Digital Transgender Archive

Finding aid to the David Greene Photographs and Papers, 1974-1983

David Greene attended the University of Michigan, where he wrote and directed a feature length film, Pamela and Ian (1971), concerning a bisexual love triangle. After graduating, he relocated to San Francisco and founded the Gay Artist and Writers Kollective (GAWK). He went on to photograph men and women who challenged gender stereotypes. Fifty of his photographs were exhibited in a show titled Shameless. For the exhibit, Greene photographed mostly friends in their own homes between February and August 1974. The subjects are "shameless" in living as gay men embracing a genderfuck identity. The show opened in Berkeley, California in 1974 with more than 200 people attending, most in drag. The exhibition then traveled to San Francisco in 1975 as Andy's Donuts, Center of the Universe. The exhibition subsequently traveled as Shameless to New York (1976), Chicago (1978), and Zurich (1979). Greene photographed a series of images for the book Men Loving Men published by Gay Sunshine Press (1977). Greene published photographs in Gay Sunshine Journal in the Spring and Summer 1974 issues. As of 2012, Greene has published four books, Unmentionables: A Novel (2010), Shameless (2011), Photographs (2012), and Detonate (2012). As of 2013, he lived in Chicago with his spouse, painter James Stephens. (Source: "Bio," Books by David Greene, accessed August 29, 2013, http://www.davidjgreene.com/.)

The collection primarily comprises 34 8x10 and 11x14 black-and-white photographic prints taken by photographer David Greene, 1974-1983. The photographs include nine images used in Greene's show titled Shameless, six images used in Gay Sunshine Press publications, eighteen images published later in his 2011 book Shameless, and one unattributed image. The collection also includes Harmodius in Exile poetry, a Harmodius in Exile diary, and an article on the Shameless exhibit from Vector magazine, October 1974.