War & Peace Quote by Herb Ritts

Ritts is pushing back on the lazy taxonomy that turns queer identity into someone’s headline and everything else into footnotes. The line about “knowing people by first names” is deceptively plain: it rejects the voyeuristic habit of meeting a person through the keyhole of their sexuality, the way culture so often treats gayness as either confession or spectacle. A first name is intimacy without extraction. It’s also a refusal to let identity be reduced to a sexual act, which is exactly how stigma keeps its grip.

“Not being afraid. Fear is the enemy” lands like a photographer’s lighting note: fear is the shadow that distorts the image. In Ritts’s world - glossy fashion shoots, celebrity portraiture, and those iconic, sun-sculpted male nudes - the body is always being read, judged, and sold. His subtext is that fear doesn’t just police bedrooms; it polices representation. It determines who gets to be seen as ordinary, elegant, powerful, or simply human.

The closing claim, “I’ve always been comfortable with being gay,” isn’t bragging. It’s a positioning statement from an artist who worked at the high-glam center of a culture that still demanded discretion, especially in the AIDS era when queer visibility was simultaneously urgent and dangerous. Ritts frames comfort not as personal luck but as a tool: if you’re not afraid, you can look longer, portray people cleaner, and refuse the shame that the market - and the public - tries to slip into the frame.