12 Images That Show NYC's Leather-Filled 1980s Nightlife

Our community has always gathered. In book clubs, for pageants, for protests, and more. In a series titled Night, Life, photographer Stanley Stellar celebrates this notion of community, which has been integral to our survival.

The full series includes images from events like a Dada Ball at the Webster Hall in 1994, as well as on subways, as well as the Mr New York Leather competition from 1987. The images, which were exhibited in 2020 at the Kapp Kapp gallery, are a part of Stellar's overall body of work that has seen him chronicling the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement since its beginnings, originally as a staff photographer for the now-defunct New York Native newspaper.

He does this, in part, to create a historical record.

"I don't want future generations to not have any clue as to who their ancestors were and what their ancestors' lives were like," he once said in an interview about his work. "We need tender moments. We need our own history. We need to know we all didn't just get off the bus at Port Authority."

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