hal Fischer, and this work is from my series Gay Semiotics.
if I had to pick my favorite selection, that would be the street fashion photos. If you saw any one of those people walking down the street, I think anybody in San Francisco, relatively informed, would say, "oh, that's a gay guy."
A good example is Street Fashion: Uniform, the guy in the fatigues and the thermal shirt. That was Dan. Everyone in the Castro knew him because that's what he wore. Nobody in those pictures is costumed. Those were people that that's what they were wearing. I would find a location and I would let them assume the posture, the position they wanted to take.
It's very interesting to think about items, like the Levi's 501 jeans. These things were making this statement about how you were going to present yourself in the community, how you would be seen maybe as a potential sexual partner.
This is not a secret language. All of this is contextual. My Western archetype, if he was in Bozeman, Montana, would not be seen as a gay type. That look in the middle of an urban environment is signifying something completely different. But I do think that all of this gets back to the kind of freedom that we all felt at that point.
This is the period after Stonewall but before AIDS. People didn't hold back in the '70s. I mean, it was celebratory and also liberating.