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About The Cover

About The Cover

By Jean Dykstra, July 2, 2017

Novelist Edmund White has called Tom Bianchi’s photographs of Fire Island a “version of gay happiness – an earthly paradise where handsome men love one another on white sands under an eternally cloudless sky.” Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-1983, enlarged prints of Bianchi’s celebratory SX-70 Polaroids taken in one of the few places where men could be openly gay in the 1970s and ‘80s, are on view at Throckmorton Fine Art through September 16. Bianchi’s book of Polaroids of the same name wasn’t published until 2013 because publishers found it too “novel” (read: queer), a reminder of how closeted many gay men had to be in those years. The exuberant images, like Untitled 368, 1975-1983, on our cover, are a record of that moment in time.