![]() It is thanks to his passion and foresight that the image survives today. Born in Edmonton, Canada, in 1925, he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was a member of the Mattachine Society - an early instance of what today would be called an LGBT organization - in the early 1950s. Belanger, for most of his life, was a devoted collector of LGBT history. The picture was once owned by the young man on the right-hand side of the image above, Joseph John Bertrund Belanger. The image is part of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries - the largest repository of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer materials in the world. This photo could have gotten these men arrested. It was taken in 1953, a time when purposefully vague statutes on morals, lewd conduct, or disorderly conduct in many states allowed the police to target and arrest gay and lesbian people for such transgressions as wearing items of clothing of the opposite sex, propositioning someone of the same sex, or even holding hands with a member of the same sex. But this picture, in fact, reveals far more than that. Today, it might seem like any other informal, casual photograph of a young gay couple enjoying each other’s company.
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