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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
April 9, 2010
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www.GayPeoplesChronicle.com
Boys at play
There's an innocence of sorts in these 40-year-old photos of gay bikers
by Anthony Glassman
Poet Scott Zieher is a collector of discarded lives.
In 1974, he was handed a stock photo and told to create a biography for the anonymous person in it. The school assignment was practically a continuation of his life's work, since he already created lives in his mind for his father, who died two months before his birth.
As he grew, so did his love of the found object, whether baseball cards, old Playboy magazines or the other detritus and debris of life.
At one point, he scavenged in the decade-old corpse of the St. Mark's Baths in New York, still finding personal items left behind even after ten years. Office supplies, a complete box of Life Savers candies, books, accident reports they were all there.
It was ten years ago, however, that Zieher's landlord showed him a pile of items, things that had belonged to one of his neighbors who just passed away. Zieher did not know the man and had not seen him in his two years of living on the same floor.
Among the things he rescued from those last remnants of a life that ended so quietly was a photo album, containing pictures from three rallies of gay bikers in 1972. Zieher contemplated researching, trying to find out what he could about the events and people depicted in the volume.
In the end, however, he decided to give us the opportunity he was given in English class, to allow the reader to craft their own stories based on those photographs, on those pictures of Vikings, Praetorians, Scorpions, Unicorns and Druids, those men who loved each other in the decade before AIDS became a household world and a worldwide nightmare.
The result of his find in his building's garbage room back in 1999 is Band of Bikers (Powerhouse Books, hardcover, $24.95), a solid volume that disproves the old caveat about judging a book by its cover. As is so often the case with Powerhouse, not only can one judge their books by the covers, but they do such a magnificent job matching the cover art and texture to the contents, that very prejudging is encouraged. It looks like an old-fashioned photo
album, and the pictures inside, following Zieher's intriguing introduction, are almost heartbreakingly pure.
There is an innocence there, among those leather-clad men smoking their cigarettes, drinking beer, kissing and wearing hats with dildoes taped onto them. It's boys at play, even though some are well past the age when "boy" would necessarily be appropriate. They're having fun, they're alive.
In a way, I can connect with these men, this summer. Three months or so after these pictures were taken, I was born. These men look like my father, who died when I was young-connecting me to Zieher, but not in quite as tragic a way.
I find myself wondering, as Zieher does, who these men are. Where are they now? Are any of them still alive? Do they still ride their motorcycles, now that they're in their 60s, 70s? Did they find love, keep love?
Those answers will probably never come to us, but at least we can join in that summer of joy and camaraderie, almost 40 years ago.
Hug
C
Smokin'
Party Boys
Chester
Pride Guide
June 18, 2010
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