Tag: Candid

Categories
Street Portrait

How does The Amazing Spiderman go to the Bathroom?

Spiderman struggles to line up the eye holes of his mask

Does Spiderman have a fly? (I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself.)

But seriously, if Spiderman struggles to find his eye holes, don’t you think he’d struggle even more to find his pee hole? I guess it depends on how desperate he is.

And what happens when Spiderman hits middle age? In the entire 60 year lifespan of the franchise, I don’t think Peter Parker has ever been more than 19 years old, complete with acne and cracking voice. But realistically, I don’t think the spider bite changed the fact that Peter Parker has a prostate gland which, like all prostate glands, enlarges as he ages and correspondingly reduces his storage capacity. By now, he probably needs to whizz every hour or so. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his initials are PP.

Assuming Mr. PP does have a pee hole and has no trouble finding it, there’s still the problem of how to handle his equipment without getting sticky webbing all over it. Or maybe that’s not webbing.

Now you know why I never got that second interview for a job at Marvel Comics.

Categories
Street Photography

Black & White Directs the Sight: a Post-processing Mnemonic

A street preacher with white hair and beard speaks to a gathering of youth on a street corner. Sunlight glints off a cross he wears and it looks as if his chest is on fire.
Light reflects from cross worn by street preacher at Yonge & Dundas intersection, Toronto

I’m standing on the southwest corner of Yonge & Dundas with my eye on a street preacher. He’s older, with a shock of white hair and a Santa Claus beard that makes him look like a prophet the way people look prophetic in Cecil B. DeMille movies. He’s gathered around himself a group of young people who look on as he shares the good news. He sways a little and I shoot a burst as he’s swinging through the full range of his sway. Well that was interesting, I think, and I go on my way.

It isn’t until I get home in front of my computer screen that I realize one of my images captured a glint of sunlight reflected from the cross dangling against the prophet’s chest. If I believed in any of the man’s hoo-ha, I might take the glint of sunlight as a sign. It’s an alignment of sorts, like the alignment of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Only in this case it’s the alignment of sun, flat surface of the cross, and my image sensor. Either way, it must mean something, no?

Then comes the all-important question: colour or black and white? In this instance, the answer is determined by the fact that the whole point of the image is the fiery cross. My choice will depend on which format shows up the glint to best advantage. Does colour or black and white do a better job of directing the eye to the centre of the preacher’s chest?

There are no absolute rules, of course. Every fresh photograph presents a fresh context for a decision. In this instance, colour is a distraction. It draws our attention away from the only thing that really matters in the context of this image. All of this highly subjective, of course. On another day, with my stomach rumbling after a dinner of spaghetti, I might have decided the image makes more sense as a riot of colour, signifying something else, like the vibrancy of urban living. But as it is, I had lasagna for dinner and I made my choice.

Categories
Street Photography

Buddies In Bad Times

A father and small child walk on the sidewalk while holding hands. In the child's free hand is a happy face balloon. On the building in the background is a large sign that says: Buddies In Bad Times Theatre.
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Yonge Street and Alexander, Toronto

If you didn’t know about Buddies In Bad Times before, you certainly did after the building on the corner of Yonge & Alexander came down. Toronto’s premiere queer theatre took advantage of clear sight lines to tack a massive poster to the side of its building. Unfortunately, like everything else in Toronto, construction on a new condo began a few months later and the sign vanished behind scaffolding.

But there were a few good months when I could stand on the west side of Yonge Street and shoot east, watching people pass on the opposite sidewalk while the BIBT sign offered commentary. Oftentimes, on busy city streets, scenes play out in ways that are no less theatrical than staged productions. So I was pleased when a father and child entered from stage right. The child held a happy face balloon which seemed to contradict the “buddies in bad times” message.

I love it when I end up with a photograph that suggests an internal contradiction. Don’t ask me what this means. I have no idea. It makes me happy just to produce an image that raises a few questions for the viewer.

Construction worker surveys site of future condominium at the corner of Alexander & Yonge Street, Toronto
Categories
Street Photography

The Advantage of Photographing Scenes that Disappear

A woman walks through a sliver of morning light on Yonge Street while behind her is a shop called Mind Games with a bolt of lightning above the woman's head.
Woman walks through the morning light on Yonge Street

One of the great advantages of living in a place where the cityscape is disposable and buildings are routinely demolished, rebuilt, and demolished once again, is that if you get a decent shot, the light just so, a person passing through the light just so, a thunderbolt above the person’s head just so, no one else can replicate your shot. The building that served as your backdrop is now a 60 story condo. And another 60 story condo across the road forever blocks that perfect sliver of morning light. Condo killed the photo star. Or something like that.

Fuck Ansel Adams and his photos of eternal natural majesty. El Capitan and all those other enduring scenes from the American southwest. Now, tourist photographers from all over the world show up at these sites, pick out the three holes in the ground where the previous photographer set up their tripod, and set up a shot that exactly replicates all the shots that have gone before. Boring. Worse than boring. All that tourist traffic to popular photographic sites is posing an environmental threat to the natural landscape. At least when I’m tramping through the city streets, there’s not much I can do to make the environment worse than it already is.

That’s why I say fuck Ansel Adams. Not because I dislike his work. I like it very much. But because we need only one Ansel Adams. We don’t need 20,000 tourist Ansel Adams. Be something else. Be you. It’s easier to clarify who you are in a landscape that changes before anyone else can replicate your shots.

Categories
City Life

To the Museum or Bust!

A marble bust sits in a museum gallery while a young woman passes in the background.

Further to yesterday’s museum post, I note that museum exhibits serve as an obvious reminder about the fleeting nature of life. We who are gaze at those who were but are no more. Dinosaur fossils. Mummified remains. Roman busts.

Whenever I visit the local museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, I pay a visit to the gallery of classical busts. I like to pretend I’m schmoozing with people from the past. Afternoon drinks with old (really old) friends. Selfies to post on the ancient Roman social media site, VoltusLiber. Unfortunately, after a few drinks, their eyes start to glaze over.

Sculptors have always had difficulty with the eyes. They look blank and eerie. In fact, Roman sculptors working in marble had no trouble at all with eyes because they painted them in. They had no scruples about painting their work to make it as lifelike as possible. But in the intervening years, the elements have worn away the paint. It was the sculptors who came later—Renaissance and Neo-Classical artists—who complained about the eyes because it never occurred to them that classical artists had painted their marble. Even where they did suspect that their predecessors were more relaxed, conventions had become so entrenched that later artists couldn’t persuade their patrons to try new things. And so blank and eerie eyes gaze back at us across the centuries.

To my way of thinking, blank and eerie eyes may be more realistic than carefully painted irises and pupils. They say eyes are the window of the soul. It’s impossible to say who the first “they” is, but people have been saying this since at least the days of Cicero who, ironically, is the subject of many blank-eyed sculptures. The problem is that no matter how precisely we represent a person’s eyes, the sense of an essential personality conveyed by that representation is illusory. Maybe our belief about eyes has something to do with empathy. Humans are keyed to feel something when they look into another’s eyes.

However, personal experience (and rational thought) contradict this belief. People with visual impairments give the lie to the “window to the soul” conceit. When I gaze into a person’s injured or unseeing eyes, their eyes tell me nothing about them as a whole person. Conversely, the fact that they cannot gaze into my eyes in no way hinders them from perceiving me as a whole person. Whatever mysterious alchemy constitutes the self does not depend on eyes. Similarly, the belief that we can learn something about ancient cultures by gazing into representations of ancient eyes is silly. In fact, ancient sculptors may have done us a service by leaving us with blank and eerie eyes; they force us to seek out more credible sources for our convictions about what our predecessors were like.

Categories
Street Photography

Photographs of what was but is no more

Shirtless man covered in chalk sits on bench with a balloon that says: Happy Birthday!
Man sitting outside the Bloor/Yonge subway station, Toronto.

As is my habit, I start each month with a fresh theme. For the month of May, I will feature images that represent things / people / buildings / neighbourhoods / objects / ideas that were but are no more. All photography seeks to freeze time. All photography fails in this because time carries on; we gaze at the frozen photograph and can’t help but note how much things have changed. Far from freezing time, our photographs underscore how quickly it flows.

Nothing alerts me to this flow quite like a visit to the local archives. For me, that means the City of Toronto archives, but most cities have an archival service. What shocks me is the speed at which my own photographs become “archival.” The word “archival” calls to mind old black and white prints of people wearing dated fashions and crossing streets where the only mode of transportation is horse-drawn carriages. But my own photographs are quickly becoming archival because the world they portray is vanishing, and at an accelerated pace.

Part of it may have to do with a cultural shift. Once upon a time, we were outraged to learn that General Motors had adopted a principle of planned obsolescence as a way to guarantee a future market for its products. But we’ve grown complacent, allowing the practice to drive consumer demand for everything from new clothes to new phones to new intimate partners. This cultural shift has even crept into municipal planning so that now we treat large buildings, even entire city blocks, as if they were disposable. As a result, it takes only a few short years for our urban geography to become unrecognizable.

I pass a homeless man I’ve seen at different corners throughout the downtown core. Shirtless. Body covered in a chalky white powder. A helium-filled foil balloon says Happy Birthday and reminds me that another year has passed me by. At the man’s bare feet are a dozen or so shopping bags—the universal symbol of consumerism—stuffed with all his belongings. In the background I see scaffolding at a construction site. Today, this is the site of a 76 story condominium residence. I can’t remember what stood there before the demolition.

Most troubling of all is the fact that, today, 7 years after making this image, I no longer see this man anymore. Even people are disposable. Some more than others.

Categories
Street Photography

Saying goodbye to a month of candid photography

Couple walks south from Bloor on Yonge Street, Toronto. The woman wears a bright red dress, the man wears a baby blue suit. Both are blessed with ample buttocks.
Couple walks south from Bloor on Yonge Street, Toronto

This is the final post in a series of candid photos that ushered us through the month of April. This is by no means the last word on the matter given that the possibilities for candid photography are as varied and as interesting as the people on this planet.

As I see it, there are only two circumstances in which I run out of candid photos. The unlikely circumstance is that the government passes legislation prohibiting this kind of photography. At least in Canada, this is improbable because the ability to photograph in public is intimately tied to constitutionally protected conduct. One day, we might become the creatures of an authoritarian regime that doesn’t feel constrained by constitutional principles. Trump could get re-elected and decide, like his buddy Putin, to invade a neighbouring country. But until such a day arrives, I view the opportunities for candid photography as limitless.

The more likely circumstance that could put an end to my candid shooting is that deep fakes become so widespread they render photography meaningless. I see that a year old video of Bill Gates sporting breast implants has retrended on Twitter. Snopes declares that the video is digitally altered, but debunking it isn’t enough to make it go away. Like the boy who cried wolf, the more unreliable our digital ecosystem becomes in its documentation of the real world, the less likely we are to believe anything is true.

As people assume digital manipulation as their default approach to online images, those like me who make such images will move on to other kinds of image making. Maybe we’ll manufacture backdrops for dystopian sci-fi virtual reality games. Or we’ll produce animal porn. But it’s a losing game. In time, even these specialized areas will be taken over by AI image-making engines.

Eventually, we old-school documentary photographers will grow old and tell tall tales of the amazing and improbable things we’ve seen. No one will believe us, of course. Anything we’ve seen, AI can do better. So we’ll drink ourselves into oblivion instead.

Categories
Street Photography

Health Care Worker on the way to his next shift

Health care worker in hospital greens crosses the street
Health Care Worker heads to Saint Michael's Hospital, Toronto

Throughout the pandemic, my wife has been able to work from home. But every so often she has to go into the office to handle something that can’t be handled virtually. She’s required to carry a laptop with her wherever she goes, but it’s heavy, so I serve as her personal pack mule. I walk down with her early in the morning, carrying her laptop and my camera gear, then I go on from there with a morning photo walk.

Back in the spring of 2020, when we first started doing this, the downtown streets were all but empty. There was no traffic coming into the downtown core and the only pedestrians were either essential workers or, oddly enough, street photographers like me documenting the emptiness. I caught this health care worker arriving for a morning shift at St. Michael’s Hospital as we were standing at the Queen/Victoria intersection. I note the Blue Jays baseball hat, a reminder of a life outside the job even as the job was beginning to overwhelm our health care workers.

Do you remember how, every evening at 7:30 pm, people leaned out their windows and banged on pots and pans to celebrate the dedication of front line workers? When did that stop? It seems our energy petered out, maybe falling victim to Covid fatigue. Two years on, it strikes me that our front line workers need the celebration and encouragement more than ever. Instead, they have to deal with a government that dickers over trivial wage increases. They have to confront incessant denialism and disinformation from a subculture of ignoramuses. And, because so many end up exposed to Covid-19, they find themselves understaffed and unable to deliver the level of care to which they are committed.

I suspect the best way we can support health care workers is to do our best to ensure that we don’t need their services. That way, they are free to offer their services to those who truly need them. That’s my subtle way of saying: wear a damned mask when you’re indoors, self-isolate when you’re sick, and take all other prophylactic measures you possibly can.

Categories
Street Photography

Is that a bullhorn? Or are you just happy to see me?

A man with a bullhorn walks down the sidewalk with a man carrying a flag.
Man with Bullhorn, Bloor Street West, Toronto

Early in the pandemic, before I had figured out that anti-vaxx anti-mask anti-government anti-everything protesters were meeting every Saturday to stage their little marches, I would see people scurrying along the sidewalk who seemed out of place. For one thing, they were walking with purpose. Nobody walks with purpose on a Saturday in downtown Toronto except if it involves shopping. But these were no shoppers. I didn’t understand then that they were rushing to their rallying point where they would get themselves whipped into a frenzy before they took their message to the streets. For another thing, they came in their dozens with flags and signs and bullhorns. What good is a message if you can’t shout it loud to a shopping public?

Ah, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the basic freedoms that buttress a healthy democracy. Even though I vehemently disagree with these people, and even though I think their notions of civic engagement have all the subtlety of a collision with a planet-sized asteroid, I celebrate these moments. They remind me that I share these basic freedoms and, if I so choose, I can stand on a street corner and speak my mind without reprisal. They also remind me that, as part of the social contract, it is my responsibility to ensure that these people feel free enough to continue without reprisal as well.

My daughter went through a stage where she would ask me what things I grew up with that we don’t have anymore. Typically, I would answer with things like rotary phones and vinyl. If I had thought more closely on it, I might have flipped her question on its head and told her about things that didn’t exist then that exist now. Social media would top the list and, with it, certain ideas about civic engagement that have changed since we all became so attached to our iPhones. In particular, I am mindful of cancel culture, an idea that didn’t exist when I was my daughter’s age.

Forget for a minute that cancel culture is something people on the left do to people on the right or vice versa. Instead, abstract yourself from specific political leanings and view cancel culture as a structural problem. When people complain that they have been cancelled, they are telling us that they have been deplatformed. They still enjoy their freedoms; they just have no way to enjoy them. A classic example from 2021 was Twitter’s decision to cancel Donald Trump’s account. We’ve encountered similar events on a smaller scale closer to home. When anti-vaxx protesters tried to enter Toronto’s CF Eaton Centre, private security personnel enforced a mask requirement and prevented them from entering. It seems almost an incidental fact that Toronto police arrested two protesters for assaulting the personnel.

Both incidents illustrate that the constitutionally entrenched rights and freedoms that safeguard a democracy apply only to the relationship between citizens and the state. They aren’t binding upon private enterprise. Twitter owes nothing to Donald Trump. Cadillac Fairview owes nothing to the shoppers (or protesters) who enter its premises.

The problem with a world where civic engagement happens increasingly in privatized spaces (especially privatized virtual spaces) is that it is increasingly vulnerable to cancellation. Democracies, and the political thought that underpins them, hasn’t been able to keep up with this strange shift.

But I assure you, me and my camera will be there, tracking the moat that protects our ever-dwindling freedoms.

Categories
City Life

Photographing People Photographing Paintings in Museums

A man raises a camera over his head and photographs a painting in the Louvre museum.
Photographing Paintings, Musée du Louvre, Paris

I suppose you’re going to call me a philistine or a dilettante because I go to museums not to look at the works of art but to look at the people looking at the works of art. And maybe you’re right. But to my mind, people are infinitely more interesting than works of art, especially if those works of art are hundreds of years old and commissioned by powerful people or institutions as a way to celebrate the fact that their social station granted them such power. In polite moments, I’d call this tautological; in blunter moments, I’d call this masturbatory.

Now, we hang these works in galleries that are accessible to humbler sorts like you and me, but in a way the message remains the same. We allow these paintings to persuade us that there is an official Art with a capital “A” that is worthy and valuable, and then there is the pedestrian stuff that humbler sorts like you and me produce that, however, compelling, is not so valuable.

We come into the presence of these works like travellers on a religious pilgrimage, and we abase ourselves before them mostly by photographing them as a sign of our absolute belief that nothing could be a worthier subject matter for our cameras. Outside these walls there may be people and traffic and gardens and birds winging through the sky, but who are we to decide that such things deserve our attention? We are mere worms, unable to decide for ourselves what is beautiful or stirring.

To be honest, I have no idea what people are thinking when they whip out their cameras in the Louvre. All I know is what I am thinking when I catch them in the act. I laugh and cringe in equal measures.

People with iPhones crowd around the Mona Lisa painting in the Louvre museum trying to take selfies with the famous portrait.
You’d be smiling too, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Categories
Street Photography

What’s more important? Staying fit? Or performing fitness?

A young couple go for a morning run and their image is reflected in a store window as they round the corner.
Out for a Morning Run on Balmuto Street at Bloor, Toronto

I hate exercise. I’m not particularly fit, but I live in a building with a gym and so, in order to get my money’s worth from my common expense fees, I visit it at least 3 times a week. The sound of my bones creaking confirms to me that I’m still alive.

I’m glad my building has a gym. A regular gym wouldn’t let someone like me be a member. I think it was Nietzsche who first articulated the gym paradox. He adapted it from Schopenhauer’s haute couture paradox: they won’t let you into a fancy clothing store unless you are wearing fancy clothes, but how can you be wearing fancy clothes in the first instance if they won’t let you in to buy them? In Nietzsche’s version, they only let you into the gym if you look fit enough to belong to a gym, but how can you look fit enough in the first instance if they won’t let you join to become fit? Is it any wonder most of us sit on the couch in sweat pants and hoover potato chips?

When it comes to exercise, I think I have mixed motives. Like everyone else, I claim that I exercise for the sake of my personal health. But in rare moments of self-reflection, I discover that it’s more complicated than that. The real reason I exercise is to “earn” the right to eat a bag of chips or drink a bottle of wine by burning an equivalent number of calories. Or, since exercise comes after the fact, it’s more like doing penance. In fact, there are deeply religious overtones to my exercise: “Forgive me, rowing machine, for I have sinned. It’s been a full week since my last session.”

I’m self-conscious and grateful every time I visit the gym and find I’m the only one there. Sometimes I choose odd hours on purpose so I can avoid what I imagine are the judgmental stares of all the buff and beautiful people. But I’m convinced that an extraverted subset of the exercising public is motivated by a need to perform exercise. It’s not good enough just to be fit; it’s important to be seen to be fit. That means working out in high-visibility settings. That means wearing the “correct” clothing with expensive brands that declare a financial commitment to the enterprise. Most important of all, that means wearing headbands.

Categories
Street Photography

Casually Strolling Down the Street in a Gorilla Suit

Man in gorilla suit walks down Kensington Avenue, Toronto

Sometimes when I’m out and about (yes, I’m Canadian and I don’t say oot and aboot), I play a game of photography scavenger hunt. I keep a mental list of things I’d like to photograph should the opportunity arise. Examples include: 1) middle-aged men wearing argyle socks and sandals; 2) looters smashing a store window; 3) a woman landing a slap; 4) a dog pooping on a religious tract; 5) a car at the moment of impact as it careens into a utility pole.

But if I included: 6) a random guy walking down the street in a gorilla suit, I guarantee you I would never in a million years get that shot. The only way I could get the gorilla suit shot would be to hire someone. But I never included the gorilla suit shot on my photography scavenger hunt list, so the gorilla appeared quite naturally and I seized the moment.

Lists are fine, I guess, but they don’t do me any good if they distract me from the strangeness of the world I encounter with every step. With a tip of the hat to Yogi Berra, I see a lot just by looking. And if a guy in a gorilla suit happens to appear, strolling casually down the road, then who am I to deny my camera the opportunity to make the shot?

Categories
Street Photography

What’s The Point?

City News at Bloor Street east of Yonge in Toronto

If I’m out on a photo walk and I see reporters, my first instinct is to suppose that something interesting is happening; I should keep my eyes open for opportunities. But when the news reporter is wearing pastels, I know he’s never going to report anything of substance. The most I can expect is school children showcasing new dance moves. Or the release of a new line of cosmetics. Or tips on how to avoid pigeon shit. That’s not to say there’s nothing of visual interest for me to shoot; only that I’ll have to look somewhere else to find it.

In this case, the visual interest lies in the news people themselves. They look as if they’ve just teleported to this corner and are trying to get their bearings. The cameraman is pointing to the west as if to say: Look! That’s west. The reporter (or the personality, or whatever he is) says: Well if that’s west, then which way’s east?

To be honest, I feel sorry for media personalities. They face horrible discrimination, especially the white blonde ones on Fox News. Much of that discrimination has arisen thanks to comedic Fascists like Will Farrell whose Ron Burgundy suggests that news personalities are vapid ciphers. If I had more money, I’d create a charitable foundation that provides support for the victims of such discrimination. Everybody deserves to be treated with dignity no matter where they score on the Human Vapidity Index (HVI), which is a real measure, at least in my own mind.

Whatever’s happening in this photograph, we can see clearly that it’s happening somewhere else. That’s the point of the pointing. There’s something to the west. What is it? Godzilla? Lady Boadecia riding naked on a horse? People wearing last year’s fashions? We’ll never know, but at least we have the consolation of our overactive imaginations.

Categories
Street Photography

Split Perspective

Front & Bay, Toronto

During the pandemic I have noticed a rise in conversations about the benefits of mindfulness meditation practice. I’m skeptical of those people who claim they use it to be more focused, more awake, more aware, more attentive, more directed. As the proud owner of a monkey mind, I know first-hand how difficult it can be to focus attention. My monkey mind isn’t unique; I think everyone has a monkey mind and anyone who claims otherwise is lying.

People talk about staring at a candle flame and achieving a state of perfect concentration. They then take that state with them from their meditation to think great thoughts, imagine cutting edge technology, implement never before heard of investment strategies, write Man Booker winning novels, and calculate in their heads the trajectory of the next mission to Mars.

I try. Honestly, I do. But my monkey mind keeps hopping around. There are bills to pay. Stupid conversations to replay in my mind. Infuriating comments on social media that won’t go away. Ear worms from the latest music. An itch on the back between my shoulder blades.

I’m inclined to think the mindfulness meditation narrative, or at least the one that’s pitched to us by the oversimplifying media, is grossly unfair. It presents us with an impossible ideal: a perfect focus that is supposed to unlock astonishing creative potential. Although I’m no expert when it comes to human cognition (if you discount the fact that I engage it every second of my life), I suspect that we can’t help but entertain a split perspective. Part of us lives in the moment while, simultaneously, another part of us detaches from our present self and looks down on us, observing and commenting on that part of us that lives in the moment. This is our monkey mind and we can’t help but give it free play.

I’m an advocate of a far less utilitarian mindfulness, one that puts no stock in achieving a perfect focus, and concerns itself instead with loving kindness, starting with the self. It forgives us for failing to meet impossible standards. We are a monkey mind people. Consciousness is a necessarily fragmented state. We are present both within and without it. We do, and at the same time we narrate our doing.

Categories
Street Photography

Candid Photos: Public Displays of Affection

Bloor/Yonge Intersection, Toronto

I’ve gone two years now without capturing a single shot of physical closeness. With masks and social distancing and self-isolation, people have grown suspicious of personal contact. So when I stood at a busy intersection just as two friends (who obviously hadn’t seen one another since the pandemic began) screamed hello and hugged one another, it seemed almost shocking. They rushed into one another’s arms and clung to one another.

I happened to be standing two steps to the left. At first, it felt awkward, like I was privy to the most intimate moment that had ever passed between two people since hugging was invented. Then I shook my head, like I might shake off a bad dream, and reminded myself that this is the sort of thing people used to do all the time. I reminded myself, too, that unabashed affection in a public space is fair game for street photography. By the time this last thought occurred to me, the moment had almost passed. I raised my camera and captured the tail end of a long embrace that had been two years in the making.

We are forgetful creatures and treat Covid-19 like it’s the first time we’ve ever experienced such a crisis. But it wasn’t long ago that we faced SARS, another novel coronavirus. And before that, there was HIV/AIDS, a global pandemic that remains with us to this day. A generation ago, I lost friends and family to AIDS-related complications. In the intervening years, we’ve forgotten how HIV/AIDS changed physical intimacy.

Before people understood how HIV was transmitted, people refused to touch others especially if they thought those others were gay. (Some were even afraid to sit on toilet seats for fear of contracting the “gay disease.”) When it comes to physical intimacy, the enduring (science-based) legacy of the HIV/AIDS pandemic is the use of condoms during sexual intimacy between non-exclusive partners. When infectious disease experts were able to dispel the misinformation and provide better information about transmission, people resumed their public displays of affection. Kissing on street corners, bear hugs, these things started up again, just as they will as Covid-19 plays out.