This world is filled with too many people who are content with being
empty. Yet, every now and then, an underground wildcard pops up, full
of intrigue and ready to redeem everything. Band of Bikers, a photo
book recently published by PowerHouse (and a must-see photo exhibition
opening tonight), is a collection of photographs that the poet and
gallerist Scott Zieher found in the basement of his apartment
building. The photographs, which had belonged to a recently-deceased
man who had lived in Zieher’s building, depict a group of gay bikers
meeting up at 1970s summer outings (members from motorcycle gangs
including the Vikings, the Praetorians, the Scorpions, the Unicorns,
the Druid are all depicted in the images). Accompanying the book is a
beautiful, intensely readable essay, written by Zieher, on both the
nature of these images and of found photography and ephemera writ
large. “I’m straight and married and have never driven a motorcycle,
but I’m a poet and a contemporary art dealer, so I certainly have
exposure and sensitivity to aspects of gay culture,” says Zieher, of
his intrigue when discovering these images. “For that matter, I first
saw Kenneth Anger’s films and read his books as an undergraduate in
Milwaukee in the mid-1980s, and came of age in an era when gender and
sexual politics were pretty rampant issues at the university level.
And the poets that made their most indelible impression on my younger
self were often gay: Whitman, Crane, Ginsberg, O’Hara. Suffice to say
one can’t call himself a decent poet and not find some affinity with a
good portion of the predominant contemporary canon. [And] I have
always had a fondness for vernacular photography. The fact that a
completely unassuming amateur captured these weekends is what appeals
most to me. It’s a marvel how much information [the photographer]
managed to capture in such an offhanded way. These photographs
comprise a gorgeous microcosm.” Like Anger’s 1964 masterpiece, Scorpio
Rising, the images in Band of Bikers depict a fringe coterie of
like-minded spirits, who seem to delight in finally finding their
place in the world, if only for motor oil-scented weekend. The men in
these photographs, living in a time post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS,
represent a Halcyon moment in gay male sexual emancipation. There is a
sense that the men depicted in these images, momentarily salvaged from
the tyranny of status quo employment and disapproving families, were
perhaps enjoying their truest moments of liberation.
Band of Bikers opens on February 25th at ZieherSmith Gallery, 516 West
20th Street, NYC
