After Jay Hollenburger and Arthur Slaughter met at Rice University in the early 1960s, the young couple commemorated their relationship with a steel red-and-blue sign intertwining their first initials. The piece was on prominent display in their Houston home for years until they extended the piece, bringing it to a height of five feet (~1.5 meters). The addition — a yellow semicircle forming the tail of the letter “G” — paid tribute to Gary Grether, who entered the relationship around 1970, according to a friend of the throuple who collectively became known as JAG.
The relationship was extensively documented across thousands of Polaroids meticulously cataloged by Hollenburger, and upon his passing last fall, half of the photographs — totaling 9,700, nearly all captioned — were acquired in an estate sale by Adam Schachter, the owner of Houston’s Langdon Manor Books. Now, over 59 years since JAG’s romance began, they will be in the spotlight at the 65th edition of the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, hosted by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. The photo collection will be on view and for sale at the upcoming annual event, held at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory from April 3–6.
(images courtesy Langdon Manor Books)
Hollenburger’s Polaroid collection begins in 1964 and runs through 1991, documenting LGBTQ+ events in the Houston area including the many parties hosted at JAG’s apartment, where visitors would lounge around the pool or socialize on sofas underneath a bookcase. The photos also chronicle events elsewhere, such as the “fly-in” parties organized by the queer fraternity organization Gamma Mu that gathered queer men from across the United States in cities like Boston, Denver, and San Diego.
One photograph focuses on the back of a red button-down embroidered with the phrase “National Gay Rodeo Chaplain”; in another image, a person wearing long evening gloves and a Cinderella-like ballgown with a cut-out rear bows to a grinning audience.
“[Art] and Jay were unapologetically ‘out,’ which was a very daring stance in the mid-’60s — especially in Texas,” David Smith, who lived with Hollenburger and Slaughter in 1965, told Schacter after the two connected through Facebook. “They just lived openly as a gay couple and presented that to the world to take it or leave it.”
The three-way relationship lasted around 20 years until Grether’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1990. As a couple, Slaughter and Hollenburger were together for about 34 years until 1995, when Slaughter also died from AIDS; Hollenburger died at age 83 last September. All three are buried together in Houston.
Schachter said that this will be Langdon Manor’s first time participating in the annual book expo, which draws a fleet of veteran bibliophiles and fresh-faced collectors to explore an assortment of objects at the cross-section of history, literature, and art.
This year’s fair will feature over 200 rare book dealers from the United States and abroad, including the Brooklyn-based rare bookseller Fugitive Materials. Founded in 2020 by archivist and publisher Daylon Orr, the business focuses on the preservation of queer, underground, non-Western material history and, as their Facebook page describes, “the disruption of informational privilege through publishing and bookselling.” They primarily work with universities and museum collections, and have regularly participated in art book fairs like Printed Matter’s fairs in New York and Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Art Book Fair.
While Orr has attended the antiquarian book expo before, this will be the first time Fugitive Materials will be exhibiting with its own booth, he told Hyperallergic.
“We’re looking forward to seeing a lot of the librarians we work with and making connections with more who are trying to think about how to diversify both private collections and institutional collections,” Orr said.
The bookseller plans to bring swaths of unseen material to the fair, including zines, items and ephemera related to New York queer history and Chicano fashion; a signed copy of Moonshots (1966) by Lebanese-American poet and artist Etel Adnan; an early David Hammons exhibition catalog; work by queer former sex worker and activist Annie Sprinkle; early-20th-century Mexican prints that recently exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and original posters and photographs from the Young Lords Party in New York.
“We’re just excited to participate and share in this celebration of the history of printed material and ephemera,” Orr said.
