A Brooklyn native, Stellar picked up a camera in 1976 and pointed it, almost immediately, at his own community: the West Village, Christopher Street, the abandoned piers that served for a few short years as a sunbathing ground, a cruising ground, a stage. Here, Stellar developed a vernacular language that carries both a pornographer’s frankness and a documentarian’s patience; a regular contributor to the literary Christopher Street magazine, the gay newspaper New York Native and the panoply of queer flesh magazines of the time, Stellar contains a high-low fluency that gives his work a grit and a candour most of his contemporaries never risked. Against the background of New York in its most unkempt and precarious, sex is everywhere and unapologetic: men frolicking and screwing in full daylight, skimpy clothing leaving little to the imagination, balanced against a natural, authentic record of Stellar’s milieu through intense, unguarded portraiture.

That candour reaches its peak in the studio portraits made during the throes of the AIDS crisis which explore the nuances of gay experience, between introspection and exhibition. Of the hundreds of men who sat for Stellar in that period, only a small handful are still here to tell it. Don’t Worry Boys takes its title from a real, semi-mythical New York social club: an invitation to a refuge where desire and survival held each other in fragile balance. Don't Worry Boys inherits that same charge, riotous and tender in the same breath, never separating the body’s pleasure from its vulnerability.

Initiated and edited by Jordan Hancock as a reappraisal of the two decades that shaped Stellar's further career, Don’t Worry Boys reaffirms Stellar’s place inside the canon of artists who documented this critical chapter of gay culture, while refusing to flatten its subject into either celebration or elegy, building joy directly inside its own grief.