Few eras have been mythologized as much as New York in the 1970s, the decade suspended between the liberation of Stonewall and the devastation of AIDS, when queerness thrived in the city’s abandoned spaces. All of Us Stars, published by Reference Point, resurrects that world through the work of Bobby Busnach, a photographer whose portraits of queer glamour and survival transformed a faded Upper West Side apartment into a stage of self-invention.
At seventeen, Busnach left a fractured home in Boston and arrived in Manhattan with his closest friend and collaborator, Geraldine “Gerry” Visco. They found an apartment in the Park Royal Hotel, a building that still carried traces of its former luxury. Beneath cracked plaster and dusty chandeliers, they created an alternative kind of Factory. Their friends, drawn from the city’s margins, became collaborators in a project that turned daily life into performance.
Busnach’s photographs exist in a world between exhaustion and aspiration. His subjects recline beneath cheap velvet curtains, their faces lit like old film stars. The clothes come from thrift stores, Fiorucci, Frederick’s of Hollywood, and flea markets, arranged with instinctive precision. Each image reveals the beauty of artifice, but also the fragility behind it. The light is theatrical and deliberate, a tool that transforms worn interiors into spaces of transcendence.
Where contemporaries such as Nan Goldin or Peter Hujar captured their communities with documentary intimacy, Busnach’s gaze was choreographed and stylized. His work does not seek the truth of hardship but the dream of escape. The camera becomes a mirror for survival, framing the self not as witness but as invention. Through performance, his friends found a way to inhabit the kind of beauty the outside world denied them.
The book traces this world with sensitivity and precision. Visco, who became both muse and patron, financed their domestic utopia through sex work. Their relationship was bound by love, dependency, and shared trauma. The apartment was their sanctuary and their stage, both safe and volatile. Within it, they enacted an alternate version of home, one that glimmered with the promise of visibility but trembled under the weight of memory.
Busnach’s images return again and again to mirrors. His photography resists voyeurism; it reflects instead a private mythology of transformation. Marilyn Monroe’s face appears across the series, taped to walls and mirrors, watching over the scenes like a spectral muse. For Busnach, she symbolized not only glamour but the cost of it, the tension between innocence and survival. That same tension shapes his portraits, which shimmer with tenderness even when they lean into spectacle.
By the late seventies, as disco waned and fear began to shadow the city’s queer enclaves, Busnach’s circle continued to pose for him. Their expressions are electric, poised between triumph and fatigue, their eyes meeting the lens with the quiet knowledge that beauty itself could be a form of defiance.
Viewed today, these photographs feel startlingly contemporary. They anticipate the self-curation and image politics of the digital age, yet they remain rooted in something handmade and intimate. There is no irony, only invention. The subjects of All of Us Stars were not icons but visionaries of their own small universe, crafting identity through light, fabric, and imagination.
The book restores that world to view. It reminds us that queer history is not only written in protest or nightlife, but in acts of creation carried out in private rooms. Busnach’s archive captures the persistence of joy in the face of erasure, and the power of performance to turn survival into art.
All of Us Stars is published by Reference Point and available now.
Cody Rooney is the Editor in Chief and senior contributor at liminul.
He is a PhD candidate, digital content specialist, writer, editor, multi-media artist, and photographer.