The Men Of The Vale

I'm looking forward to obtaining a copy of Thomas Roma's In the Vale of Cashmere (powerHouse Books, $30), a collection of photos of the landscape in the Vale of Cashmere in Brooklyn's Prospect Park as well as the black and Hispanic gay and bisexual men who frequent this popular cruising area.

I first learned of this book (and the Vale of Cashmere) when I saw a photo essay by Roma called "The Men of the Vale" that appeared in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times (October 11, 2015).

Roma, the director of the photography program at the Columbia University School of the Arts and a heterosexual, stated in his essay that he "photographed the landscape between 2008 and 2011 and introduced myself to the men I encountered. I'd ask them if I could make a portrait for a possible book....Many declined, but many said yes, and I was grateful every time they did."

In the Vale of Cashmere is Roma's tribute to his friend Carl, who died of AIDS in 1991 and was a frequent visitor to that section of the park.


An exhibition of Thomas Roma's photos can be viewed at the Steven Kasher Gallery, 515 West 26th Street, Manhattan, until December 19, 2015.

On Bisexuals

"In those days [the 1960s] we always assumed that a bisexual (especially, for some reason, a bisexual man) was really a homosexual in the closet. ....But as I learned a decade later in Paris, the world is full of genuine bisexuals, though most of them keep a low profile, not because they're ashamed but because everyone distrusts and fear them."--Edmund White, from City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (Bloomsbury, 2009).