Ron Zuckerman has never once bought a painting to match a sofa. He has never hired a designer to tell him where a photograph should hang, and never acquired a piece because its value would appreciate. For 45 years, he simply stood in front of a photograph and if he felt some kind of a connection, he bought it. One at a time, on a fundraiser's salary.
The result is that his home – a flat in San Francisco's Castro district – feels more like an archive. Built in 1889, the flat's building announces itself with confident proportions, high ceilings, long corridors and a succession of small rooms that, when lined with art, highlight a seemingly vast amount of wall space. From the entry stairwell to the guest bedroom, from the kitchen to the den, just about every surface holds something that chronicles facets and moments of queer life across the 20th and early 21st centuries.
The bathroom’s shower curtain is imprinted with an image by Wilhelm von Gloeden, while on the door are a plate from Benjamin Fredrickson’s Wedgies series, a Mark Morrisroe photogravure, and a photograph by Russian émigré Alexander Kargaltsev
The collection ranges from the serious to the whimsical, encompassing everything from a 1950s physique card and icons painted by Zuckerman’s late partner Nick to a photogravure that turns out to be a sex ad and a plate with a man being given a wedgie (a work by Benjamin Fredrickson, a photographer known for shooting subject matter that is often considered taboo). The collection spans studios in Brooklyn and the Instagram era, Mapplethorpe and Mississippi, the AIDS epidemic, and whatever comes after that. It is not a survey; it is an assembled history, both personal and queer-specific, that announces itself from the first step.
The guest room is lined with works by photographer Danny Fitzgerald (Les Demi Dieux). On the bed is a quilt by Patrick Merriman, while alongside the cabinet is a work by Russian émigré Slava Mogutin Previous page, left, the hallway features works by Herbert List, Peter Stackpole, George Dureau, Ken Duncan, Ruth Morgan, Amos Badertscher and Justin Julius Santos, as well as a quilt by Greg Climer
‘The show starts at the door,' says Zuckerman. And he means it literally. As you enter, you encounter three photographs by Luke Smalley, known for capturing images of athletic young men, often with a 1920s prep-school aesthetic. This is followed by an introduction to photographer Danny Fitzgerald (who also worked under the moniker ‘Les Demi Dieux'), the artist most represented in Zuckerman's collection.
The first image he ever bought, he recounts, was by Marsha Burns, a Seattle photographer who caught an androgynous young man with his socks rolled to his ankles, the shadow falling in the most striking way. Zuckerman saw it in a local gallery in 1980, paid $200, and took it home. He fell in love with the image and had no plan for how and where he would display it. That instinct, and unbothered by the lack of a plan, has governed every purchase since.
On the staircase are 20th-century works by Wilhelm von Gloeden and his cousin Guglielmo von Plüschow, Edwin F Townsend, Fred and William Ritter, and Danny Fitzgerald, as well as more contemporary offerings by the likes of Nan Goldin, George Dureau, David Armstrong, Howard Roffman, Peter Hujar, Erwin Olaf, Richard Renaldi, Marsha Burns and Marcus Leatherdale
Although the subjects of the art are invariably male, female artists can also be found at various waypoints across the space, seen, for example, in Lissa Rivera's Beautiful Boy series. The gaze in this collection is not monolithic. Further diving into the space, we come across Nan Goldin's photograph of her nephew, Simon on the Subway, acquired at a Gay Men's Health Crisis benefit for $500. It is worth considerably more now.
The view of the living room from the primary bedroom
What followed, in the early years, are artefacts from the downtown New York post-Stonewall scene: those such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar and Stanley Stellar. Zuckerman had read about them before he could afford them and reading made him want to look, and looking made him want to own. In the years he has been collecting, his biggest regret was trading in a Mapplethorpe photograph of a man in an autoerotic act, which visitors found too explicit, for a print by Helen Levitt.
‘They'd be talking to me and they'd see it on the wall, and then they'd have this look of disgust on their face. I thought, maybe it's too much.' No disrespect to Levitt, though, whom he calls ‘a great street photographer'.
The south wall of the living room houses work by Larry Clark, Anderson & Low, Robert Mapplethorpe, Baron von Gloeden, Francis Schichtel, Greg Bruce, Vincenzo Galdi, Kyle Meyer, Nicholas Vance Zuckerman, Bruce Weber, Jack Pierson, Stephen Barker, and Mark Beard
His first Peter Hujar, bought in 1986 from the Gracie Mansion Gallery during Hujar's first-ever solo exhibition, was paid off in instalments. He still has the typed invoices, with each payment recorded in ink. Last September, at a Fraenkel Gallery recreation of that same show, he reconnected with Gracie Mansion, who is now an art consultant, and showed her the invoice. To his surprise and delight, she pulled out her own copy. Her ledger also had the payments made out to Hujar directly, cheque numbers and all.
The East corner of the Primary Bedroom houses work by Peter Hujar, Kelly Grider, Bryson Rand, Jason Byron Gavann, Clifford Baker, Michael Belensky, David Lebe, David Riera, Stephen Milner, Fernando Carpenada, and quilt by Patrick Merriman. Map of Paris et Environs 1740 from The Louvre. And on the door, David Wojnarowicz and Nicholas Nixon
Then he discovered that, before Stonewall, there had been another world entirely, seen in the art of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus and Jared French, physique photographers working out of Brooklyn and the Midwest. The prints are studies in a very specific masculine beauty. He began collecting those, too. The ‘collector gene', he calls it, without apology.
There are also the pieces that operate more as artefacts than decoration. Among the collection of portraits in the living room are two artworks that tell a story. Above the sofa hangs Icarian Angel, by the late San Francisco artist Daniel Goldstein. At first, it looks like an abstract photographic print, a spectral figure emerging from a tawny surface. As Zuckerman begins to explain, it takes a moment to absorb the context. The photograph features a leather bench cover from the Muscle System, the renowned gay gym on San Francisco's Market Street. The shot reveals the imprinted outlines of human figures left by the sweat of men who exercised there. A substantial proportion of them, Zuckerman estimates, possibly half, died during the AIDS epidemic. Goldstein called the series Reliquaries, which stems from the Latin word reliquiae, meaning ‘remains of a martyr'. Poignantly, the piece was a gift he gave himself the year after his partner died.
The kitchen features a selection of more current contemporary queer painters and print artists, including street artists Pete Doolittle and Jeremy Novy, Adam Baker, Mark Johnson, Robert Martin, Michael McConnell, Catherine Alice Michaelis, Nancy Loeber and JD Raenbeau
Across the room is a work by Kyle Meyer called Interwoven, a photograph of a gay man in Eswatini (where homosexuality is illegal) wearing a traditional woman's headdress. The photograph has been cut into strips and woven together with the actual headdress the subject wore during the portrait shoot. Meyer came to San Francisco for an art fair and visited Zuckerman's flat. Later, a specialist framer assembled it while on the phone with Meyer the entire time. The work has the effect of serving to conceal the wearer's identity while also revealing it at the same time. Both pieces work well in the space which, he says, is done ‘instinctively'. Both leave traces on materials and what the body inscribes, as well as what gets preserved when the body is gone or endangered.
The primary bedroom houses the work of Daniel Handal, Jody Jock, Zachari Logan, The Skinny Type, Jeremy Novy, Robbie Sweeney, Steven Lee Ashmore, Mark I. Chester, John Arsenault, Jean Cocteau, and Sadao Hasegawa. Quilt by Patrick Merriman
The north wall of the living room houses works by Nir Arieli, Robbie Sweeny, Bill Jacobson, Rafael Soldi, Daniel Goldstein, Marsha Burns, Joe Ziolkowski, Paul Blanca, Bruce Cratsley, Paul Strand, and Pedro Slim, and behind the door, Stanley Stellar, and Jock Sturges
Meanwhile, in the bedroom, there is a brief departure from the nearly endless array of male physique on display throughout the rest of the home – an enormous c.1740 map of Paris and its environs, which Zuckerman acquired from a former donor to the Quaker charity he fundraised for early in his career.
Zuckerman says he serves as a ‘yenta’, (Yiddish for ‘busy body') or connector, fostering a community by linking artists including JD Raenbeau, Bill Hayes and Stanley Stellar to galleries, most notably Clamp Art. His move from collecting black-and-white photography to contemporary painting was, in fact, inspired by his discovery of Raenbeau, a Long Island art teacher with a painterly approach, whose vibrant Jean-Honoré Fragonard-inflected canvases depict his husband in the garden with a raw, sexually charged explicitness that is somehow both tender and matter of fact. When the LA opening of one of Raenbeau's shows needed two more pieces to complete the exhibit at the last minute, Zuckerman flew over with the paintings in his carry-on luggage.
The den houses work by David Hilliard, Amy Elkins, Jack Balas, Blake Little, Mel Odom, High Shurley, Anderson & Low, Anthony Gayton, Mikel Marton, Curtice Taylor, Deborah Lusker, Bill Travis, George Danielle, Troy Schooneman, Baron von Gloeden, and David LaChapelle. Other artists housed in the den include John Dugdale, Frederick Weber, Mel Roberts, Kurt Markus, AJ Stetson, Daniel Rampulla, and Nicholas Vance Zuckerman
Today, he is a licensed psychotherapist, who, by his account, charges half the going rate because he would rather see ‘artists and dancers than tech workers who can afford the difference'. The two roles – of collector and therapist – are not as separate as they might seem. The artists he collects tend to become people he has lunch with and whose break-ups he talks them through. ‘They're my boys,' he says with the affection and tenderness of someone who has watched a community flourish, experience extended loss, bury its dead and persevere. The flat reflects all of it. The longing, the loss and the continuation of beauty. This is what it means to collect within a history you have also lived through.
This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today