Neal Baer is a board member at the ONE Archives Foundation in Los Angeles, a non-profit dedicated to preserving LGBTQ history. He and fellow researcher Michael Wolfe recently stumbled across a series of photos taken at what appears to be a gay wedding in the 1950s.
Here’s what they know about the pictures: They were printed in 1957 at a neighborhood drugstore in Philadelphia. They capture a ceremony featuring two grooms. The photos also depict the exchange of rings before witnesses, an officiant leading the ceremony, the kiss, the cake, the gifts, and more.
The owner of the drugstore where the film was dropped off to be developed decided they were inappropriate and refused to return them to the unknown grooms.
Now, Baer and Wolfe are trying to identify the couple.
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“We have put in months and months and months investigating who these guys are,” Baer tells the Advocate.
“We just left pretty stunned,” researcher Wolfe adds. “We were a little bright-eyed about, ‘Oh, we’ll just go and find the guys in these photos,’ but it’s turned into a long-term project. We call ourselves like the gay Scooby-Doo. We get to go and hunt down this amazing story.”
They’ve launched a website–OurOneStory.com–in hopes of tracking down the men.
“Does anybody recognize them?” says Baer. “We’d love to know that. What would be a huge help is just getting these photos in front of a bunch of 80 and 90-year-olds.”
“We are hopeful that in the connected age that we could spread them fairly widely and get more eyes on them,” adds Wolfe. “There are too many recognizable faces among the set that we couldn’t find a match.”
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GayEGO
Very good information revealed here, 1957 was a very gay-unfriendly time.
jkthsnk
Here’s hoping the store owner had a miserable life.
nitejonboy
why do you wish that ? what does the store owner have to do with it ?
Captain proton
um, isn’t it more than likely they didn’t survive the early aids epidemic years
Green4Clover
If these 2 were sexually monogamous and drug free, they would have survived. Being gay back then does not automatically get you AIDS
Chrisk
Most would be in their 50s/60s by then when most start to settle down. The hiv epidemic was mostly driven by younger men.
ElPillo
OMG! Am I really reading this crap from younger folk?! This is what I read in the comments, “one must be x to have survived ortherwise we are trashy; thank goodness we are so better now”? Are we having a Peyton Place gay society now?
dbmcvey
What difference would that make?
zedus headus
Wow. No, it isn’t more than likely. Please, please, please educate yourself by reading about how AIDS and HIV impacted the gay community. It is perhaps the most important part of gay history as an argument can be made that the real birth and growth of the gay political movement was a result of the disease. A significant part of a generation of gay and bisexual men was decimated and all of us, even now, continue to be impacted by it.
S.anderson
They’d be in their 80s-90s now! And, what if the wedding didn’t take place locally? Or, the roll was found on the street and sent for developing by someone curious to find the owner?
OneOldBear
They look like such a happy couple in these pictures!! I just got our my wedding album from the early 1980’s to remember how wonderful that day was.
dgsea06
1957? WoW! is the word. Moi in 1957 was way too young to know that two humans could and did marry the person they love. Except that the only reason people “get married” is to ensure a constant and steady fuck. They, (the heteros) do it all the time. Turn the wife into a walkin’ talkin’ baby factory and say “See what I can do!”
These photos make me wish I had known that it was possible, even then, to have a crush on a classmate, show affection and get, well nowhere! T’would’ve been worth a try! In 1957.
Superb stuff, QUEERTY!
Keep us informed upon the status of our ongoing struggle for the right to simply exist or to exist complicatedly. We Are Human Beings.
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QueerTruth
Great story, Graham. TY.
RobtheElder
I would have been 15 in 1957 (am 76 now). The fellows whom the pictures depict getting married would have been about 25 then, and would be 85 now. Aids didn’t decimate anything like a whole generation of gay men. Sometimes the tabloids and even the regular legitimate newspapers made it seem like that, but I lived through the epidemic stages, and most of my friends did, too. It really depended on what your lifestyle was like. We all knew gay men who frequented bathhouses, having indiscriminate sex with a dozen or more men in a single evening. If that wasn’t your scene, you stood a good chance of not being infected. Most of my friends from that era are still with me… RobtheElder
Motion
I read with pleasure … a brave story!
brickdr66
Cool. Wow.