‘Mary and Dusty were an iconic butch/femme couple in 1990s San Francisco. The world we lived in back then was a radical counterculture – and we were not embraced by the outside world’
in my early 20s and fell in love with it: the vibe, the ocean, the hills. It’s a big city on small terrain and feels like nowhere else. But it also gave me access to something I longed for: a diverse, vibrant and radical queer community. It was shocking how many people made up the queer scene in San Francisco in the 1990s, which is when this image was taken. It all felt so fast; there was so much going on. I would walk out of the house and immediately run into people I knew.
I can’t recall exactly when I met Dusty and Mary, the couple in this photo. I lived with Dusty in a houseshare for a few years. Mary was a friend of a friend before becoming Dusty’s partner, and spent a lot of time at our place. I love the colour and composition. There’s a lick of red pulling from the right foreground into the centre of the image. It’s like an invitation into a new world, like looking into a snow globe. And there, right in the centre, you have Dusty and Mary, staring directly at you with this smouldering gaze. I took a whole roll of shots. In those pre-digital days, you never knew what you had. Taking rolls to be developed felt like an Easter egg hunt.
It’s not just their intimacy that strikes me now; it’s also how perfectly it captured a specific time in San Francisco’s history. Dusty and Mary were an iconic butch-femme couple, and their look is so distinctly 90s – Mary in the slip, Dusty in that archetypally masculine white vest. It’s both a document of my personal history and a document of queer life at a specific moment in the city’s history.
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