Gottschalk describes Arbus’s work as “frank,” the same word she uses to talk about her own work. At Cooper Union, a teacher gave Gottschalk an assignment to go see a show at the Museum of Modern Art, where she wandered into a room full of Diane Arbus photographs and saw outsiders depicted respectfully in art for the first time.

It was in high school that she befriended other lesbians for the first time, many of whom had been kicked out by their families and were now spending their evenings in gay bars and sleeping on the streets. Gottschalk grew up working class on the Lower East Side-her mother was a beautician and her father a merchant marine-and trained at an arts high school and then at Cooper Union. The photographs instead depict women that we hardly ever get to see in a way we hardly ever get to see them: lesbians from the past, shot artfully and softly, living full lives. The show provides a record of New York City before Stonewall, when being out was dangerous and illegal, but it is far from a miserablist parade of atrocities or a cloying celebration. The images here are fine art, certainly, but also something like a photojournalism of the everyday, albeit of lives that were never allowed to be merely ordinary. The introductory image depicts an act of self-conscious courage and overt activism, but the majority of the images in the exhibition do something different: they depict politics as something lived every day, and family as something chosen and found. Gottschalk is responsible for the photographs that fill the room, but in this photograph, she is the subject, inviting you into her intimate world of working-class queerness with an enticing warning: you may find what you see and hear disturbing, and you may find it unbearably alluring. This iconic image, blown up to life size, greets you in the north gallery of the Leslie Lohman Museum in SoHo for the exhibition “Brave, Beautiful Outlaws: The Photographs of Donna Gottschalk,” on view until March 17. The placard in her hand says it better, and in bold, scrawling capital letters: “I am your worst fear. It’s 1970, and she’s at a protest in the Village wearing tight black jeans, assuming that sexy stance of toughness that is alluring across gender. She’s got something between a smirk and a frown on her lips.

A short-haired woman leans on her right leg, her chin tilted up.

Brave and beautiful cast