Living with Men, Floor to Ceiling

Les Demi Dieux in Wallpaper* Magazine

We stayed with our friend, fellow collector, and photography client Ron Zuckerman when we visited San Francisco last summer. He put us up in his guestroom, where we felt very much at home, primarily because most of the four or five dozen framed photographs that covered the walls had come from us, especially the two dozen or more images by Danny Fitzgerald, the 1960s photographer behind “Les Demi Dieux,” whose photography estate we own and manage at BigKugels Photographic. Many of these vintage prints are one-of-a-kind or at least are the only ones known to be in existence, so sleeping next to them again had the impact of a slumber party with old friends after decades apart.

Ron’s apartment is a time capsule, but not simply because so many of the images and objects covering every available space in every available room are from the last two centuries. The whole aesthetic is also of a time before digital galleries and non-binary gender theory, when many gay men, who were art-lovers and archivist by nature, as well as celebrants of the male figure and homoerotica, built salon-style nests to surround themselves with the objects they loved. Like many of the gay collectors we have come to know over a lifetime, Ron himself is the affable docent tending his library and museum collection with expert knowledge and personal affection. And we could happily get lost in its halls and cubbies for hours.

Ron’s entire home and collection were recently featured, in detail, in the August 2026 issue of Wallpaper* magazine. The story, “NAKED AMBITION: A San Francisco-based psychotherapist’s art collection presents a consequential chronicle of queer life across two centuries,” by Alfredo Mineo, is accompanied by dizzying images of Ron’s narrow apartment captured perfectly by photographer Annie Schlechter. The author notes well, “Much of the work in Ron Zuckerman’s San Francisco flat was illegal in midcentury America, so was created, printed and distributed privately, only existing to this day thanks to a host of tenacious and courageous collectors.”

If you didn’t get a chance to pick up the print edition, you can peruse the article and collection online.

Images by Annie Schlechter: Above, Ron’s guest room is lined with works by photographer Danny Fitzgerald (Les Demi Dieux), purchased by Zuckerman over the years from BigKugels Photographics. On the bed is a quilt by Patrick Merriman, while alongside the cabinet is a work by Russian emigré Slava Mogutin.
Below, on the staircase are 20th-century works by Wilhelm von Gloeden and his cousin Guglielmo von Plüschow, Edwin 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.