GAYLETTER

In 2008, I had the chance to interview the gay erotic photographer Tom Bianchi, a gentle-hearted horndog if ever there was one. The occasion was a small show in Palm Springs, where he lives, of a few dozen of the roughly 6,000 Polaroids he took in the Fire Island Pines during the idyllic, hedonistic summers of 1975 through 1983, before AIDS began spoiling the party. I remember Bianchi telling me that of the literally hundreds of men he photographed, half had died. Then he burst into sobs on the phone.

Five years later, it’s gratifying to see that his stunning collection, which languished in shoeboxes for years while he shut away those happy-turned-painful memories, has found its way into a gorgeous book, Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines, Polaroids 1975-1983 (Damiani, $50.00). In his long, chatty introduction, full of memories of wild theme parties and midday outdoor orgies, Bianchi notes that Polaroid film confers a “painterly” quality. That is abundantly evident here; the dunes, surf, cedar homes and blue sky of the Pines have never looked more hazily beautiful. Then there are the men — hundreds of them, many of them naked, all with exactly the same aviator glasses, moustaches, tiny red running shorts and lithely muscled late-seventies body. They’re a reminder that as much as the pre-AIDS Pines was a dreamlike haven for a closeted, disliked minority, it served the upper tier of that minority — uniformly slim, white, well-employed and beautiful, at least through Bianchi’s reverential lens.

But that doesn’t spoil either the tender sexiness or the unbearably elegiac quality of these images. The fact that so few of Bianchi’s subjects let him shoot their faces directly, for fear of being outed, only adds to the ghostliness. Even in the shots Bianchi took of crowded dance floors and beach-blanket cuddle puddles, there’s a quietness. It’s like that startling quiet when the ferry pulls out into the bay toward Sayville and you suddenly can’t hear, even faintly, the pounding disco beats you’ve left behind.

Check out Bianchi’s Instagram and this collection of limited-edition prints from the Pines Polaroids collection.