110 pages, digital offset black and white, perfect bound

Essay by Holden Seidlitz

Shot over the course of the past three years, Paul’s photographs work to position late 20th century gay male art, AIDS and political history and culture as an obvious lineage for contemporary transgender men and transmasculine people.

From Holden Seidlitz,

“It’s interesting, you say, that we’ve based a gender on a sexuality. (“I am not a man so much as a faggot, the sex I have with women notwithstanding,” etc.) It’s true, about us, stiff-lipped cohort of new boys whose masculinity isn’t modeled after loggers, linebackers, slick-suited ad executives, but on the detritus of masculinity, the castaways, a kind of masculinity-in-exile, man excised from manhood. As if the most macho, virile thing we could imagine was to remove the jewelry from our noses and stick it through our eyebrows, our nipples, both ears to just one. We throw around trade like a compliment. Because the paragon of maleness is looking like the straightest gay guy in the dark room.”

Paul Burnham Schwartz (1996) is a photographer based in New York City. In the lineage of late 20th century gay male portraiture, Paul’s interpretive approach concerns itself with complicating narratives of identity and power, spectator and subject, and resistance to what David Wojnarowicz refers to as ‘the pre-invented existence’ or modalities of the mainstream.