Tim Gray: you've always lived here?

SS: I’ve always lived here, and I'm really interested in photographing the immediate visual things and people in my life and environment. I'm not interested in photographing models, because I don't live among models. I'm not interested in photographing California surfer boys. What I'm interested in is the visual reality of my own day-to-day existence and fantasy life. 

Whenever people talk about early childhood, it always amazes me that they have very articulate memories about being a certain age. My memories are really always triggered by seeing photos of myself or others as a child.

I have a picture from 1947 that shows my mother in K AL, who was my surrogate father. KAL had a camera, and he taught my mother how to use it. Later, he taught me how to take pictures, too. To amuse myself, I would sit on the floor and spend a lot of time looking into my grandmothers three sided mirror. By changing the angle of two of the sides, you could change the image you saw. It was very fascinating to me.

TG: So you were composing pictures in your mind.

SS: Yeah, right. I would sit on the floor cross-legged for a long time and just look at her magazines over and over again. I was always fascinated that all these world—of color and refrigerators and kitchens and war and cars and luxury and fantasy and movie stars could be there just by turning the page. 

These pictures communicated with me more than people are friends at that point. These photos of the late 40s and early 50s are part of my visual vocabulary even now.

TG: Was this in Brooklyn?

SS: And, in Montreal. My mother was Canadian. We traveled back-and-forth. I was sort of bicultural as a child.

TG: So this was a magic place for you? You didn’t have anything like it in Brooklyn?

SS: Exactly. In Brooklyn, I guess in 1957, when I was definitely in puberty, I noticed that two blocks away from my house, near the bus stop, was a candy store with a magazine rack that had those little physique magazines. Very tame.

TG: What do you mean “little”? Do you mean in size?

SS: Yeah. Like this, Tomorrow’s Man.

TG: That’s about three by five inches.

SS: Yeah. There were a couple of them—one or two—and I couldn't believe it. They were lost in the midst of all this heterosexuality and 50s normalcy. There were these magazines about bodybuilders and men. I could open them and see something that I never, never, never saw in any of the other magazines of my boyhood. In my grandmother's room, it was refrigerators and ladies and lipstick and liquor bottles and automobiles and consumerism. But these little magazines with pictures of nearly nude men—who were they for, in my normal Flatbush neighborhood? I don't know. It was just astounding to me, because I had never seen them in any other context, ever. Even at that point, I had this hungering to be with men.

TG: You knew you were gay?

SS: Absolutely.

TG: When did you first know that?

SS: In my grandmother’s room.

TG: How old were you?

SS: It’s hard to say. I knew that I had a secret, a different secret. 

TG: Was there a lot of time between being aware of having this hunger and discovering these physique magazines?

SS: Yeah. I was about seven or eight when I knew that I had a desire for or a secret about men. I knew I couldn't reveal it to anyone. I knew it wasn't acceptable; it wasn't the role everything around me pointed toward by saying, “This is what should happen to you. You're going to like girls and date girls and have girlfriends and get married and do all these normal things.” I knew way back in my grandmother’s room, looking in that mirror, that it wasn’t my way. 

TG: That’s an early age. Was it a vague sense?

SS: It was a vague sense. I wondered how it would manifest itself. I was very afraid of it. I wasn't particularly down on myself for it, but I knew that I had my own private thing that I would have to deal with in the future.

TG: So when you saw these physique magazines, something clicked?

SS: Yeah. Something clicked.

TG [Looking at the issue of Tomorrow’s Man]: This was published in 1956.

SS: In the magazines in that candy store, it was like looking at some kind of forbidden fruit. But there were never, never any full frontal male nudes. The models seem to have been nude in the photos, but someone had crudely drawn or painted on a posing strap where their genitals were. If the model wasn't wearing a posing strap, that area would be blocked out in black with the crudest magic marker in the shape of a strap or pouch, or the penises were airbrushed into nonexistence. I didn't find that funny, I found it mystical. At that age and in my culture in my own naïveté, I thought that not having penises in the photographs was some natural thing that happened, when you pointed a camera at a man, the camera wouldn’t record his penis. In 1955 or 1956 in Brooklyn, it was all about breasts and breast size. Only three or five times in my life had I ever even heard someone refer to the word “penis”. 

TG: And you’re still roughly 13 at this point?

SS: Right. I had pubic hair, but I don't even know if at that age I had actually ever seen another penis in my life, other than my own in the mirror.

TG: Your father?

SS: No, never. Or my brother. Never. I would sleep with my cousin in Montreal. We were around the same age. This was the first other penis I ever saw.

TG: 13 is when you're in seventh grade, which is when you change classes and start taking showers in gym class with other boys.

SS: Right, but by then I had figured out that penises didn't disappear in front of a camera. I would look at these pictures and think, gee, this is really magical, this is really far out. What is so wrong with penises that they can't even be photographed? What is it? What is it?

TG: So you didn’t hold on for too long the notion that the camera automatically erases penises?

SS: I lived with that fantasy for a while. It wasn't until the 1960s, during the sexual revolution, that I started to realize that it was really this set of values imposed by heterosexual men in the publishing business and in the lawmaking business that forbade anyone to see the male nude male body without it being visually mutilated. To this very day, I still don't understand what the big deal is. I don't get why heterosexual men have such a vehement revulsion regarding their own bodies. I've always felt very political in my stance. It's not like I'm trying to balance out the scale by photographing nude men and revealing their penises. But why can't we be natural? Why can't we be beautiful? I realize that a real theme for me is that we're all the same inside. For me, it's really about those little physical differences between your ears and his ears or his ears and someone else’s ears; these differences that are little, or big. We're all different, and we're all the same. And I love that. For me, my photographs in book form should be like an encyclopedia of types and body parts. We're all the same. But those little, subtle design differences are beautiful to see and to play with, the heart tells me everyone is the same. Their eyes tell me there are design differences, and the heart tells me everyone is the same. 

I don't photograph professional models. I just photograph men who have this hankering, this fantasy, this desire to be photographed nude. Why is that? Why are there so many people there for me? I don't hypnotize these people, and over hundreds of men come here. In a way, I think taking off their clothes to be photographed is breaking a taboo or crossing a line, like going to get a tattoo and then not telling anyone you have it.

TG: You said that you never could understand why this was a taboo in the first place. Maybe the people who pose for you feel the same way?

SS: Definitely. They definitely are on my side here.

TG: So, in a way, you’re all a political army for the same cause.

SS: Yeah, and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. I never have to search very long or far for models, and they come from all walks of life. Not everyone in this book is gay. They come gay, bisexual, and heterosexual.