CHECK OUT “GAY SEMIOTICS”, A LOL-INFESTED GUIDE TO BEING GAY IN THE 1970s

By James Branson

In 1977, Gay culture was just starting to come out from behind closed doors, with photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe documenting the underground BDSM scene, and disco celebrating is heydey.

In a tongue-in-cheek look at gay life in San Francisco, photographer Hal Fischer produced Gay Semiotics, a part anthropological, part comedic examination of what it meant to be gay.

Fischer took numerous black and white photographs of a variety of gay lifestyles, looks and – ahem – accessories, adding David Attenborough-like commentary on each of the images.

“I was exposing something and I was celebrating it by using text and a certain way of photographing in a very deliberately artificial way to disarm it, to not make it threatening,” Fischer said. “This isn’t Mapplethorpe doing S&M work, this is a 180-degree opposite.”

“I was using the size of the text against the image so to read it from a distance would seem like an advertisement and then when you got closer you might think, What’s he talking about?, but then I would disarm that by using humor.”