Manhattan, home to the art establishment I’d so eloquently rejected, was obviously out. Not to mention I was so broke that I couldn’t have covered a deposit or first and last month at any price. Besides, Brooklyn was my home turf. My pops knew a guy who needed a building manager for a place on St. John’s. The location was off the map, natch, but if I showed quality work that people had no chance to dig elsewhere, they’d have to start paying attention. Which they did, didn’t they?

I wasn’t thinking of it as a women’s gallery. Start using labels and you seal yourself into smaller and smaller boxes until it’s just you in there. Plus, some see a label as asking for a favor. As in: Oh, Kind Sir, would you please spare a glance for Women’s Art, which needs your special attention? Not to say I wasn’t showing work by women artists, because I was, but that doesn’t mean I had to call it anything. It’s not like the Tenth Street places were calling themselves men’s art galleries, even though that’s exactly what they fucking were.

It wasn’t until later that people started calling me a feminist. I’ve got no beef with that, but things smelled different back then; “feminist” still meant some chick in a long white dress, circa 1918, marching for her right to vote. Remember, The Feminine Mystique didn’t hit until 1963, and women’s lib came on four or five years after that. Now do the math: I opened the Lacuna in 1961. I was an underemployed, overeducated, underappreciated, overconfident art-school pain in the ass who wanted to give her friends a place where they could show their work. It just so happened that those friends were women. When I met Lil, I could see straight off that what she was doing with her camera was the real deal. So, naturally, I made her my friend.

64. The Popsicle eaters, Brooklyn, 1960

Again with the underwear? you ask. Well, again, it was hot. Summers in Brooklyn got pretty ugly, hence those old-timey photos of whole families sleeping on fire escapes, and wide-angle shots of people draped over every grain of sand at Coney Island. Hence children willing to expose their soft child parts to the bruisingly high-pressure water streams of popped fire hydrants. Let me tell you something: it was much easier to lie around in your underthings pressing a dripping Popsicle to your chest between licks, as demonstrated here by me, age five. Naturally, Lillian (camera engineered by Joe Kubiak) is sitting perfectly straight and dripless, hair neatly brushed, looking like she could be the doyenne of Popsicle etiquette at a finishing school if she happened to be wearing anything more than panties.