Alvin Baltrop’s Voyeurism: Sexual Perversity, Race, and the Historical Uses of Photography

Join us on November 12, 2025 from 4:30PM to 6PM in the Paul Cardario Conference Centre at University College (15 King’s College Circle) for the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies’ annual Michael Lynch Distinguished Lecturer Series. This year’s talk will feature Darius Bost, Associate Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. See below for more information about their talk titled “Alvin Baltrop’s Voyeurism: Sexual Perversity, Race, and the Historical Uses of Photography.”

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Abstract: Darius Bost will explore the work of black gay photographer Alvin Baltrop, known for his photographs of the gay sexual cultures and abandoned warehouses at New York’s West Side piers in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 2019 solo exhibition The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop at the Bronx Museum, Baltrop has received increased scholarly and popular attention. However, Baltrop has been primarily discussed as a gay artist who focused on gay subcultures. Bost will discuss how Baltrop’s identification as a black gay voyeur shaped his artistic practice and life experience. Since Baltrop viewed his photography as historical documentation of a fleeting gay culture, the talk also considers how his voyeuristic approach to photography might intervene in the practice of queer history.

Darius Bost is Associate Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies, and the co-principal investigator of the Provost Initiative on the Racialized Body at the University of Illinois Chicago. Bost is the author of the award-winning book, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence, and co-author with C. Riley Snorton of A Black Queer History of the United States, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2016.

If you have any accessibility needs or requested accommodations, please email sexual.diversity@utoronto.ca.