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Rose colored lenses of nostalgia, a scene depicted as the fantasy it was desired to be, but the reticence or demureness in some of Baltrop's early voyeurism shouldn't be mistaken for anything but caution. His situation's precarity, a gay black man in the 1970s, is expressed on the surface of the photographs themselves, in its tentativeness, his body's extreme vulnerability. People threatened, murdered. A gay haven was habitually brutal. These people were killed, ostracized, displaced to the corners, to escape the purview of a society disavowing them. You see it in the photo's trembling hand.
See too: AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee at Deborah Schamoni
