John Riggs
The informal arrangement at the 602 Club: The front half, along the bar, was for gay patrons.
Scott Seyforth, co-founder of the Madison LGBTQ Archive, points out one lesser-known aspect of the photographs by John Riggs that will be displayed as part of The 602 Club in the Sixties: the presence of gay men. “It is highly unusual to have interior photos of an LGBTQ gathering place from the 1950s and 1960s, especially this many images of this quality.
A photographer needed a professional camera, high-speed film, and had to know what they were doing,” says Seyforth. “As a well-known bartender at the club, John was able to move through the bar snapping candid photos of people – capturing the kind of images a stranger couldn’t. We do not have a similar photographic record of any other Madison LGBTQ gathering place: The Three Bells, The Kollege Klub, The Belmont Hotel Bar or The Velvet Swing. The Riggs collection lets us peer back through time and see what it was like to be in one of those spaces.” Riggs describes the place and the era so eloquently, we are printing a version of his artist’s statement from the exhibit’s catalog.
— Catherine Capellaro
John Riggs
Madison in the 1960s was a Midwest way station between San Francisco, Berkeley and Greenwich Village for a tidal wave of rebellion, new thought and cultural evolution. And the 602 Club at 602 University Ave., midway between campus and downtown, was the watering hole for many of those riding the crest of that wave.
“The Six” had become by the early ’60s a hangout for artists, activists, literati, intellectuals, draft dodgers, war protesters and a mixed bag of scholars and misfits from all disciplines. It was also one of the early public gathering spots on Friday and Saturday nights for the gay community of Madison. The University Art Department faculty meetings generally ended up there, and it was home to the Marxist Drinking Society. It was an exhilarating scene — the characters were iconoclastic, the mood rowdy, and the conversation heady. Proclamations rang out, and the closer to closing time, the grander (and louder) they became.
I tended bar at The Six during my undergraduate years, very early in my photographic career. While serving schooners, mixing drinks and making change, I was shooting in what little there was of available light. I was 22, naive, arrogant, idealistic and ambitious. Just home from two years in France and Germany studying French and German literature and philosophy, I was enchanted by the diversity of the people and the sophistication of wit, language and ideas on all sides. It was this enchantment that stimulated me to record the raw power of the personalities, the physical beauty of the people, and the (to me) exotic ambience of the place.
By 1966 I had enough material to prepare for the owner, Dudley Howe, the gift of a book of some 160 images for his 15th anniversary celebration. I had hoped he would keep it at the bar for people to look at, but he liked it so much he didn’t want it ruined by spilled beer. So he immediately took it home, never to be seen again. Until, that is, someone very early in the life of the internet put up a website of the Six and used some of the images from the book on that site.
That is how (very much later) Scott Seyforth — co-founder of the Madison LGBTQ Archive
— found me. He inquired if I had any of those negatives left, and if so, they would be of great value to the Archive project, and would I be willing to donate them? Which is then how I met David Null, the University Archives director.
David felt that the 602 played a pivotal role in campus history, which intensified his interest in these images. I dug deep and discovered some 500 negatives from the era. Together the three of us hatched the idea of mounting a public exhibition of a selection of these images, along with a few pieces of 602 ephemera from the collection of Dudley’s daughter’s (Ja-Ja Howe).
But the negatives themselves were in dreadful condition. They had barely survived the many moves and poor storage conditions in unheated barns and moldy sheds over 50-some years. Scratched, dusty, and suffering from spider-web cracks in the emulsions, each scanned hi-res image would require hours to days and longer of painstaking digital restoration to print to any size. I was skeptical about whether I could coax prints of sufficient quality for a gallery exhibit, but I bought a high-res scanner and set out to learn that technology.
Everything in this exhibit was shot between 1964 and 1968 in the dimly lit conditions of a tavern at night. The overall result is gritty, somewhat dark, and raw — appropriate, I believe, to the time and the place. It was a different world then, and my goal is to render this work in a way that will reflect the reality of what it felt like to be there. If shot today with current digital technology, the effect would be radically different. More “perfect” perhaps, but I daresay less compelling.
The 602 Club in the Sixties runs through July 27 in the Class of 1925 Gallery at the Memorial Union with an opening reception June 15, 5:30-7 p.m.