A 69-year-old nursing assistant in the Northeast Kingdom reconnected with a former lover on Facebook resulting in an exhibition of rare behind-the-scenes images of the gay rights movement at a New York City museum.

Donna Gottschalk, the photographer, had many lives before settling on a small farm in Victory. But she kept her cache of photographs from the late 1960s when as an art student she began to capture life on the margins of society.

It was a time when being gay was considered criminal and dangerous, even in major cities like New York.

Some of Gottschalk’s early subjects in the exhibition, “Brave, Beautiful Outlaws" at the Leslie-Lohman Museum for Gay and Lesbian Art, were her friends from gay bars. She said it was the only place a lesbian, like herself, could feel somewhat at home before she got involved in the gay liberation movement.

Being gay was a terrifying future.

“It was terrifying future if you were going to be gay,” Gottschalk said describing the dangers the LGBTQ community navigated 40 years ago if they were "out."

"You could lose your job, if you managed to get a lousy job,” Gottschalk said. If you were openly gay or looked gay, you couldn't hope to have a legitimate career.

Laws against the gay community were beginning to be relaxed but society's attitudes and police procedure were slow to change.

In June 1969, police raided Stonewall Inn, an unlicensed gay bar, but the patrons -- lesbians, transgender people and gay men -- fought back. Several nights of riots ensued.

It was the birth of the gay liberation movement, also known as the gay rights movement.

Gay Liberation Front

When Gottschalk discovered the Gay Liberation Front, it was a revelation.

“Previous to that I had to shut up,” Gottschalk said. “All of a sudden it was OK to be pissed off. We were fighting back.”

The photographs she took of counter-culture rebels are a contrast to the outward defiance of the political clashes. Her portraits are relaxed, intimate.

Gottschalk said that to keep her friends from getting nervous in front of the camera, she told them she was just trying out new equipment, “working something out with the lens."

“We were mostly having a good time,” Gottschalk said.

Documenting the uncelebrated

Gottschalk's formal training in the arts at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York made her hesitate to identify herself as a photographer.

She accepted her role as a photojournalist, because she agreed that she served to document the lives of the "uncelebrated ... interesting people who hadn't managed to get themselves killed.”

“I know every bit of her life, from the day I met her till she died,” Gottschalk said of her friend Marlene whose "magnificent physique" appears in photographs from 1969 to 1993 in the exhibit.

“The city of San Diego cremated her, but in my photographs she is immortalized for all time,” Gottschalk said. Marlene lived out of a van in California until her death from cancer.

Marlene was one of many friends and relatives Gottschalk witnessed experience violence, poverty, mental illness, drug addiction and death.

These were the vulnerable who “didn’t or couldn’t protect themselves,” according to Gottschalk.

She documented the bruised and bloody face of her sister, Myla Gottschalk, at 18, in about 1977 when she was beaten for being gay outside of a 3rd Avenue bar in New York City. Myla was then known as Alfie, as indicated in Gottschalk's photograph titles.

When Myla didn't run away from a car full of antagonists, she ended up in Bellevue Hospital where Gottschalk retrieved her, and not for the last time.

Far from the madding crowd

Gottschalk has lived for 18 quiet years in a “funky old place,” where she now takes care of her former camera-technician business partner and some aging animals with a young couple she says helps out on the farm.

“I was trying to leave New York from the moment I was born,” said Gottschalk, who was raised in a small apartment in Manhattan's East Village, as one of five siblings.

Her farm in Victory is about 15 miles from the nearest rural town and far away from what Gottschalk called the "stink and noise" of New York City.

She returned to the city for a rare visit to see her exhibit and catch up with friends, including Joan Biren, the old flame who brought Gottschalk's work into public view.

“She said someone should see these, and now they are," said Gottschalk.

“Brave, Beautiful Outlaws," will be on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum for Gay and Lesbian Art in Manhattan until March 17, 2019.

Contact Nicole Higgins DeSmet ndesmet@freepressmedia.com or 802-660-1845. Follow her on Twitter @NicoleHDeSmet.