Amos Badertscher Images and Stories

The long-awaited first career survey from photographer Amos Badertscher, who comprehensively documented a uniquely American queer underworld

Across several decades, self-taught photographer Amos Badertscher (1936–2023) made thousands of photographs of a liminal queer world: young male sex workers, drag performers, trans pioneers, and Baltimore, Maryland’s inclusive, ribald nightlife. The encounters with these marginalized figures helped Badertscher understand his own queer identity and reveal a confident body of work that stakes out an important corner of queer art and aesthetics.

Made between the 1960s and early 2000s, the photographs featured here constitute an unparalleled chronicle of a culture of the era particular not only to Badertscher’s hometown, but universally identifiable, one which began to fade with the movement of LGBTQ+ rights and liberation. The hundreds of images are accompanied by Badertscher’s writings about the history and experiences of his subjects, further illuminating the intimate inner lives of people who were frequently dismissed, feared, and objectified by mainstream culture. Amos Badertscher Images and Stories is a landmark introduction to a figure who is now finally receiving his due as a major twentieth-century portraitist and chronicler of queer subculture.

Hunter O’Hanian is a curator and former executive director of the Stonewall National Museum and Archives and director of Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York.

Jonathan D. Katz is Associate Professor of Practice in the History of Art and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, curator of The First Homosexuals at Wrightwood 659 Gallery in Chicago, and author of About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art (2024) and editor of The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a Global Identity 1869–1939 (2025), both published by Monacelli.

Beth Saunders is curator and head of Special Collections at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and curator of Lost Boys: Amos Badertscher’s Baltimore.

James Smalls is Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of Homosexuality in Art.

Joseph Plaster is Curator in Public Humanities and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Rafael Alvarez is an author and screenwriter based in Baltimore and Los Angeles.

Theo Gordon is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of York.

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