Page 18 - Faces of AIDS: 102 Portraits

JIM WIGLER

PIONEER PHOTOGRAPHER
A Lifetime Focus on Gay Popular Culture

Jack Fritscher

Jim Wigler was born in Detroit in 1944. to hunk calendars for the “Castro
Upon moving with his Nikon to the wild Country Club” to his solo exhibits like
art scene of 1970s New York City, he Vietnam War Vets: Face to Face, Stars

lensed a poetic Leonard Cohen and a of the SFPD, and Faces of AIDS.
dramatic NYPD cop who incarnated his
fantasy of his erotic ideal. He worked In Summer 1982, the Eagle bar in
professionally and significantly as San Francisco hung his show, Raw
assistant’s assistant to photographer Graphics, celebrating the men and
Frances McLaughlin-Gill, the first spirit of 1970s kinky role-playing
female fashion editor under contract to psychodrama. Wigler’s authentic
Vogue. Taking a page from the female photos, caused an erotic sensation

gaze of her book, Women Photograph among applauding leatherfolk. The
Men (1976), he moved in 1979 to turn series featured Gunner Robinson, his
his gay gaze on San Francisco men. partner in their company aptly named
Trailing habits from New York, he joined RAW Graphics: RobinsonAndWigler.
in the high times of art, sex, drugs, and Leather-satyr Gunner was photo-
disco on Castro Street and Folsom graphed in the woods with guns and
Street before beginning his recovery in knives menacing two leather-hooded
1980. and bound men played by Karl Boyer
and Larry Hunt, a model he shared
During forty years, thousands of his with Robert Mapplethorpe who, two
photographs have appeared on the years younger than Wigler, at that same
covers, centerfolds, and interior layouts moment in New York, was shooting

of dozens of magazines including Bear, his own challenging fetish photos of
Honcho, and the legendary Drummer masked men, guns, and knives.
which in October 1982 launched
Wigler’s nationwide reputation by Both photographers scared the horses.
publishing his immediately canonical It was the first summer of Gay Cancer.
photo series “Red Dog Saloon.” As an People were already scared sexless.
erotic documentarian of leathermen, he Self-appointed gays began to censor
shot his deep-focus profiles most often gay art and behavior the way they
on location in bars, playrooms, and had attacked the 1980 film Cruising

Golden Gate Park. His popular rugged for its frightful straight gaze at gay
work was everywhere from magazines culture. These iconoclasts demanded