GLR January-February 2025

PHOTO ESSAY

Momentos of Desire G ERVAIS M ARSH

E DITOR ’ S N OTE : The following is by a grant recipient in a program launched in 2022 by TheG&LR , our Writers and Artists Grant, which was awarded to three recipients in 2023. The purpose of this grant is to assist advanced students engaged in LGBT-related research, and awardees are expected to produce an article for this magazine as part of their project. This is the third of three articles from 2023’s recipients. P ATRIC McCOY AND I sit across from each other, a binder of photographs resting on the table between us among stacked books of fiction, art, and memoir. I am perched on the edge of the couch, while he leans into an armchair. From the corner of my eye, I see a slide show of images, mostly of Black men, cycling through on a computer screen, accompanied by the faint sound of jazz. We haven’t seen each other in a while, so we catch up and I share more about my up coming move to New York City. Emotion catches in my throat because it is still hard to talk about leaving Chicago. On this October afternoon, the conversation is colored by the pressure to record Patric’s thoughts before I can no longer easily enter the warm embrace of his home in Hyde Park. While we speak, one of his friends moves around in the kitchen, preparing fried fish that we will share later that evening. Patric McCoy was born and raised in Chicago. His father was an artist, and he has long had a sense for the value of cre

muted to work on a bicycle, so I was riding through these neigh borhoods in Chicago from the South Side all the way to the downtown area with this camera always visible, hanging off my neck. I’d be riding and people on the street would just holler out at me: ‘Hey, take my picture!’ It was almost always men. In fact, I might have five images of women out of the thousands and thousands of images of people who asked me to take their pictures. So I would stop and take their picture and it often led to: ‘Hey, what’s up with you?’ It was a come-on. They were ask ing out of desire, a desire to be recorded, but I think also a de sire to interact.” Over the course of the 1980s, Patric amassed an archive of thousands of photographs of the men he encountered. Prominent locations in the archive include Jackson Park, which straddles the Woodlawn, Hyde Park, and South Shore communities, and which was (and still is) known for as a cruising area. It’s also known for the dive bar the Rialto Tap in the South Loop, where Black men from across the city would come to hang out, and potentially to hook up. The Rialto, as Patric describes it, was in one of the seediest areas downtown, alongside homeless shelters, single oc cupancy lodging, and burlesque clubs. A bar where “anything goes,” he recalls. “So the ‘good people’ would never say that they went to the Rialto, but they would go there. The Rialto had the reputation of being a place where you could smoke marijuana openly at the bar ... the police didn’t even do anything. The lat

ative practice. Although he worked as an environmental scientist for his whole professional career, Patric de veloped an extensive photography practice, first using a point-and-shoot camera during the 1960s and ’70s to create images with family and friends. In the early 1980s, he began to take his relationship to photography more seri ously and learned to use a 35mm cam era. In 1984, he made a commitment to carry his camera everywhere he went and take at least one photograph per day. Most of the photographs from this period are of Black men through out Chicago. He rode his bicycle to work in the downtown area, and around different areas on the South Side. While biking, men would notice his camera and approach him, asking to have their picture taken. “I com Gervais Marsh, having completed his PhD at Northwestern, works as a freelance art curator and editor of Ruckus Journal .

ter half of the ’80s was when the bar it self started to accept the fact that it was gay. I think they even had a float in the gay pride parade one time.” T HE P HOTOGRAPHS T HE MEN IN M C C OY ’ S PHOTOGRAPHS pose or look straight into the camera. Others appear more candidly, in mid conversation, moving around the bar, or on the street. There is no specific “type” of man in the photographs, with race being the only throughline. For each image there is an anecdote. In the accompanying photo (left), the man’s head is turned to the right as he looks past the camera, lips calmly closed and a chain with a pendant around his neck. Wearing a white tank top, arms crossed in front of his chest, he leans on the back of a light-yellow car. The scaffolding of the CTA tracks project above his head, perhaps an indi cator of Downtown Chicago. He seems at ease as he is photographed. I linger

Photos by Patric McCoy. Courtesy of the artist.

TheG & LR

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