In the summer of '75, a young portrait artist named Larry Stanton brought his 8mm camera to Fire Island. The footage he shot captures a unique time and place, a time when gay men were carefree in their newfound sexual liberation. As a budding painter, Stanton was particularly drawn to two more established gay men from the Art world: Henry Geldzahler, the controversial media savvy curator of the Met's contemporary collection, and the internationally-acclaimed artist superstar, David Hockney.

From the Fire Island home of Stanton's lover Arthur Lambert that served as these men's home base, Larry's 8mm camera captured Geldzahler posing on the beach, Hockney painting, sketching but also frolicking and playfully posing the nude subjects of his own polaroid stills, which spit out of his camera at lightening speed. Most of all, Larry loved to aim his camera at the parade of young attractive semi-clad men he convinced to sit for portraits--often by sleeping with them.

In a few short years, AIDS would descend on NYC and Fire Island and Larry Stanton would be one of its early casualties. As he lay dying in an iron lung, a few blocks away in Arthur's townhouse, lay his portraits of boys, men, models, dancers, actors, hustlers -- all of them frozen in time, forever captured as they were in their prime, at the peak of beauty and promise.

Larry Stanton [dot] net

David Hockney [dot] com