These Vintage Nudes by Tom Bianchi Will Take Your Breath Away

Take a Look Back at 1980s Gay New York

Photographer Tom Bianchi is well known for his sun drenched 1980s Polaroids of the gay mecca, Fire Island. But, the same years Bianchi was pointing his lens at beachgoers for his Fire Island Pines series, he was also chronicling gay life in Manhattan from his Greenwich Village residence. Though he believed then that those images were too explicit for publication, the iconic writer and photographer has released them now in a new book called 63 E 9th Street.

In February, Tom Bianchi's Instagram account was briefly deleted after uploading an image from the Pines series. "In conjunction with the recent death of creative freedom on Tumblr, this situation highlights the need for our work to continue to be seen and shared in the physical world -- uncensored," he told Out then, announcing this book. And while the reality of running a site like Out is that we can't show the work completely uncensored, here is a selection of the images that appear in 63 E 9th Street which includes some of the photographer's owns nudes as well as photos of the men he hooked up with.