Like many gay bars, the Rialto Tap in downtown Chicago was not so much a hole in the wall as a hole in the universe. You could fall in at 4 AM and find yourself in the boozy confidence of hustlers, dealers, drag queens, office drones, and faded Adonises. The fire code permitted a limited number of souls, but what multitudinous fantasies they imbibed alongside their rotgut! The Rialto was a pickup bar, a place to score drugs and work the dance floor. Its clientele was mostly Black men, and so during the bar’s heyday—the 1970s and ’80s—it was doubly estranged from the straight corporate world of the Loop. It was one of those gems you either knew about or didn’t.
Of course, photographer Patric McCoy knew about it. In the 1980s, he took portraits of the bar’s regulars with a 35-mm camera he had recently bought and was still teaching himself to use. But his isn’t an insular body of work, like Anders Petersen’s tender documentation of Hamburg’s Cafe Lehmitz. McCoy radiated outward from the hive of the Rialto, cruising the city and the lakefront on his bicycle, taking portraits of anybody who asked him to. His subjects posed themselves. McCoy was just there to record their irrefutable Black agency.
Fifty such portraits were on view here, a mix of color and black-and-white, hung salon style—a variety of faces, each with its own attitude of seduction or languor or inscrutability. The photos, all of which were taken in 1985, were grouped into themes: “Body,” “Chillin’,” “Fashion,” “Men on Bikes,” “Portraits,” “Puns,” “Rialto,” and “The Look.” The jumble initially seemed contrary to the spirit of close encounter that underlies McCoy’s project. Yet as I regarded each picture on its own terms, the faces resolved into specificity and enacted an intimacy in keeping with the ambient eros. The exhibit was a casual paean to Black masculine beauty. Row Row shows a buff, shirtless man piloting an inflatable raft. In Benson & Hedges, another young idol flexes his cantaloupe-size biceps. These images have a sensuality that is more natural, more impromptu, than the work of George Dureau or Robert Mapplethorpe: white photographers whose portraits of Black bodies can evince mannered fetishism.
McCoy is a connoisseur of textures, fabrics, and hair. Cream and Green captures the fortuitous synchronicity between the palette of a man’s jacket and that of a passing city bus. Slick, one of the most expressive works here, is a black-and-white portrait whose subject strikes a pseudo-Napoleonic pose, hand to chest, hair luminously pomaded back. New Day is a grayscale study in light, featuring a bus rider in profile, his handsome face and white collared shirt gilded with sun. If you told me the photo was from the 1950s, I wouldn’t doubt it; the image has a timelessness reminiscent of, say, Roy DeCarava’s work.
McCoy has a sense of humor, too, evident in the series of punning photos. In Famous Fried Chicken, a shirtless man mimes a bodybuilding pose—a front-lat spread—in front of the titular fast-food joint, looking much like the eponymous bird himself. The subject of Five perches atop a bench advertising RENT ME, I’M READY. He flashes a quintet of fingers to the camera, insinuating perhaps that five dollars is his going rate.
Despite these pleasures, the show should have been more rigorously edited. Too many of the photos were unremarkable. The images of a man lounging on a couch, a man glancing back from a bike, or a man simply looking into the camera felt like outtakes. They imparted no mystery, no formal or conceptual intrigue, no narrative implications. The curator, Juarez Hawkins, invoked the political power of representation, but the mixed quality of the work on view demonstrated that not every picture of the past merits our veneration.
Curatorial wall text mentioned AIDS, but almost as an obligatory aside, since there’s no way to know which of McCoy’s subjects succumbed to the disease, and none of the photos on view alluded to that tragic scourge. Even without the ravages of time and successive pandemics, these photos were already requiems. The Rialto is gone, too, razed in 1990. If you go there today, not a trace remains. You either know it was there or you don’t.
