The first time anyone cruised Peter Hujar, he was 16. An older man was following him down Lexington Avenue one Friday night, when Peter swung around and asked, “Are you following me?” “No,” the man lied, but they made a date to see each other anyway. Peter was “in love with him right then,” he said later. “All I could think about was how I was going to see him tomorrow.”
When Peter showed up the next day, the man answered the door in a green and brown turtleneck and a pair of green shorts. He must have looked like an unripe squash, quivering at the sight of this beautiful boy standing outside his apartment. Peter thought he was handsome but didn’t mistake his attraction for true love, only the beginning of a way for him to be in love. A fleeting moment with a man, the first of many, was often all he wanted or needed. For a time, they saw each other on Sundays, when he lied to his mother about going to church. Picking up guys and bringing them home became a lot easier when he moved to Thompson Street. That’s when his sex life kicked into gear.
By 1970, he guessed that he might have had sex with at least 15,000 people. “If he had five minutes,” Fran Lebowitz remembered, “he’d go somewhere to have sex.” Peter wondered how his flings from Christopher Street might look when photographed. So far, his portraits of lovers had probed personality more than sexuality. Sexuality — and sexiness — was otherwise unimportant to a reading of his pictures; you didn’t necessarily need to know what anyone got up to in bed, even if it helped to learn that the nude blond boy on the zebra was a lover.
There were few photographers who worked with gay male eroticism in any serious or direct way at the time. But by the mid-’60s, Peter embraced the gay world rising to the surface. Already, he had captured such a range of his own experience, so gay men — gay men who lived unafraid as gay men — were an unavoidable subject for him, especially when he saw them everywhere. Inevitably, these men — their desires, their sexual practices — would find their way in front of his camera.
“I do want some of my sexual pictures to be hot,” Peter said. “I’m not doing them with the idea of doing ‘artistic’ nudes. I want people to feel the picture and smell it. I want the picture to be seductive. I don’t think about it, but it happens anyway. Yet I don’t want the picture to be hot because that’s too easy to do. Then it gets to be standard porno pictures of some guy doing whatever. I want to have the photo contain the same elements that could be found in any good portrait.”
Sometime in late 1966, when Peter was 33 years old, he invited two leather queens, Jay and Fernando, both wearing tight pants, black shirts, and biker caps, into his studio. During the session, Jay and Fernando admire one another’s uniform, gold chains, gruff poise. At ease, turned on, they touch, taste, toy with one another. One guy’s cock is pierced. It rises from wiry pubic hair in several close-up shots. The younger of the two men strips. He poses with statuary confidence. Otherwise, they barely notice the camera. Nothing Peter had shot before was ever so explicit.
The contact sheets yielded no especially great images, but then it was probably an exploratory shoot, practice for the future. Shortly thereafter, Peter photographed another leather queen, the poet Kirby Congdon. Congdon poses against a wall, removes his shirt, then his pants. Peter shot him lying down, posing naked against the wall, ass facing the camera (we also see his ass in a tight shot). His erect penis is shown up close. These are better, Congdon a little warmer.
Mostly missing from these first “hot pictures” is that feel and the smell, the seduction. Jay, Fernando, and Kirby Congdon are still seen at an emotional distance, even when they draw near to the camera and bare it all. Their kink insists upon a performance of heightened masculinity and of a sexual theater that falls somewhat flat for Peter’s camera, with its keen sensitivity to raw and unvarnished individuality, his always seeking what lies behind the performance, backstage. If the success of Peter’s sexual photos depend on their possessing the elements of a good portrait — that “blistering, blazing honestly directed towards the lens,” as one of his sitters once described it — then these early hot pictures, especially of Jay and Fernando, somewhat miss the mark, except as an analysis of a sexual type. This would change quickly.
After the upheaval of the 1960s, no one was quite sure what would come next — and for a while, it felt like the 1970s hadn’t started at all. The be-ins, the marches, and the riots had mostly subsided, leaving a strange quiet in their place. For many gay men, the new decade was a revolution of the body. It played out in bedrooms, on the piers, in clubs. After decades of repression, a whole generation suddenly felt free to explore what had been forbidden. In New York, that freedom erupted on the West Side, where sex was sportive, social, and unapologetically open.
For Peter, a summer day in 1975 might begin at the piers. By then, most of the waterfront was derelict, cut off from the city by the elevated West Side Highway, forgotten by the municipal authorities, and largely unpoliced. The piers’ isolation made them a popular cruising ground: concrete flatlands for sunbathing and, in the collapsing buildings that jutted onto the water, hidden alcoves for furtive encounters. On this urban beach, a hookup was as easy as a handshake or passing a joint. You might not even have to say anything. Eye contact alone could signal to someone he should follow you into the shadows.
What thrilled Peter about the piers was the feeling of someone’s eyes on the back of the head, that unwashed smell. He was a “genius about sex,” Lebowitz remembered. He strove to capture what he could of it in his photographs. He never brought his camera to the clubs or trucks — that would have violated their sanctity — but he did shoot Christopher Street and the piers, when the ruins turned into sprawling outdoor parties. In the mid-’70s, he photographed all sorts of guys gathering on the waterfront, friends and lovers, many of them half-naked, in short shorts, talking among themselves or smiling for his camera. A young kid hanging from ship ropes like a makeshift hammock. Boys lying in each other’s laps. One 1976 photograph of Pier 42 — taken on an astonishing tour of the city on Easter — is a fabulous tableau of this now-lost New York. A group of handsome men stand and sit on a wooden barrier, an ailing ship anchored behind them. A shirtless Black man in mirrored sunglasses stands beside a bearded white guy, hands in his pockets.
Almost every man in the picture is distracted by what is happening out of the frame — strangers walking by, cars slowing down to scope out the scene. It’s a brilliant portrait of the piers at their height and an ode to photography itself. To cruise is to look and admire as much as it is to touch and be touched; these men were living cameras. Their eyes snap away.
As Peter immersed himself in the gay scene, his “hot” photographs grew more daring. One raunchy session from 1975 with a lover named Mike Karton begins with Peter worshipping Karton’s jockstrap in his Second Avenue loft. Peter sits with Karton on his mattress, talking and laughing, before Peter mounts him. The camera catches the moment of penetration, Peter’s hand reaching back to adjust Karton’s cock. Another man joins them; they fuck in pairs.
Someone pulls out a large double-sided dildo. Karton and Peter stand naked on a towel, their backs to one another, as they insert the dildo in their asses. It goes on.
His subject had become intimacy in all its raw forms. He photographed himself in the baths, a solitary cruiser, eyes lifted in anticipation of who might come through the door. He photographed himself having sex in the piers. He photographed lovers and friends naked and turned on. With his camera, he cruised their bodies, seeking their eroticism, their pleasure — bodies of all kinds, too, from chubby H.M. Koutoukas to the lithe performer Robert Levithan, Hujar’s lover in the mid-’70s.
In the summer of 1976, he photographed Bruce de Ste. Croix sitting in a chair, admiring his own erection. The resulting triptych was exhibited in the backroom of the Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery for a 1978 group show focused on the male nude in photography. The New York Times famously sniffed that there was “something to be said for old-fashioned prudery when the unclothed human body is a man’s body.” But The Village Voice singled out Peter’s photo as a highlight of the show, even if the gallery “timidly” hid it in a box. The Voice ran the image uncensored. “Thanks for Le Temps Perdu,” read the headline.
The session with de Ste. Croix was easy, intimate. Bruce followed Peter’s instructions as he would any choreographer’s, he later recalled. He stripped naked, masturbated on Peter’s mattress, sat in the chair, played with himself. In the photographs taken that day, Bruce has a spectral beauty, as if conjured out of the air. Only when he stares at his hard cock does he finally seem to come into focus; his gaze intensifies — and concentrates — his presence in the room. “He dug through my nakedness and found an innocent part of me,” de Ste. Croix said.
The photographs carry a mood of discovery, as if this were not only de Ste. Croix’s first erection but the first erection of any man. The triptych — now one of Peter’s most beloved works — is an homage to male sexuality in its purest, most distilled form. It is deeply sexy. Nor was it merely erotic but part of an intellectual exercise, inspired by a conversation Peter had with de Ste. Croix about the disappearance of the erection from western art after antiquity. Peter remembered seeing a Caravaggio painting of a young boy — “quite beautiful, quite sexual” — and being struck by how subtle its eroticism was since Caravaggio’s boy is not fondling himself. It prompted a question in him: “Why can’t you have someone … touching himself and still have the same artistic considerations?” With his camera, he wanted to restore the erection to its once-revered place. “He liked breaking down barriers,” de Ste. Croix said.
In the summer of 1974, Peter was invited to show some of his pictures of nightlife, the Catacombs, and Candy Darling on her deathbed at the Floating Foundation of Photography, a dingy barge filled with handmade furniture docked at the 79th Street Boat Basin. The Village Voice called Peter’s work “outstanding,” and his friends at Rock Scene declared by the end of the year that he had become “New York’s favorite photographer.” After seeing his work on the barge, the gallerist Alex Coleman invited him to present a portfolio at her Foto Gallery in August. These shows marked a shift in Peter’s thinking about his work. He had wanted his pictures to be beautiful, even extraordinary — but he had not always allowed himself to think of them as art. “The art thing was just an inkling,” he said. That was changing. Nothing sold at the Foto. But the lack of sales didn’t slow his momentum. In early 1975, he signed a contract with Samuel Mitnick of Da Capo Press for a book with a $3,000 advance. He thought Susan Sontag’s name would help with sales, and she agreed to write the introduction. “I really would love to make money off it,” he told Linda Rosenkrantz. “And also to have it get around. You know I’ve always had a star thing, wanting to be … a star.”
If he had read any of Sontag’s recent essays on photography, her argument had not yet put him off, even if her ideas contradicted his own. She was still a few years away from publishing the divisive On Photography in 1977. At a moment when Peter was beginning to see his pictures as art, Sontag mostly refused to countenance photography as such because “time’s relentless melt” levels all pictures, professional or amateur, into mere objects of interest. There is something stupid and complicit about a photographer, she argued. She says the operator of a camera is akin to a magician who can only partly comprehend his trick. This is what Peter was up against, what all photographers were up against, even with friends. (Still, she was warmer and more gracious toward the idea of photographic artistry in her introduction to Peter’s Portraits: “I am moved by the purity and delicacy of his intensions. If a free human being can afford to think of nothing less than death, then these memento mori can exorcise morbidity as effectively as they evoke its sweet poetry and panic.”)
Reading On Photography now, you might be tempted to wonder whether Sontag had ever asked Peter about his work. There was so much she might have learned from him.
“He was a teacher,” his boyfriend Robert Levithan said. “He taught me to trust my eye.” One way Peter taught photography was by administering a test in his loft. On his dining table, he would lay out his pictures, hand you an eyepiece, and ask, “What do you think?” Which was the right image, the better print? He knew, but he was curious about your eye. When he asked John Erdman to judge some contact sheets early in their friendship, Erdman realized Peter was vetting him. Did he belong to his tribe? Membership didn’t require any special expertise; usually you just got it intuitively. You understood his anger, his love, his desire, his humor — like how he might start calling fire hydrants hydrangeas. Coming from performance, Erdman knew what it looked like when someone came alive onstage or within a frame, enough for him to be a good judge of a portrait. How you look at photographs, not only the subject matter but the composition and the quality of the print — because there are serious differences here — says a lot about who you are, Peter thought. “You had to reveal yourself to him in the act of looking at his work,” Steve Turtell said.
Sontag should have asked Peter about the portrait he made of her for his book. That conversation might have changed her mind. In it, she is lying on his mattress, her hands behind her head, eyes gazing upward. So much of the meaning of this photograph was refined in the darkroom. Peter burned the background wall of his loft so it became a kind of sky, while rendering the undulations of the blanket more pronounced so the image is a kind of seascape with Susan drifting on his bed like some grand ship. He also adjusted her hair — much of the gray disappears from the negative in the final print, with only a few strands showing near her temple, a prophetic salute to the famous white streak of later years. She is more Susan Sontag than Susan Sontag ever was in 1975.
The portrait is a proficient and tender demonstration of Peter’s skills as a photographer and printer, and it flies in the face of the author who wrote that photographs exist out of a “quasi-magical, quasi-accidental” relationship between the camera and the subject. Peter said he assembled Portraits in Life and Death like a novel. The book is divided into two parts: 28 portraits followed, without a break, by 11 pictures from the Catacombs.
Many of the portrait subjects in the book would have been familiar to those living in the East Village. For the most part, they were Peter’s neighbors, the people he saw around town. José Rafael Arango from the Palm Casino, the director Charles Ludlam, the playwright H.M. Koutoukas, the composer Alan Lloyd, the actor Lola Pashalinski, the dancer and poet Edwin Denby, Ann Wilson, Bob Wilson. Others were already verging on national fame. John Waters — the first portrait in the book — was a sensation with Pink Flamingos (1972), and Sontag was almost a household name. John Ashbery, another subject, had just published his celebrated Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. “A lot of emotion went into picking people who are in the book and who aren’t,” Peter said. The performer Bette Bourne summarized what Peter was looking for in a session: “You had to reveal … blistering, blazing honesty directed towards the lens. No pissing about. No posing. No putting anything on. No camping around. Just flat, reveal-who-you-are … You must strip down all the nonsense until you get to the bone.”
The key to the portraits is what Peter called their “isolation.” They share a lonely atmosphere, and “aloneness is what’s frightening.” Most of the photographs were taken in a sudden burst in 1975, when Peter said he was feeling solitary — the beginning of another one of those depressions from which he had suffered his whole life, only this one would prove much deeper than the others, almost without bottom. He concentrated on the human face as if looking into his subject’s eyes — and seeing death in those eyes — would steady him.
He was proud of Portraits. It encapsulated his achievement as a photographer and stood for something greater: the philosophical and artistic power of photography itself. The book did not sell well in his lifetime, though it eventually achieved cult status as a landmark photo book of the 20th century, mirroring the rest of Peter’s career: as someone who was always highly regarded by a small group of admirers and friends, all of whom knew what they had on their hands — even if it took the rest of the world time to catch on.
One of those admirers and friends was David Wojnarowicz, who was surprised when he slept with Peter in September 1981 that he was meeting the photographer of that special book. “I knew it, knew it well,” he wrote after that night, when Peter pulled a copy from his shelf to show David. At 28, David dreamed of creating work as powerful as those images. “Maybe I want people to faint at the meaning of my work,” he wrote in his diary the next day, echoing Peter, who once said, “I want to be discussed in hushed tones.”
An excerpt from the book The Wonderful World That Almost Was © 2026 by Andrew Durbin, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 14th, 2026, and Granta Books on April 23rd, 2026.
