By Richard Andreoli

Iconic photographer Tom Bianchi discusses his extraordinary career, the impact of AIDS on his life, and the new documentary Gay Sex in the '70s.

In the world of queer artists, Tom Bianchi stands out as the man who resurrected male beauty, sexuality, and erotic expression from the ravages of AIDS during the 1990s. He first moved to New York City as a corporate lawyer in the early 1970s when disco was queen, Bette Midler performed at bathhouses, and the gay community was just beginning to discover its voice. This was post-Stonewall but pre-AIDS so homosexuality was still very much an unspoken part of American culture, and yet within this world was Fire Island, a seemingly magical oasis where Bianchi and others like him discovered a new world of sexual exploration.

"Every single fantasy I had about life I saw at Fire Island," says Bianchi from his Los Angeles home where his portraits of male nudes hang with a pride that he could never have displayed when first moving to New York. He smiles broadly as he recalls the time, saying, "There were gay men holding hands and it was all the guys you saw in GQ, in Playgirl. It was beyond anything I could have imagined and I realize now it was a tiny epicenter of gay life."

Similar insights are expressed and uncovered in the new documentary, Gay Sex in the '70s, which opens in Los Angeles Nov. 18. Combining first person accounts from such survivors as Bianchi, author/activist Larry Kramer, and Studio 54 architect/designer Scott Bromley, filmmaker Joseph Lovett is able to show slices of gay history from a social, political, and sexual perspective that hasn't truly been seen in queer cinema.

"I think the reality of our lives is important," explains Bianchi, who supplied Lovett with numerous photographs taken from his first book, Fire Island Pines. This unpublished collection includes the obligatory shots of Speedo-clad men with thick sideburns and mustaches or handsome nude sunbathers, while more unexpected images capture wild sex in the woods and numerous drugs being sniffed or smoked. These aren't models, they're simply gay men who led normal lives every other day of the year but on Fire Island felt so unencumbered by closeted society that they would willingly allow Bianchi to shoot their most intimate and secret activities. "I think it's important for us to report on what the reality of our experience was," Bianchi says of the documentary. "New York at that time was so incredibly exciting," he says before the smile starts to fade. "And then it became terrifying."

While Bianchi is known to most as a photographer, he actually made his name in the New York art world as a sculptor and painter in the late 1980s. It was only after years of working as a lawyer that he began producing collages, and with some encouragement he contacted his friend, Carol Dreyfuss, from the famed Parsons-Dreyfuss Gallery in New York. Impressed with Bianchi's work, she first placed him in a group show and then within 24 months he had his own opening where New York Times critic, Hilton Kramer, gave him a favorable review.

"At that point in my life, while it was intensely scary, it was also intensely magical," Bianchi observes. "Suddenly I got this heavy duty art world credibility and parlayed that into a successful career. I may have become one of any number of successful California abstract artists had it not been for AIDS." Indeed, just as AIDS changed the social and political landscape of the gay community, so too did it impact Bianchi's place as an artist as well.

"It's so hard for me to contemplate those days," he says, the words choked with sadness. It's a stark contrast to the normally smiling man who relishes his current life with the same sort of abandon as when he was reminiscing about those summers in New York. "You just couldn't believe what it was like," he begins again, trying to form sentences while conveying the magnitude of the AIDS crisis; indeed, from seeing walking skeletons in the East Village to fearing that your ringing phone meant another friend had died, the memories are just as raw today as they were years ago.

"The whole world that had been so attractive about Fire Island to me, what it expressed -- the most beautiful men on the planet, the nicest men, the most fun people -- all gone," he says, the tears finally falling. "To this day I have only two or three friends who survived that. Out of hundreds."

New York became too painful for Bianchi and his partner, David Peterson, so the couple moved to Los Angeles where Bianchi continued working as an artist, but there was no escaping the disease.

"In 1988, as David lie dying of AIDS, I was doing the largest commission I'd ever gotten, which was a two-story sculpture for Saks 5th Avenue," he says. "I realized that I was probably infected myself, I didn't know if I had much time and I wanted to leave a record as to who we were."

Bianchi wasn't simply interested in the physical aspects of gay men, though he admits that they were important because "this was a time of enormous physical disintegration and fear about sex, and the community itself was longing for something positive." But at the same time he wanted to touch on issues that had really been harming the community, and he saw those issues reflected in another popular photograph from the period.

"There was a Herb Ritts image called 'Fred With Tires,' and I knew that the guy who posed for it was supposed to be straight," Bianchi recalls. "He was short so they put blocks under his legs, and [he was] smeared with fake grease. I looked at that picture which had become an icon and thought, why are we worshipping the unavailable? And I realized as beautiful as the image was, it was completely fake and it was everything that was wrong with [gay men]. It was the old issue of worshipping trade, we're not worthy ourselves, and somebody else has to stand in as our ideals."

Alongside this understanding, Bianchi also saw how that attitude was being impacted by AIDS, but through the perspective of his partner. "David taught me, very poignantly, how much this disease was about the self-esteem problems that we had," he explains. "David saw his death and disintegration as inevitable and somehow as the wages of sin. It wasn't until very near his death that he realized what the mental construct had been and how destructive it was."

The resulting coffee table book, entitled Out of the Studio, was published in 1991 and touched a nerve, selling an unheard of 57,000 copies and launching Bianchi's name into the cultural lexicon like never before. Throughout the 1990s he produced 10 books of photographs that covered life, love, philosophy, and the issues of art versus pornography. His latest works, the On The Couch series and his forthcoming Deep Sex series, further explore sexual shame and finding healthy ways to express sexual energy. Now looking back at both his photos and first-person accounts used for the Sex in the '70s documentary, juxtaposed by his current projects, Bianchi sees it all as being different parts of a larger journey.

"From my very first project on, starting with [those] Fire Island photos, my effort was to create a picture of ourselves that was real and beautiful and would dispel many of the negative myths and help us find ourselves," he says. "I'm a political artist, and I didn't want another kid to go through the shame I went through as a gay person. That was what my work was about." He pauses, and once again that smile returns and his face lights up anew. "Spiritually, I believe that's one of the reasons why I survived: to do what I'm doing."

For more information on Bianchi, visit www.tombianchi.com