“It’s easy to read the title of this book wrong. Two-thirds of it refers to specific physical spaces—from the Castro Valley in San Francisco to the conga-line of Christopher Street that cuts through New York’s West Village. But the vanished world that the photos in Nicholas Blair’s book revitalize has far less to do with capturing specific places than with freezing a unique time—one in which the very concept of “gay streets” had meanings and functions nowhere to be found in the modern world, queer or otherwise.

In the era of these photos—between 1979 and 1986—as well as for many years before and more than a decade after, nearly everything that was commonly considered “gay” either happened on streets like these or was tangentially connected to them. The special world that reality created can be seen in all its heat, humor, and intimacy in Blair’s photographs.

The cliché is to call what these photos capture “a community.” But, to me, it has more to do with a sensibility and an experience, ones that, however divorced from the current world, remain deeply embedded in something eternal: History.”