Debates over the annual Pride parades in New York City and across the U.S. often focus on who should or shouldn’t be allowed in the parades. In past years, those debates have centered around sexual orientation floats and the presence of uniformed police officers. This year, pro-Palestinian groups in San Francisco rebelled over the presence of companies with ties to Israel, and protests in Houston over Chevron’s sponsorship.
These are incredibly important discussions, but paradoxically, they often get lost in discussions about belonging in a broader sense. Pride remains important because it gives the LGBTQ community a yearly opportunity not just to march, but to come together, celebrate, and show affection in a society that in many places does not encourage same-sex interactions.
A treasure trove of photographs that gracefully capture the all-encompassing intimacy of Pride. Focusing not only on those marching, but also on the crowds enjoying themselves on the sidelines, it reveals just how powerful its elements can be. Forty years ago, photographer Bruce Cratzley left his apartment and walked with his two dogs to West 29th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, beginning a project that lasted more than a decade to document what belonging at Pride really feels like. “From the beginning, I was excited by the exotic, somewhat chaotic sexiness and fun of the parade. I was hooked,” Cratzley writes.
Many of Cratzley’s most moving photographs are quiet portraits of relaxed people or close-up shots of tiny moments of tenderness in the middle of a crowd — a hand on a back, a warm embrace, a pinched nipple.
In one photograph, a man appears to be embracing his girlfriend’s torso from behind as they gaze out towards the parade. The anonymity of the subject and the graceful simplicity of the pose make the image something of a homosexual symbol.
New York City’s Pride March, which began in 1970, has been documented by many photographers, but Cratzley’s collection of black-and-white photos offers another valuable archive of the event. These images remind us of the beauty of people coming together in public to embrace and hold one another.
For Cratzley, these everyday, casual gestures of affection, eroticism, and care—the kind barely thought of on sunlit public streets except during Pride festivals—were just as worthy of being documented as the marches themselves. Particularly during the AIDS crisis of the mid-1980s, when homophobia and hysteria were rampant, it was a time of heartbreak, resilience, and political mobilization, when the rituals of coming together and being physically intimate took on new, almost radical, meanings, as did the act of witnessing and documenting one’s community in crisis.
In June 1991, less than a week before Pride, Mr. Cratzley’s partner, David Wayne, who had happily accompanied him on the final few marches, died at age 33 from AIDS-related causes. A few days later, Mr. Cratzley was still grieving, but driven by a sense of duty, he showed up to the march and took photographs, as he had done for years. “It was hard to get started, but, as always, I got caught up in the spirit of the parade,” he wrote. “I found a new energy born from my feelings about the loss and my own joy of being alive.”
Cratzley was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, and by the mid-’90s his health had deteriorated to the point where he was no longer able to continue photographing, and the project came to an end. He died in 1998, aged 53.
Whether they’re marching, mourning, partying or protesting, the millions of people expected to take part in Pride marches this weekend will embody what Cratzley calls “the spirit of the parade.” Cratzley’s photographs capture how this spirit both inspires and transcends the marches, and is most beautifully expressed in moments of intimate togetherness that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Jackson Davidow is an art historian and curatorial researcher at the Harvard Art Museums. Bruce Kratzley was a New York City photographer.
Photo from the David Bruce Cratzley Foundation via Gallery Cayafas and the Harvard Art Museums.
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