As the first director of the foundation, Dudley took it upon himself to amass an archive of photography, letters, event posters, magazines and various other personal effects from artists and community members, all of which lends a personal context to the artworks in the collection. They continued showcasing and archiving art made by the LGBT community, functioning as a gallery where artists could sell their work, before transitioning to a museum and foundation in 1987.
Partners Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman began to exhibit art by gay artists in their SoHo loft in 1969, the same year the Stonewall uprising took place. “There was a sense in those days of, ‘We’re just going to have fun and do silly, outrageous, non-binary, non-conformist things, and it was a time when everything was sort of amateur night.” “A lot of those people were kicking up their heels and having a genderf-ck good time.” Both Saslow and Dudley participated in so-called “genderf-ck drag,” which he distinguishes from “ classic drag” in that they kept their beards and body hair and were more concerned with breaking gender norms as a form of protest. “The guy in a dress with a beard, running in front of the task force banner, captures a lot of the atmosphere of the early gay liberation community, because so much of it came out of the hippie movement,” says Saslow. Johnson, shown at top, to revelers who conformed more to heteronormative standards. These changes are evident in Dudley’s images, whose subjects range from outspoken activists like Marsha P. “The community started to attract more mainstream folks who weren’t necessarily politically radical or countercultural - they just happened to be gay.” But as the number of out gay people grew, says Saslow, the parades transitioned from intimate gatherings of like-minded people to events attended by a broader array of participants. “After 10 years, the movement started to have some visibility, and it wasn’t automatically a kiss of death to be out,” he says. Saslow, who was also a friend of Dudley’s, marks this era as a shift in the gay liberation movement. “We were becoming acceptable enough that a gay person could have a significant political career, but we also became very aware of how much of a nerve that was touching for conservative people.” “It was, in a sense, the year we debuted on the larger public stage,” says Jim Saslow, a professor of art history at the City University of New York and an early gay activist. And in October 1979, the National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights took place with roughly 100,000 participants. These years saw Anita Bryant’s homophobic crusade through the “Save Our Children” campaign in 1977, the election and assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978, and the White Night riots the following summer after the lenient sentencing of Milk’s murderer, Dan White.
There is a certain electricity to these photos too, as they document a time when LGBT communities were bearing witness to significant cultural change. They present the parade not as a newsworthy spectacle but as a gathering of people making themselves visible at a time when the world at large was not interested in seeing them. As a result, the photographs feel warm and intimate. Unlike much of the publicly available photography taken at the first pride parade in 1970 and those that followed, these images were made not by a disinterested photojournalist but by someone deeply entrenched in the community. The circumstances his subjects faced in their daily lives, however, were profoundly different.Ĭourtesy of the Estate of George Dudley and the Leslie-Lohman Museumĭudley made the photos in this collection during pride parades between 19. His images of queer and trans people parading down the streets of Manhattan illustrate an ebullient and joyous atmosphere that feels not too dissimilar from scenes at pride parades today. George Dudley, a photographer and artist who also served as the first director of New York City’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, documented scenes from pride parades in New York City from the late 1970s through the early ‘90s. Pride has come a long way since its more radical origins, when marchers numbered in the thousands, corporations were far from getting the memo and the stakes in general felt higher.īut there is much to be gleaned from remembering how it once was. This week, New York City is hosting WorldPride in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, with an estimated 4 million visitors expected to participate. Amid the flurry of rainbow-laden corporate logos, sponsored events and news items about gay penguins, it is difficult to turn on a television or set foot in public during June without the reminder that it is Pride Month for LGBT and queer people.