{"id":111562,"date":"2026-01-25T00:05:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T00:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/111562\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T00:05:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T00:05:12","slug":"listen-the-last-confederate-widow-of-1960s-cruising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/111562\/","title":{"rendered":"LISTEN \u2018The Last Confederate Widow\u2019 of 1960s Cruising"},"content":{"rendered":"

That sense of mystery is something that a lot of my better photographs have, and The Ramble at the time exuded a kind of mysterious\u2026 19th century romanticism of the English garden that gave you that kind of experience. I used it as a kind of leitmotif when I was creating the photos, a kind of archetypical pattern of these dark shadows, these endless pathways, the late autumnal feeling of people doing these perambulations\u2014almost a metaphor for the human condition, in a way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most of these men were looking for love. Sexual love, of course, but for companionship, love. And yet they\u2019re constantly being thwarted by social conventions, their own psychological inhibitions. It became a very dream-like almost nightmare situation\u2026 And some of the better images in the series have a touch of that feeling, a kind of tormented anguish, a questioning of the human condition.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Arthur Tress, whose newly published photographs of gay men in Central Park\u2019s Ramble in 1968 and 1969 are the earliest shots of outdoor cruising in a natural setting, joins Harry Siegel and Alex Krales to discuss his work in a New York City where homosexuality was still a taboo and a crime<\/a>, why he\u2019s publishing it now, and much more.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

[Photographs from The Ramble, NYC 1969<\/a> are on display at the CLAMP gallery in Chelsea<\/a> through February.]<\/p>\n

\"\"Credit: Arthur Tress\/ The Ramble<\/p>\n

Between 72nd Street and 59th Street was an abandoned railroad yard. The train still could go by on their way to Penn Station or something, but they had the remnants of this old railroad yard. There was a pier at 72nd Street where people would go out and sunbathe nude. And I would get models. I would just walk along and say, \u201cWould you like to be in some of my photos?\u201d And I found this couple, and I brought them over to this derelict freight car. It\u2019s this couple kind of clinging to each other in this kind of falling-apart world, this very violent world, it\u2019s become evocative now for people. My photos are always kind of spontaneous happenings within a certain kind of found environment. I don\u2019t plan them out exactly.<\/p>\n

\"\"Credit: Arthur Tress\/ The Ramble<\/p>\n

One or two of the stronger portraits had been published before now. One was in Aperture Magazine. It\u2019s an image of a shirtless young man with a kind of very intense expression, with some branches with thorns against his chest. But I would never say that they were taken in The Ramble. I would just say young men in Central Park, because they really were hidden photographs. I didn\u2019t want to impinge on the privacy of the people in the photographs.<\/p>\n

\"\"Credit: Arthur Tress\/The Ramble<\/p>\n

These two were my most elaborately staged and directed photos. These two guys, I had them moving around that famous stone arch.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Credit: Arthur Tress\/ The Ramble<\/p>\n

When people cruised in the bushes or wherever, your hand on the crotch was certainly a sexual invitation but also this continual wandering down the labyrinthine paths is kind of very dreamlike and in itself an experience. So those were two photographs where I think my more mature style was beginning to show itself<\/p>\n

\"\"Credit: Arthur Tress\/The Ramble<\/p>\n

I began really focusing on the gay world, the gay cruising world in Manhattan. Those were the Christopher Street piers. It was just two guys standing there, which was kind of dangerous. You know, they were falling apart. And we had piers at 72nd and Riverside. There was a whole stretch, some of which is still there, of [what was then] abandoned waterfront, and I would occasionally go down. This was a lost image. I just was going through the contact sheets and said, \u201cWell, that\u2019s really a good picture.\u201d It\u2019s actually gotten a little bit more exposure now, and it\u2019s just been bought by a museum. My prints aren\u2019t very expensive, as I feel that photography is kind of democratic and you can make lots of prints. A museum I had never really heard of, called the Reina Sofia in Madrid, just bought a print, so that photograph now has a kind of a life of its own. It\u2019s kind of a classic, just a very 1980s moment.<\/p>\n

\"\"Credit: Arthur Tress\/ The Ramble<\/p>\n

That was 1967, 68, with the flower children from the Summer of Love in San Francisco, but also certainly the East Village. I personally think that they were more out, fashion-wise, and had a certain sexual fluidity that was kind of a precursor of gay lib. It was kind of hippie lib. You know, they were having group sex and living in communes. All kinds of street drag queens, and they were breaking down all kinds of barriers and were very much out in the world.<\/p>\n

\"\"Credit: Arthur Tress\/ The Ramble<\/p>\n

\u00a0I think that was a gesture that he did on his own. What\u2019s funny is that in the background is the Dakota, where they filmed Rosemary\u2019s Baby, and he looks like Mia Farrow, which I thought was a kind of strange coincidence. In other words, we\u2019re trying to define what is surrealism. You know, what is the dream like? And we\u2019re always kind of on the edge of that in our daily life. The word surreal has become quite over-used, but it\u2019s when something is transformative, when an ordinary scene just edges into something a little bit different. It can be elaborately set up, or it can just be kind of nudged into happening, to have that kind of disturbing scene. You know: What is that?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That sense of mystery is something that a lot of my better photographs have, and The Ramble at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111563,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":{"0":"post-111562","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-nyc","11":"tag-queens","12":"tag-queens-headlines","13":"tag-queens-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}