Photographer, artist, and professional skateboarder Ed Templeton has made a career out of capturing young people on the fringe, hanging out, hooking up, and chilling out. In 2011, he released Teenage Kissers, a companion to the groundbreaking Teenage Smokers (2000), images from nearly 16 years of kids passionately embracing at the skate parks, beaches, boardwalks, and suburban margins of Southern California, as teenagers are wont to do.
Now Templeton brings the exuberant human spirit of this project to Los Angeles Pride, where he documented revelers kissing on the streets of West Hollywood. His photos of parade-goers of all shapes, colors, ages and sizes form a technicolor collage of the many, many faces of love—whether you’re a shirtless cowboy, a pink-haired drag queen, guys in mesh shirts, guys with tattoos, or babes in pasties. On the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, the act of affection becomes a political demonstration, the passion of each pair of lovers burning like a Molotov cocktail. One couple kisses in front of signs held by protestors from the notorious Westboro Baptist Church that say things like, “Homo sex is sin.” As their lips lock in the glorious afternoon sun, they flip them the bird.
