Life At 'The Piers'

Today at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, an exhibit will open that explores the importance of one of Manhattan's most stories and beloved gay landmarks: the West side piers. Featuring over 70 images, the show aims to look at the docks of the Hudson River as a haven for artists and gay people.

"After years of persecution and repression in the 1950s and 60s, the counter-culture revolution of the late 1960s brought about many cultural changes; this was especially true of changes in sexual attitudes," says a release announcing the exhibit. "Public nudity and sex were becoming more accepted, especially as subject matter for artists seeking new forms of expression. In the post-Stonewall era, these new-found freedoms were swept up into a changing socio--political and historical landscape that gave rise to the gay rights movement. The New York Piers, where many gay New Yorkers gathered in the late 1960s and 1970s, where these new sexual freedoms were often played out, became the crossroads for an emerging gay subculture and for artists of that period."

Check out a SLIDESHOW of images from The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfronthere.