This Moment Will Never Happen Again

Around 2 a.m. on January 27, 1973, the sanctuary of the Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles, considered the first LGBTQ religious denomination in the United States, caught fire.

A few hours later, a community organizer phoned photographer Anthony Friedkin and urged him to capture images of the charred rubble as well as of the church’s founder, the Reverend Troy Perry, who had arrived at the scene. Friedkin grabbed his ever-ready cameras and film and drove downtown.

By the time he arrived, the fire—later believed to be arson—had dramatically compromised the structure. The firefighters gave him 45 seconds to go in and get his shot.

Inside, Rev. Perry stood with arms folded, wearing black clergy attire and a somber expression. Friedkin made choices in split seconds. “I intentionally used a wide-angle lens,” he remembers. “I wanted there to be an intimacy, but at the same time, show all the ruins in the background. This was Rev. Perry’s church, and he was victimized. He was in a state of shock, and I felt his anger,” he says.

This powerful photograph of Rev. Perry, a print of which is now part of the Getty Museum’s collection, will be featured in the upcoming exhibition and publication Queer Lens: A History of Photography, organized by Paul Martineau, curator of photographs at the Museum. The show will explore the transformative force of photography and how it has played a profound role in increasing LGBTQ visibility by representing individual lives and the spirit of the times.

A philosopher’s photographer

Friedkin remembers the Rev. Perry shot as a classic “Cartier-Bresson decisive moment.” For Henri Cartier-Bresson—considered the pioneer of modern photojournalism—that perfect moment was “a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera,” as he told the Washington Post in 1957. “Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

“I’m from that school of philosophy,” says Friedkin. “I love shooting the moment, immortalizing a split second in time. And black and white gets to the moral of the story.”

Friedkin is committed to capturing unaltered moments—he never crops his pictures, and he prints the negatives in their full proportions. “The reason is that when you start to crop a photograph, you’re starting to do surgery on the reality of the moment,” he says. “It’s also psychological, because when you start to crop, you start to take the reality, the moment, that time, that place, out of the picture.”

An inspired childhood

Friedkin got his first camera at age eight, a classic Kodak Brownie, and chose black-and-white film. He began using a darkroom at age 11 and says that for the last 67 years, not much has changed about his techniques. In his early years he shot portraits of his childhood friends, his brother playing Knights of the Round Table, and his cat giving birth at the foot of his bed.

Friedkin’s parents were great influences. His father, David, was a Hollywood screenwriter and producer whose credits included cowriting the audition script for Gunsmoke and the screenplay for Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. His mother, Audrey, was a dancer and actor under contract with Paramount Pictures. Friedkin and his brother, Gregory, came of age in a liberal household where LGBTQ people were always welcome. His parents enjoyed throwing parties, drinking and dancing with the Hollywood elite, and paying no mind to sexual orientations. Friedkin would later understand that this was unusual in the greater world.

The Gay Essay: A seminal project

In 1969, the same year as the Stonewall riots—a series of violent demonstrations protesting a police raid of a New York City LGBTQ bar—20-year-old Friedkin traveled to Europe intending to make his first serious photographic portfolio. But once he got there, he couldn’t decide what story to tell.

When he returned to the United States, he knew he wanted to do an “incredibly emotionally challenging” essay for himself that would be difficult to pull off on every level: emotionally, artistically, spiritually, and technically.

Friedkin decided to do a story on the LGBTQ community called The Gay Essay and would draw on his upbringing and refuge in Hollywood, an industry teeming with LGBTQ dancers, designers, and hair and makeup artists even when gay or lesbian people in other work environments, if outed, stood to lose their jobs.

His mission was to photograph his subjects living their full lives. He went across the board, photographing political activists, male prostitutes, and performers like Divine and the Cockettes. He especially wanted to photograph serious couples who exuded love for each other.

Challenges and controversies

Of all the difficulties Friedkin faced for this project, that he did not identify as LGBTQ wasn’t one of them. No one ever asked him, he says; they always just welcomed him with open arms. “Everyone in the community was so thrilled with the idea that I wanted to do this. They could tell I was serious and knew what I was talking about. They always said they would do whatever they could to help me.”

He did, however, have some close calls with the police. Once he trailed two undercover cops in Hollywood and witnessed them stopping to investigate two men kissing in some bushes. They jumped out of their car, pointed a shotgun at the two men, but then spotted Friedkin, who was photographing them. “We could have shot you,” they told him. Friedkin calmed them down and remembers that they then left the two men alone. He also photographed at gay rights marches and in gay bars, where he saw patrons getting arrested just for putting their hand on someone else’s shoulder.

Several magazines refused to run Friedkin’s photos, and the one that purchased a few postponed publishing them many times. Eventually the magazine admitted it was afraid of losing advertisers. “But at the same time, some of these magazines would run horrible, grotesque shots from the Vietnam War,” he remembers. “I would ask, ‘But you can’t run my pictures because they’re of people of the same sex showing love for one another?’”

Regardless, The Gay Essay was first exhibited at Los Angeles’s Ohio Silver Gallery in 1973 and featured 72 photos.

The Getty Museum acquisition

The photograph of Rev. Perry complements 20 other works from The Gay Essay series that are already part of the Getty collection.

Martineau recently described the portrait as “powerful.” “I decided to include it in the upcoming exhibition and publication because it tells a story of Perry’s courage and determination, his refusal to give in when facing the worst kind of hatred.”

Martineau much admires Friedkin too. “With an abundance of youthful idealism and a sympathetic eye, the photographer represented individual lives and the spirit of the times, bringing visibility to those who emerged from the shadows to fight for equality. The Gay Essay is a seminal project, prefiguring the work of other photographers in the LGBTQ community, including David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia.”

“It’s interesting,” Friedkin says about his photograph of Rev. Perry in his burned-down church. “It never went away. People are always like, what’s the story behind this?”