GLR May-June 2026

Coming to Terms with Peter Hujar

S TEVE TURTELL’S new book Portraits and Places gathers six short essays set between 1970 and 1980. In them, the poet traces his early coming-out years—from Brook lyn to Manhattan—and the experiences that shaped him as a gay man. The collec tion’s opener, “I Was a Teenage Revolu tionary,” finds Turtell at nineteen, marching in the first pride parade: “A late

and he was 21. As the younger, less ac complished of the pair, Turtell places Hujar on a pedestal. When Hujar tells him he has a “good eye,” it’s “like being confirmed.” Their bond consists of long phone calls, grumbling about money problems, and at tempts to quit smoking. In 1980 Turtell plans a trip to New Or leans. He’d done it before, on the cheap, and believes Hujar will love it. The bus

M ICHAEL Q UINN

PORTRAITS AND PLACES by Steve Turtell With photographs by Peter Hujar Palermo Publishing 128 pages, $30.

ride is long and the YMCA bleak. Hujar is bored and prone to complaining—and to withdrawing into himself. “One of the unspoken rules of friendship with Peter was that he could abandon you, but not vice versa,” Turtell writes. At a parade, determined to have a good time, Turtell leaps for a handful of beads and crouches to protect them. A little girl then tries to

comer, I’d had nothing to do with the planning; I was one of the necessary foot soldiers.” He remembers the crowd of ob servers outnumbering the marchers and how quickly the group moved, exhilarated yet afraid. He’d come out at four teen, only to discover that it was not a one-and-done act but a lifelong process. Although he joined the Gay Liberation

grab them. It’s only when Turtell looks up and sees Hujar watching that he lets go. Yet admiration does not pre clude irritation. While waiting for Hujar to respond to a question, in the long silence that follows, Turtell recalls watching “the ash on his cigarette grow longer and longer and not fall off.” Tension comes to a head on the train ride back to New York. When he catches Hujar cheating at cards— again—he explodes: “Fuck your talent. It doesn’t give you the right to behave like an asshole.” The confrontation is a blow from which their friendship never re covers. Years later, Turtell runs into Hujar shortly before his death from AIDS-related complications at age 53. He describes the once “tall, handsome” man “with some thing of a Viking warrior in his face,” now pale and “almost phos phorescent.” Hujar doesn’t ac knowledge him; he no longer remembers who he is. The mem ory doesn’t smooth over the quar rels for Turtell. It gives them

Front, he found its “analysis of ad mittedly real and complex prob lems” to be “superficial and even simpleminded.” Subsequent pieces trace his im mersion in the downtown arts scene: communal living arrange ments, dressing in drag to sell magazines at a Cockettes show, and making ends meet as a mes senger and nude model. In “Kis met in Oakleyville,” he spends months on Fire Island. In “Hippie Heaven, circa 1972,” he lives in a toolshed and showers outdoors. With a poet’s eye for detail, he writes: “Lunch was followed by a nap that began with a paperback, its pages floppy soft from years in the salt air, falling soundlessly to the floor.” The book’s emotional center,

“Peter Hujar in New Orleans,” re counts a pivotal friendship, and Portraits and Places includes eleven reproductions of Hujar’s portraits. Turtell writes that “in addition to the gorgeous tonalities and elegant compositions, gray, I think, is the source of much of their emotional power.” A similar sensibility governs this essay: no one emerges in stark black andwhite. Turtell met the photographer in 1971, when Hujar was 37 Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Man hattan-based newspaper The Village Star-Revue and on his website at criticalinfluences.com . 44

Cover of the artist’s 1980 book, Love & Lust, features Peter Hujar’s Self-Portrait, Standing.

another dimension, shaped by what came after. Although these essays span a decade, they feel shaped by a longer reckoning. While Turtell moves through rooms filled with famous New Yorkers, he resists mythmaking. More than a record of a downtown legend, Portraits and Places is a clear-eyed reckoning with youth, ambition, and the limits of admiration.

TheG & LR