Eric Leven | Stanley Stellar: Here for This Reason / 2019 [documentary]

my secret love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Leven (screenwriter and director) Stanley Stellar: Here for This Reason / 2019 [15 minutes] [documentary]

 

Stanley Stellar, the subject of this short documentary, had been filming gay figures for over 40 years when director Eric Leven’s film was shot in 2019.

    He explores that although he grew up in a very creative family in New York, and knew that he contained within himself a “difference,” he knew little about what being gay meant. He only knew, he explains, what the media told him. But he did sense that behind the windows of Christopher Street apartments and others in the Village that gay life was going on. And we witnessed in the 1960s a sense of gay experience on the streets.  

   The picture of the Cristopher Street bookshop below, for example, was manned for many years by the noted photographer and filmmaker Avery Willard, which as I mentioned elsewhere in these volumes, I visited often when I lived in New York City.

     As he begins to take us through his archive, he is briefly distracted by an entire file drawer devoted to men with “tattoos,” something he didn’t see very often in the media. But on Fire Island having encounter an ex-navy man with extensive tattoos, he felt the need to go up to him and ask if he might take his picture. And he take, obviously, a great many tattooed men, something not usually featured in photos of the period.

    In some instances his subjects would also reveal other secrets of their body. And, as he admits, he was also the part of that other secret society: the society of gay men, many of whom were still closeted. We didn’t have a visual history, he argues, so I found nothing wrong with being a gay photographer.

   On Sundays he would walk down Christopher Street, and like so many others squeeze through the whole in the wall to enter the new gay playland of the Hudson piers. The piers became a private gay world where gay men could get to know one another and see each other on parade.

    The cops knew about, but didn’t really care. And if you wanted to have sex with someone you could always find some obscure corner and lose yourself in a fantasy world.

     Stellar also talks about another somewhat unknown phenomenon that happened in the late 1970s when gay men were no longer forced just into bars (mostly mafia run) and basements but were now beginning to manage their own spaces such as the “Firehouse,” an old engine house that was rented out on weekends by gays for dancing and music. “It was music that was making us a tribe. And that was glorious.”

     He talks about Gay Pride Day, and his being there with his camera. If Stellar is sometimes

vague concerning details of how it came to be, he does provide a lovely insight as he photographs and watches young men standing on the corners and talking who he suddenly realizes are men he’s long seen in the dark of gay bars but now appear as transfigured beings in the light of the day, as if the secret world of his past and been opened up to the rest of society.

     But suddenly the 70s are ended. And there in the newspapers are strange reports of diseases happening to gay men. At first it was like some science fiction thing, but then got more and more frightening all the time. At the same time, he bought a new camera that permitted him a square format that resulted in far richer pictures.

     And he begin recording photographs of gay people simply because nobody any longer knew how long anyone would live. He wanted to record men with AIDS now, because it was a death sentence and he wanted to capture them before they died. In one case, he recalls a pretty boys asking if he could bring his boyfriend over to shoot both of them. Nobody knows except the boyfriend that he has AIDS, and Stellar realizes that he is consciously bringing his beautiful friend to have photographed as a couple before the end. He recalls that he spent most of 1980s photographing couples, realizing that he was there for that reason.

 

    “I would shoot somebody and then be invited to his memorial service two months later.”

    If Gay Pride had always been a day of meeting friends, we all became aware that there were fewer and fewer of them.

     The 80s became a time of health awareness, gay men were creating art groups and making art related to health. And together with lesbians who appeared in support more and more younger people were coming out in support. Gay life changed. And then Gay Pride exploded. It wasn’t just me and my friends but miles and miles of people come to express their pride and support of gay men and women. Now it became suddenly a day to celebrate. You didn’t hide it from your friends anymore. You could march down 5th Avenue and feel like you are a valid human being, freed of that guilt and negativity.

     “I’m an old guy now,” he concludes; and the young don’t seem to be caught as I was in the collective past, trapped our years of shame. “Now at this point in my life if I try to think of what we all share, it’s a uniqueness and a strength; it a beautiful, wonderful uniqueness that deserves to be honored, that we deserve to honor each other, we deserve to love each other,” without being a secret.

     If Stellar sometimes says the obvious, he pictures provide us with a history that would have otherwise never have been known.

 

Los Angeles, December 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).