Gay face interested me because I have been seeing a cousin if not an offspring of it where I nor you would expect to see it. Where is this place you might ask?
Stuart (left), Zack and Sergio are three of the subjects in Lauren Tabak’s photographic series that explores queer...
............................ IDENTITIES
She calls it “Gay Face” and identifies the subjects just by first name.P photo: Lauren Tabak
The past summer was supposed to be a lot different. It was supposed to be Louis with his head out the car window lapping at the wind as Lauren Tabak cruised down a never-ending road. It was supposed to be her visiting friends and the sort of landscapes that a person never forgets.
But a day before that summer was to begin, Tabak broke her arm. The road trip was canceled.
She needed something to do, some sort of project to help keep her sane. Maybe a series of portraits, something that explored queer identity. Maybe she’d call it “Gay Face” — as in, No way he’s straight, that dude has definite gay face.
“Is that even relevant anymore?” a friend asked. “We live here, in San Francisco. No one cares if you’re gay or not.”
Fair enough. But then “Gay Face” wouldn’t be about passing or trying to hide an identity, it’d be about flagging, about broadcasting it for anybody to see. The same way Tabak wears androgynous clothes and a black hat with a wide brim. “Sometimes,” she says, “you just want your community. You just want to be seen.”
Photographer Lauren Tabak spent the summer of 2019 making photo portraits of the queer community in San Francisco.Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova, Special to The Chronicle
“Gay Face” grew into a collection of 30 or so portraits of queer people in the Bay Area, a series with earnestness and honesty in self-expression at its center. The photographs are shot in the vertical, the subjects, each having come as they are, pop against a pink background. (Tabak chose pink because, well, it’s gay.)
Some of the subjects were models. Some were deeply uncomfortable in front of a camera. Some were friends of Tabak’s. Others found her as the portraits began to make the rounds. Some dressed casually; two wore chain mail; a few didn’t bother with shirts.
The effect is a larger portrait made of individual ones, a photographic sketch of San Francisco’s queer community in the summer of 2019.
The process, Tabak says, was collaborative and casual. In truth, it sort of doubled as a chance to hang out with people she hadn’t seen in a while. “I’m actually really shy and awkward. I find that if I want to catch up with someone and hang out, it’s so much easier for me to have a creative project.”
In a statement about her queer identity and posing for a portrait, Amaris wrote: “The queer-exodus has made me want to be as visible as possible.”Photo: Lauren Tabak
Some sessions were fast, others — like the time her friend showed up a little too stoned — took some time. Afterward Tabak would send the subject about 10 shots. Together they’d pick The One and then Tabak would work with them to add some words on being visibly queer. For the series, Tabak uses only the first names of the subjects as a matter of style and to provide them a degree of privacy given the mostly online nature of the project.
“The queer-exodus has made me want to be as visible as possible … ,” Amaris wrote for her personal statement. “My wife and I are excited to play our role as ‘elders?’ in the community. I hope that when the gaybies see us around town they think: OK. You can get older, find your unicorn, rock your own style and make a little coin in this city without compromising your identity.”
“Do I have a gay face? If people had to make a snap judgement, I feel the resounding answer would be ‘yas queen’!,” Havilah says in her note. “I love blurring the lines between feminine and masculine as an androgynous cis woman; proudly pushing back on a dominant culture’s ideas around what it means to be ‘normal’ without having to say a word.”
Miles posed for the “Gay Face” project, stating, “I hid the fact that I was trans so well most people ignored it — I did too, but that left me isolated from any kind of community, and made talking about a large portion of my life impossible, or embarrassing.”Photo: Lauren Tabak
For all the bright colors and bold styles and bravado, the project is one of vulnerability. One subject pulled out, their portraits shot, but their words not yet written. They’d gone through three drafts, they told Tabak, and they just weren’t ready.
In one image, a man name Miles stands with his arms crossed over his bare chest. He’d found his way to Tabak’s home after seeing her portraits on his friend’s Instagram feeds. They did a shot of tequila and put on some music by Lizzo.
The decision to pose for Tabak wasn’t a small one for him. For a long time, Miles tried not to flag. That’s changing, bit by bit. Painted nails serve as a small sign of his queer identity. He writes: “I hid the fact that I was trans so well most people ignored it — I did too, but that left me isolated from any kind of community, and made talking about a large portion of my life impossible, or embarrassing. Because of that internalized shame it’s taken me a long time to be comfortable publicly identifying, even within an LGBTQ+ space. Now that I have though, I’ve realized what a pleasure it is to be seen for your whole self. And I’ve realized that I don’t actually want to look or be cis. I don’t want to be some cheap facsimile when I could be myself.”
At the beginning of the project, Tabak snapped a quick self-portrait. She pulls it up on her phone. It’s a beautiful image — all the right angles and just the right light. No one has seen it yet, she says. Maybe she’ll hang it at a show planned for Sept. 21 at Dreamers and Make Believers, a small salon in the Mission. Maybe she won’t.
At the moment, Tabak says, she’s a little stuck on her own caption, on the words to pair with her image. But maybe her portrait can stand alone. Looking at the photos, all together, nice and neat in a grid, it’s clear she’s been saying something about queer identity since the very first shot.
Kyle was a subject in Lauren Tabak’s photography portrait project “Gay Face.”Photo: Lauren Tabak
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