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He took photos of gay men in New York City when the queer scene wasn’t of much interest to other photographers. David McGillivray interviewed him to find out more…

There’s a Facebook group called Vintage Workingmen Beefcake, which has more than 50,000 members. Sometimes the old photos of Marlboro Men and Muscle Beach bodybuilders attract hundreds of views. Scrolling down the posts a few months ago, I discovered a distinctive picture of a bare-chested man with a VPL (visible penis line), making a call from a public phone box. The comments were very appreciative. A lot of people wanted to know more about this photo. Then somebody revealed, “It’s by Stanley Stellar.”

“At a pay phone on the corner of Christopher and Bleecker Streets, NYC” is one of tens of thousands of photos taken by Stellar, an American photographer. They’re mostly of men in New York City, where Stellar was born and still lives. It’s impossible not to wonder what became of the nice-looking man Stellar noticed using a phone booth. This is because Christopher Street is in the heart of New York City’s gay village, and also because the photo was taken in 1981, the year the New York Times first reported on a “Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals”.

Now aged 76, Stellar is still a photographer. But now everybody is. The Stellar photos that fascinate us today date from the 70s and 80s, when hardly anyone used a good camera to record everyday gay life. “I didn’t think the world needed another gay man to be a fashion photographer,” says Stellar. Instead, he took candid pictures of men cruising or celebrating