“As the World Burns: Queer Photography and Nightlife in Boston” Keeps Dancing and Breaking out the Booze Through the Archives

A monstrous gaudy powder-white Christmas wreath, adorned with silver balls and a gigantic red bow, towers over a full bar. The ginormous wreath is flanked by metallic cut-out stars, floating down from the heavens, caught by a single string pinned to the ceiling. Partially hidden behind the pine needles like an upstaged choir are the grinning black-and-white headshots of more stars. These, however, are the ones you wish on every night before passing out in bed from near-fatal alcohol poisoning from nightly heavy pours—the ones that only need to be called by their first names: Marilyn, Barbra, and Liza. They are joined by some guy I can’t identify by squinting into the background of a fading vintage Polaroid. No matter. All I need to see are those three wise women—mothers of camp, showbiz, and Hollywood—peering down onto a manger of booze to feel as if I’m right at home for the holidays.

That, I assume, was the point. This Polaroid, on view in the group exhibition As the World Burns: Queer Photography and Nightlife in Boston at the Tufts University Art Galleries at SMFA at Tufts, was captured by Jim McGrath, a worker at Boston’s Playland Café. Open from 1937 to 1998, Playland was a bar in Boston’s former red-light district known as the Combat Zone. But along with sleaze came seasonal cheer thanks to McGrath who, as an adjacent informative label attests, “played a major role in shaping its memorable program of festivities and decorations for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, and St. Patrick’s Day…” True to this description, nearby Polaroids showcase even tackier Halloween décor—spooky skeletons topped with hairy werewolf masks, so cheap I can smell the rubber and matted fur wafting off the picture—and costume parties in which a glamorous drag queen trimmed with a feather boa gets sandwiched between Dracula and the Grim Reaper with the face of a horribly disfigured bear. Each Polaroid in McGrath’s collection is fuzzy, as if perfectly representing those blurry nights with too much well liquor like bleary-eyed family photographs after drowning in egg nog or World Famous Pumpkin Punch.

Family is exactly how McGrath explained these events in an oral history from 1997 (also quoted on the label): “like one big happy family.” I see it. Looking at those ho-ho-holiday photographs, I felt overwhelmed by warm fuzzies, further emphasized by McGrath’s pics sharing vitrine space with Patricia A. Gozemba’s snapshots of the Fran’s Place reunion in 1983. Butches and femmes, many with aviator glasses perched on their noses, gleefully dance together or sit satisfied behind their beers and gin and tonics. Simple (chosen) family album snapshots, sure. But each quite movingly depicts the communities forged within bars and clubs that are of a particular touchstone for queer people.

It’s this communal potential of nightlife, as well as exactly how these semi-recalled memories are recorded, that is the central thesis behind As the World Burns. Curated by Jackson Davidow with TUAG’s Laurel V. McLaughlin, the exhibition, which restricts this nightlife overview to just a decade from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, doesn’t share the manic maximalism of Jim McGrath’s Playland decorative frenzy. In fact, entering the gallery, perhaps unwisely after visiting the breathtaking extravagance of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum that would make Des Esseintes envious, I was surprised and a little disappointed by how empty it looked. The large rectangular gallery space is sparsely populated with mostly smaller photographic prints on the occasionally painted royal purple walls, as well as several vitrines. The only sculptural element is a tiny elfin rhinestone-and-feather-encrusted ceramic shoe by Avram Finkelstein, molded in tribute to his friend Kenny Angelico’s drag persona Ivy, shown alongside two of Boston’s MVP (Most Valuable Photographer) Nan Goldin’s exhibition postcards.

On closer inspection, though, this curatorial restraint is a benefit and represents a bigger challenge. Mounting an exhibition on nightlife isn’t easy (trust me). Yet, it is somehow less effort to just go over the top with it, submitting to the pressure to represent every bar owner, photographer, writer, artist, and anyone who has ever gone out period (or else have an inbox full of angry emails). Instead of burying the viewer under an avalanche of photos and ephemera, Davidow narrows the exhibition by mainly focusing on three sources of photography: photojournalism from the gay press such as Gay Community News and, my favorite, Bad Attitude, a lesbian insert in the also amusingly named Fag Rag, with headlines like “Thoughts on Cunt” and “The G Spot–Who Needs It”; visual artists, most in the various local art schools and many associated with the so-called Boston School alongside big(ger) names like Goldin, David Armstrong, and Mark Morrisroe; and, as previously mentioned, casually shot vernacular pics, such as those from McGrath and Gozemba, from the archives of the History Project, a Boston-centered LGBTQ archive started in 1980.

This organizational breakdown has a few net effects, not the least of which is weaving a narrative that everyone, either in or outside of the community, can digest. That narrative is one about preservation–how photographers, artists, and bar patrons with a camera record these ephemeral nights and connections, moments that may not have seemed at the time to have historical importance but with the perspective of time, most certainly do. As Davidow writes in “Against Our Vanishing” in The Baffler, an essay that informed and inspired the exhibition, “More than artifacts tinged with nostalgia and longing, the photographic archives of this history become tools of survival that work against our vanishing and toward our liberation.”

For that archive, as well as the exhibition’s display of it, I’m grateful as, admittedly, I know fuck-all about Boston’s queer nightlife scene from the 1970s and 1980s—or even now, for that matter (though the bros screaming “faggot” at their friend on the phone outside of my hotel was an indication that the safe space of queer nightlife is still absolutely necessary in Beantown). My knowledge is almost entirely forged by Goldin’s photographs of her drag queen friends picnicking in parks, what I just read a few months ago in the Boston chapter of Lucas Hilderbrand’s The Bars Are Ours, and hazy visions of the Combat Zone filtered through the lens of late photographer and critic Christian Walker in the groundbreaking exhibition, Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant, which I caught last year in its incarnation at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. The latter is perhaps the most closely tied to As the World Burns, organized as it is in conjunction with the concurrent Tufts University Art Galleries iteration of Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant, also curated by Davidow and Leslie-Lohman’s Noam Parness.

It is Walker, then, who introduces viewers to As the World Burns with his most known and, I’d argue, most gorgeous series, The Theater Project. Displayed in a tight line like a reel of film, the photos are placed on top of a greyscale wallpaper of flyers from Boston’s Golden Age of Sleaze, boasting “Three Super Hunk XXX Hits” and “Jock Strap.” The Theater Project documents the dusty, derelict interior of the Pilgrim Theater, a “porno palace” that screened straight porn but, as seen in Walker’s photos, the encounters inside were anything but. There is something haunting about Walker’s series—the photographer wandering around the theater like a ghost, alone in stairwells and hallways, occasionally coming across other spectral figures, single men and gender-nonconforming people hovering in decrepit balconies or sitting solo in the ratty seats. Every so often, this meandering solitude bursts with a sudden eruption of fucking or a particularly romantic makeout sesh in a toilet stall, rivaled only by Sherry Edwards’s mid-coitus technicolor electrified limbs as the hottest moment in the exhibition.

Walker’s relative solitude is an outlier. Even Goldin, forever behind her camera, appears in the midst of a night out at her chosen haunt, The Other Side, in a lovely candid photograph by Allen Frame. Yet, other photographs reveal even closer bonds between people, from Angela Russo’s pic of a duo of men sitting at the Gay Community News benefit at Club Max, one sporting a Rush-branded poppers T-shirt (where do I get one?), to Gail Thacker’s silly platinum-haired crew gathering around a fashion show at the punk hangout Spit. Granted, there is a limit to the enjoyment of staring at other people having fun in pictures while in an art gallery. As the World Burns makes up for that party monotony by including some thrilling, never-before-exhibited works. Some of the most dynamic are Jason Byron Gavann’s photographs taken mostly at the appropriately named Together, the former site of the soul club The Sugar Shack. In these photographs, glamorous trans women and drag queens vamp for the camera or, conversely, sit bored, gazing warily into Gavann’s lens. One photograph, in particular, stands out among the portraits. An anonymous pair of legs-for-days sit precisely posed and crossed, sporting black strappy heels. Entitled Giving Legs, this photograph is reminiscent of some particularly obsessive foot fetish imagery in Barkley L. Hendricks’s lesser-known photographs and Dario Argento’s films.

Of course, it’s no surprise that along with the forging of essential communities—or as Gavann terms it, “street family”—that Boston’s queer nightlife scenes would also provide space to explore and experiment with identity and gender without the prying eyes of those that would police them. Gavann’s photographs pair nicely with Allen Frame’s particularly dramatic series of black-and-white photographs of Kevin in drag. In Kevin in Polka-Dotted Dress, Cambridge, Kevin tosses his head back, holding a cigarette, in a lovely sundress like a golden age actress. Throwing a shadowy silhouette on the wall, Kevin’s practiced pose is performed for himself, quite literally as on a side table sits another one of Frame’s photographs of Kevin, Kevin in Fur. Avram Finkelstein takes on a more coded reference to gender in Untitled Portrait [B.]. Made in 1972, this needlepoint, itself a gendered craft discipline, is a subtle portrait of B., a trans woman in the circle of many of the visual artists in the show, based on a Nan Goldin photograph. Rather than a direct copy of the source material, Finkelstein zeroes in on the tips of B.’s fingers. Hands are a subtly gendered appendage that becomes of particular worry in terms of passing—a concern that Finkelstein erases entirely by abstracting B.’s fingertips into barely recognizable pixelated dots.

More than just some disembodied fingertips, B. appears elsewhere in the show, as do many of the other artists and friends who float in and out of each others’ artworks. Two other figures that flit into view quite frequently are teenage hustler and stunning Leif Garrett lookalike Bobby Busnach, who notably stole his own camera in a robbery, and Geraldine Visco, a writer and technicolor whirlwind who was a staple in NYC too until her death last year (For a full and vivid account of Gerry, read Joseph Keckler’s “Gerry Party” in his essay collection Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World: Portraits and Revelations). All three—B., Bobby, and Gerry—star in the exhibition’s centerpiece and title inspiration: As the World Burns, an 18-minute film from 1973 by Mark Winer. Though I saved this film for last, its influence was continually present with a loud eclectic soundtrack that ranged from David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane-era cabaret “Time” sliding abruptly into Kool and the Gang’s “Funky Stuff” to Nico’s uncharacteristically jaunty “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” from Chelsea Girl to Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”.

Though the film’s title is a coyly nihilistic take on the soap opera hysterics of As the World Turns, As the World Burns has much more in common with other low-budget Super-8 movies from the era, including a similar deadpan blasé delivery of many No Wave films and early John Waters movies. Winer’s film opens with Busnach slouching around Boston while giving non sequitur musings in voiceover such as “I wish I had a joint!” or “My grandmother gave me an enema when I was 12. She loved it!” In a particularly, um, smooth transition, Bobby considers, “I think I’ll go see B. in Beacon Hill.” There, B. emerges from her apartment with a drolly ambiguous statement: “Oh Bobby, I knew it was you by the way you rang the bell.” What does that even mean?! Was he passed out on it? Even with her intuition, B. seems a bit ambivalent about Bobby’s drop-in, insisting he only comes around when he wants something (“People usually stop by because they want to visit but you—you’re a different case”). Going for a stroll while having an uplifting convo (“Isn’t it a SHAME that Mary Jane died?!”), B. and Bobby meet up with Gerry, B.’s sister Lee, and Lee’s girlfriend in Lee’s apartment where they have champagne, make out, and roll all over the floor, with Bobby’s baby pink memorial James Dean T-shirt becoming its own character.

Perhaps my favorite part of the film is its conclusion when the entire cast sits on or near a couch and stares down the camera, sneering and smoking, to Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.” A delightfully defiant gesture—they’re not one of your little toys! Made when Winer was a film student at Boston University, As the World Burns has never been formally shown since a student screening in 1973 when, as Winer recalls in the corresponding label, “People were completely shocked…They’d never seen anything like it before.” The film did have a later life on social media thanks to Busnach who, in 2014 uploaded a digitized version to Facebook where it remains. The only catch, though, is several frustrating minutes of sudden muted audio due to copyright violations.

While I encourage watching the film even while enduring those silent sections, that’s not exactly ideal viewing, pointing to just how hard it is to still find and maintain a record of these transitory historical queer nightlife scenes. So much has been lost or remains floating out there, half-recollected, half-saved, half-ripped offline due to David Bowie’s copyright sticklers. Even when nightlife flyers, posters, and photographs get donated to prestigious smart-fuck university archives, they’re not exactly accessible to the average person without a definitive research purpose or other institutional backing (which is why community archives like the History Project are so vital). In addition to less snoot archives, exhibitions such as As the World Burns also represent essential work, bringing these captured nightlife memories out into the public to assert just how important dancing and breaking out the booze were to so many LGBTQ+ people’s not only survival but enjoyment of life. And still are. For if, as Peggy Lee sings, that’s all there is, that doesn’t seem too bad to me.