The suave style and subtle codes of gay San Francisco in the ’70s

A decade after the Summer of Love transformed San Francisco into a wonderland of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, a new wave of devotees embraced the Castro District as the epicentre of Gay Liberation. In 1975, a young Hal Fischer arrived in town, set to pursue his graduate studies in photography at San Francisco State University. But it was the streets that would school him in ​“Gay Semiotics”: a language of desire and discovery. 

“We are looking at a golden age between Stonewall and AIDS, a period of incredible freedom,” Fischer recalls. ​“No one had money. The corollary in the art world was nothing really sold. You could live incredibly cheaply and do whatever you wanted to do. People were wonderfully direct. You could say anything, everything was out there.” 

Inspired by August Sander’s epic series, People of the 20^th Century, Fischer began crafting street portraits of young men who subverted classic masculine archetypes, embedding a web of sexual codes into their fashion choices. There are thick moustaches, cowboy tropes and the ​“Hanky Code”, where gay men displayed different coloured handkerchiefs in their rear pockets as a covert way of expressing their sexual preferences.

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“One of the things that always fascinated me about Sander’s work was how people presented themselves when a camera was there,” he says. ​“Some people would adopt the pose that was expected of them, and there’s a gravitas to that.” 

But where August Sander strove to document his fellow German citizens from all walks of life, Fischer focused exclusively on those who turned his head. ​“One of the things I picked up from Sander was that no one in my street fashion series was costumed. That’s what they were wearing,” Fischer says. ​“Although I found the setting, which was always very neutral and close to nondescript, they assumed the pose. I let them become what they wanted to be, and that was a very important thing for me. The vocabulary of poses understood by the culture at large doesn’t exist anymore.” 

In August 1977, Fischer exhibited 24 prints from the series in his first solo exhibition, held at Lost in the Cell Gallery. ​“I remember there were 300 people at the gallery, which was a small gallery in a little Victorian house, in South Market, and I thought, ​‘Wow, you’re having your 15 minutes,’” Fischer says. ​“As a critic, I knew that I had done something unique and was aware it was important.” 

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Hal Fischer, Gay Semiotics, 1977, from Hal Fischer: Seminal Works (Aperture, 2025). Courtesy the artist.

Nearly half a century later, his vision can be seen in full in Hal Fischer: Seminal Works (Aperture). The book chronicles Fischer’s brief, but glorious, photography career, bringing together early works and major series made between 1977 and 1984, while crafting an indelible portrait of San Francisco at the height of Gay Liberation. Combining photography, play, and performance into a many-splendored celebration of the male gaze, Fischer’s semi-anthropological studies of local culture are blessed with the knowing eye of a visionary and the soul of a writer.

In his 1979 series, Boy-Friends, Fischer catalogues as bevy of young men of the manic pixie type, including ​‘A Lost Boy’, ​‘The Hippie’, ​‘The Punk Poet’ and ​‘A Neighborhood Friend’ – their eyes hidden behind black bars, the encounters written with diaristic delight. ​“If you look at my archetypes, this is what’s attractive,” Fischer says. ​“This is what carries forward.”

Hal Fischer: Seminal Works is published by Aperture.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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