From Miss Rosen’s article for DAZED:
What I find so compelling about Amos Badertscher is that his work depicts the very particular quality of Baltimore in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s long after it’s died everywhere else: a hustler culture not consisting of queer figures, but of straight boys making themselves available to gay men for money. The very boys that would call you a ‘faggot’ in the park during the daytime, were offering themselves to you at night. The thing that Amos represented here is the moment before the concretisation of the idea of gay and straight as a binary. He was interested in those moments in between.
His work is in the ‘Transfigure’ section because it is all about the sort of fuzziness of these categories in real life. If a straight boy who lives with his girlfriend but makes himself available in the park at night, is that homo or hetero? When I interviewed Amos and started talking about the gay movement, he got angry. He said, ‘It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. Before it, every man in the world would pose before my camera, because it didn’t matter. But after then, it started to mean that you were gay.’