“The whole thing being naked is that I’m exploring my sexuality, which goes back to being from West Texas,” said Mr. mooney. “It was really like, ‘You’re gay, you’re bad, sex is after marriage.’ If I had seen images of gay men being proud of their bodies, I think it would have made growing up a lot easier.”
His own images, with their nostalgically faded colors and carefully carved bare body parts, often suggest that there is something mischievous or macabre going on just outside the chaste white borders of the prints. They feature scruff, ripped tank tops, and other accessories from an emerging fashion trend that some in the industry are calling “sleazecore.”
So it wasn’t surprising when these images spread across the internet during the initial lockdowns of the pandemic, especially among other scared, horny, isolated gay men, many of whom started DMing the photographer to volunteer their own portraits.
Once it was safer to meet in person, Mr. Mooney refined his aesthetic by capturing other (often fit, often tattooed) men in New York, making some close friends along the way.
“A lot of my pictures have me going into someone’s house, hanging out, drinking, smoking a little — and if they want to take their shirts off, that’s cool,” he said. “The intimacy of a Polaroid photo makes it sexy, but it had become something of an Urban Outfitters children’s toy. A lot of people forget that it is a legitimate medium.”
Of course, there’s a long artistic tradition, especially in New York, of hot gay photographers capturing their hot friends on Polaroid film, dating back to Andy Warhol and his 60s Superstars; Robert Mapplethorpe, with his S-and-M-drenched black-and-white prints of the 1970s; Don Rodan, an influential gay community photographer at the same time; Peter Hujar, who captured the grim East Village scene before dying of an AIDS-related illness in 1987, during another pandemic; and Tom Bianchi, who for five decades has caught his beefcake buddies stripping naked and snooping around Manhattan, the Pines, Palm Springs, and elsewhere.