Castro to Christopher by Nicholas Blair featured in CNN Style this month to celebrate Pride!
“His candid black-and-white photography documents fleeting (but timeless) moments of self-expression, sexual tension and empowered activism. In photos taken at Halloween parades, he captured partygoers transgressing gender binaries in flamboyant, scantily clad costumes; at Pride events, he shot photos of couples holding hands, embracing each other and sharing kisses in public.”
“Notably, one of the last chapters in his book captures the first large-scale AIDS candle vigil in San Francisco in 1983 — amid a community already in mourning, just a few years before the disease ravaged a generation of LGBTQ people. “If it wasn’t for AIDS, who knows what would’ve happened in terms of the gay liberation movement and people,” he shared, recognizing that so many people who died could — and would — have been artists, activists and leaders promoting the cause. “It really set the community back.”
It’s Blair’s capturing of the vigil in particular that helps cement “Castro to Christopher” as a vivid time capsule of gay life before marriage equality, HIV prevention medication and the boom of trans visibility.
In its pages, viewers are invited to reflect on the past while understanding how it has influenced our present. It is a tribute to a generation — in many respects the first — of LGBTQ people whose lives and experiences shaped queer life today, in remembrance not just of their painful moments but of the pockets of joy, celebration and resistance they claimed in their lives, their loves — and in the streets.”
Read more about the book HERE
Read the full article HERE