Gay semiotics

Through his work as an art reviewer and photographer, he soon became embedded in the Bay Area's artistic and intellectual scene.

Gay Semiotics Revisited Aperture : Between and , American artist Hal Fischer created Gay Semiotics, a landmark series of photo-text works providing a pioneering analysis of gay historical vernacular as it unfolded on the streets of San Francisco’s Castro and Haight-Asbury districts

Thirty-seven years later, the book remains a proactive statement from a voice within the gay community from a moment in history just before the devastation wrought by AIDS. Taken directly from Fischer’s personal experiences living in the vibrant gay communities of San Francisco’s Castro and Haight.

First published as an artist's book in by NFS Press, at a time when gay people had been forced to both evaluate and defend their lifestyles, Gay Semiotics earned substantial critical and public recognition. Bryan-Wilson: Gay Semiotics is an attempt to map some of the discourse of structuralism onto the visual codes of male queer life in the Castro.

Gay Semiotics Since —when the first exhibition of this series took place in San Francisco— Gay Semiotics has been recognized as a unique and pioneering analysis of a gay historical vernacular and as an irreverent appropriation of structuralist theory.

Fischer: Thanks to Lew Thomas, in semiotics school I began reading things like Jack Burnham’s The Structure of Art and Ursula Meyer’s Conceptual Art. Fischer’s series Gay Semiotics, brought these theories to bear on gay culture in San Francisco’s Castro and Haight-Ashbury districts.

The photographs in Gay Semiotics present the codes of sexual orientation and identification Fischer saw in San Francisco's Castro and Haight Ashbury districts, ranging from such sexual signifiers as handkerchiefs and keys to depictions of the gay fashion "types" of that era--from "basic gay" to "hippie" and "jock.

Gay Semiotics [male Symbol]. Fischer's book gay widely, finding a worldwide audience in both the gay and conceptual art communities. This new edition reproduces the look and feel of the original volume, which reconfigured into a book format the 24 text-embedded images of Fischer's photographic series Gay Semiotics.

A “lexicon of attraction,” as the artist has called it, this work classifies styles and types while acknowledging their ambiguity. How did you come to structuralism? Fischer's insistence on the visual equivalence of word and image is a hallmark of the loose photography and language group that included Fischer, Lutz Bacher, Lew Thomas and others working in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Hal Fischer. Hal Fischer born grew up in Highland Park, Illinois. He continues to live and work in San Francisco.