“They Accomplished Much, Even in Dying”: The Pioneering Gay Art of Peter Hujar and Paul Thicke | Peter Hogar

AAndrew Durbin, author and editor-in-chief of Frieze magazine, spent nearly five years writing “The Wonderful World That Was About to Be.” This dual biography of photographer Peter Hujar and sculptor Paul Thicke, two gay artists who made extraordinary work in the years before and during AIDS, focuses on their friendship, creativity, and collaboration spanning more than 30 years. They died within a year of each other, in 1987 and 1988, both from complications of AIDS.

The works and lives of Thek and Hujar have returned to the cultural scene in recent years. Ben Whishaw played Hogar in Ira Sachs’s 2025 poetic film, The Day of Peter Hogar, and his images were used as the cover art for the album Anohni and the Johnsons and Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling book A Little Life. Thicke’s equivalent moment was slower. His most important works were large-scale installations in Europe, all lost, which, Durbin told me, “everyone loved, but few could experience. When they were finished, there wasn’t much left for sale. But I think his moment is about to come.”

When I met Durbin in Berlin in late March, he said he had not slept much in the run-up to the book’s release. After we talk, he will speak at the local gallery Gropius Bau, where an exhibition of Peter Hujar’s photographs is on display until June 28. This is the first stop on his book tour, and he seems relieved to finally talk about it. “I wanted to show that they really lived,” he says of Stone and Thicke. “They accomplished a lot, even as they died.”

The Fantastic World That Almost Was is an important part of the literary recovery in queer art. To write it, Durbin had to race against time: many sources passed by while completing the book, including the executors of the Thicke and Hogar estates.

Among the many horrors of AIDS was the second erasure: families claiming their children died of another disease, stripping their strangeness from the record. The collections of many artists, even those celebrated in their time, have been scattered and lost. Such a fate might have happened to Hagar and Thicke as well, had it not been for the people Durbin interviewed. His book expands on this work, depicting the intimate relationship between the pioneering couple in twentieth-century art.

“The lives of artists who died of AIDS are often read in reverse, through the lens of the disease,” Durbin writes in the book’s introduction. “They are seen as tragic and pathos figures.” In contrast, the book focuses on their lives from 1954 to 1975, with their deaths at the conclusion. The result is a love story that feels messy and real.

Hogar first photographed Thicke in Coral Gables, Florida, around 1956 or 57, when they were both in their early 20s. By 1960, they were neighbors on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and in love. When I asked Durbin about Thicke’s legendary appeal (Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal were among those who fell in love with him), he said, “Paul was like a kid. He was excited about the world. He was funny, he was hilarious, he made you laugh. He made you want to take care of him.”

A postcard sent to Stone from Fire Island: a crowded beach with a single figure outlined by Thicke. On the back is written: “A picture of happy people, except for me. I see that I am looking for you everywhere.”

While on vacation in Sicily in 1963, they descended into the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, where photography was forbidden. Al-Hajjar, with his camera, ignored the rule. Paul reached into a glass coffin and picked up what he thought was a piece of paper. It was a bit of a dried human thigh. “I felt strangely relieved and free,” he later said in a 1966 interview with Artnews. “It made me happy that the bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers.” Hojar’s catacomb photographs would become Portraits in Life and Death (1976), the only book he ever published.

For Thicke, the afternoon planted the seeds for “pieces of flesh”: bizarre sculptures of wax flesh in glass and metal cases evocative of Christian relics. All of this made him overnight the disturbing new star of the art world.

Both men resisted being pinned in place. Thicke often destroyed his works, deliberately misdating the paintings and constructing fragile, ephemeral compositions that left nothing salable behind. Hujar “didn’t want to be known as just a gay photographer,” Durbin told me. Even when he addressed explicitly gay topics such as “West Side cruise lands, promenades at night, lovers, friends and open-minded artists,” Durbin writes, Hogar felt that “to claim homosexuality is to throw your work into a subcategory that most museums and serious critics will not touch.” When he photographed nude men, including a series of erotic images of David Wojnarowicz, he released them under an anagram of his name, Jot Harper, as part of his long search for a good pseudonym. However, his camera kept returning to famous queer subjects such as Candy Darling, Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, Wojnarowicz, Jackie Curtis, and John Waters.

In August 1975, Thicke sat in for what would be his last photo shoot with Stone. Their relationship was fractured. “There was never one moment where it started,” Durbin tells me of their falling out. “It’s a collection of experiences. A book can’t capture that.” The sessions resulted in some of Hajar’s greatest images. “In the second session, Paul’s face turned in all his feelings for Peter—his love, his envy, his dismissal, his misunderstanding, his desire to forget, his desire to forgive,” Durbin writes.

The final letter Thicke wrote to Hogar is full of ideas and suggested photographs for pictures in life and death, then in progress: “a bush, a door, a gate, a road, a tunnel, pearls.” He writes as if they are at the beginning of something, not the end. The last line said: “Anytime you want to make love, just ask me.”

For queer readers who come after AIDS has killed an entire generation and buried how these men loved, worked, and made things, the fascinating world that was about to emerge offers something rare: proof. “I would like them to read this and realize that they can make art however they want,” Durbin says of younger readers.

“It is now no longer possible for us to have the career that Peter and Paul had,” Durbin admits. “Few people can live [New York’s East] The village now and be a photographer. Urban bohemia has disappeared. But some have a vivid memory of it, and it is an acute and painful loss. We want a world where Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis are our neighbors. This is the New York we want and miss. We want those bars where really cool people sit and drink beer.

“I don’t think I realized how important the relationship was,” says Linda Rosenkrantz, now 91 and one of the last surviving members of Hugar’s inner circle, says Durbin’s book sheds new light on the photographer’s private life. [with Thek] “It was in Peter’s life. I think it was obscured even by me, even Andrew,” she wrote. [Durbin] “I explored it fully.”

That reckoning is now going full speed ahead: in New York there is a MOMA show series running this month, Durbin’s own exhibition opens this week at Ortuzar Projects while Buchholz Gallery opens Thek on May 13 with a major exhibition also planned at the Watermill Center later this year. “This is a huge success in terms of legacy and legacy,” says Noah Khoshbin, president of the Paul Thicke Foundation. “This is an artist who did not have a single job in an American institution at the time of his death.”

In 1975, Thicke wrote to Hogar: “…all we wanted to do, we wanted to do, was also add our names, almost like the lists of names on graves of millions, unknown soldiers, etc., we wanted to say I was here too!”

The spirit of the wonderful world that was about to be is a loud call for these artists to get the recognition they deserve. “I will love these artists until I die,” Durbin told me. “And I’m sure I’ll be talking about Peter Hujar and Paul Thicke for the rest of my life.”

• The Wonderful World That Was About to Be by Andrew Durbin will be published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux on April 14 in the US and Australia, and by Granta on April 23 in the UK. Peter Hujar/Lise Deschenes: The Persistence of Vision is on display at Gropius Bau, Berlin, until August 23