While legal reform bills snaked their way through national parliaments in some parts of the globe, radically redefining the role of the state in regulating the sexual behavior of its citizens, private behaviour became public fodder for minority groups who were among the first to suffer at the hands of government pushback. Liberationist movements created new iconographies of outrage while students and workers took to the streets but rarely shoulder to shoulder with their gay, lesbian, and trans sisters and brothers. The winds of change managed to waft their way across the Iron Curtain, where placards, pamphlets, and pictures from the West were seized by the secret police or added to the arsenal of local activist groups already active in mobilizing for change. The revolution of taste and sensibility was not just in the streets, it was televised during the evening news, on screen at the movies, and in magazines and advertising, while sex education was designed to pass on to the youth the shape of possibility to come. Photography sat at this nexus, part education of desire, instrument of repression, technology of rebellion and art of the masses.

This panel approaches the theme of photography and its role in visualizing queer and trans worlds and worldmaking in a global setting with papers on gay liberationist photography in the Americas, trans kinship in Italy and Brazil and radical queer sex organizing and care in Toronto, Canada. It asks us to consider the work of images in realizing - in some cases presaging and extending - the emotional attachments and commitments that formed part of visibility politics of the era. While much of the historiography on LGBTQIA life and organizing centers around medicine, sexology, and social movements, this panel shifts attention to photography to interrogate the power and importance of picturing desire, politics, identity and kinship in the 1970s and after.