Steve Rosenthal was given the Passion for Freedom Visitor’s Choice Award in October 2011 for his series, We do not have homosexuals like in your country. In our country we do not have this. In Iran this phenomenon does not exist. This work tells the story of two teenage boys, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, from northeastern Iran, who were executed for committing homosexual acts. The pictures themselves are, remarkably, constructed from the profile pictures from Gaydar profiles. Polari met Steve to talk about his work, and conducted the interview stood in front of a picture of the boys just moments before they were hanged.
CB: When did you start out using Gaydar profile pictures in your work?
SR: I was quite a late joiner to the world of Gaydar. It wasn’t until January 2007.
When I set up a profile I wanted to create a log of every person who visited my profile, but I didn’t really know why. And so I started to build a catalogue of the images and strap-line text.
Then I was introduced to the program I use to make the pictures. At the time I had about 15,000 images, but the quality wasn’t that good. As the archive grew the quality of the images got better and better. So I had my Gaydar profile on all the time, and I was logged into as many chat rooms as possible, as I found that way you’d get more hits. It was on 24/7 really.
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