Anthony Friedkin: The Gay Essay

The photographer Anthony Friedkin began work on “The Gay Essay,” a four-year-long series documenting gay communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco, in 1969, at the age of nineteen. Friedkin, the son of a Broadway dancer and a Hollywood screenwriter, had already worked as a freelancer for the Magnum Agency when he began spending time at the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center. There he met Morris Kight and Don Kilhefner, the founders of the Gay Liberation Front of Los Angeles, who introduced him to L.A.’s gay and lesbian scene; later, Friedkin travelled to San Francisco to photograph an experimental-theatre company. ”The Gay Essay,” a selection of which was first exhibited in 1973, will be published as a book next month. A new and comprehensive exhibition of Friedkin’s photographs opens at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, on Saturday.