It started in a
basement in Aurora.
For decades, tucked beneath a house in Aurora, two men quietly built one of Denver's most significant collections of gay art and ephemera. Paintings, photographs, magazines, films, T-shirts — the kind of objects that belong in a museum. The kind that rarely make it there.
They collected work spanning the 1960s through the 1990s, decades that gave Denver's queer community some of its most vital and most painful years. Much of the earliest work was created at a time when making it — let alone displaying it — carried real risk. Artists working in the 60s and 70s made this work anyway, in defiance of a culture that would rather they didn't exist at all.
Denver's gay history wasn't preserved by institutions. The official record didn't make space for it — so the community made its own.
For most of the 20th century, queer life in Denver existed in the gaps — in basement bars, in back rooms, in private homes. Jeff and Doug's collection is part of that tradition: a decades-long act of quiet preservation by two men who understood that these objects mattered, even when nobody else said so.
The collection spans the birth of gay liberation, the height of the clone era, the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, and the first stirrings of the world we live in now. It is joyful and explicit and tender and political. It is exactly the kind of work that mainstream culture spent those decades trying to ignore.
When Jeff and Doug decided the collection should be seen, Afterglow Backrooms was there to make it happen. We acquired the collection because we believed what they believed: that this work deserves an audience. That Denver's queer community deserves to see itself reflected in a gallery. That history kept in a basement is still history — it just needs a door.
Afterglow Backrooms is Denver's gay art gallery, housed at Bit Factory on Santa Fe Drive. Jeff and Doug's Basement is our opening exhibition. It won't be the last.
Keep the basement alive
Exhibitions like this one don't happen without support — and our ambitions don't stop in Denver. Our goal is to take this collection on the road, bringing Denver's gay history to cities across the country. If that sounds like something worth funding, donate here.