The annual conversations around Pride marches, both in New York City and across the country, often focus on who should — or shouldn’t — be included. In past years these debates centered on floats about kink or participation by uniformed police officers; this year has seen pushback in San Francisco by pro-Palestinian groups over the presence of corporations with ties to Israel and protests in Houston over sponsorship by Chevron.
While these are crucial debates, they often mean that, paradoxically, what gets lost is a discussion of belonging in a broader sense. Pride retains its importance precisely because it gives the L.G.B.T.Q. community an annual opportunity not only to march but to convene, celebrate and be affectionate in a society that, in many places, doesn’t encourage displays of queer communion.
A trove of photographs that elegantly capture Pride in all its inclusive intimacy, focusing not only on the marchers but on the crowds reveling from the sidelines, illuminates how powerful that element can be. Forty years ago, the photographer Bruce Cratsley left his apartment, walked his two dogs over to West 29th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and started a project that lasted over a decade and captured what belonging at Pride truly looks like. “From the beginning,” Mr. Cratsley wrote, “I was excited by the parade’s exotic, somewhat chaotic sexiness and joy. I was hooked.”
Many of Mr. Cratsley’s most stirring pictures are either quiet portraits of people at ease or close-up shots that illuminate the smallest moments of tenderness, in the crowd: a hand grazing a back, a warm embrace, a nipple pinch.
In one picture, a man’s arm wraps around his lover’s torso from behind as they gaze, one assumes, toward the parade. Because of the subjects’ anonymity and the graceful simplicity of their pose, this photograph offers something of an emblem of gay love.
While many photographers have documented New York City’s Pride march since its inception in 1970, Mr. Cratsley’s collection of black-and-white pictures offer an alternative and vital archive of the event. These images remind us of the beauty of coming together, of holding and being held by each other, in public space.
For Mr. Cratsley, these ordinary, subtle gestures of endearment, eroticism and care — often conceivable on a sunny public street only during Pride festivities — deserved to be documented as much as the procession itself, especially as homophobia and hysteria ran rampant in the mid-1980s during the AIDS crisis. It was an era of heartbreak, resiliency and political mobilization, and the rituals of gathering and being physically intimate took on a new, almost radical significance — as did the acts of witnessing and documenting one’s own community in peril.
In June 1991, less than a week before Pride, Mr. Cratsley’s partner, David Waine, who had relished accompanying him to the last few marches, died at age 33 from AIDS-related causes. Days later, Mr. Cratsley, still in mourning but compelled by a sense of duty, showed up at the march to take photos, just as he had for years. “It was difficult to get started, but, as always, the spirit of the parade caught me,” he wrote. “I know there was a new energy from the emotions I was feeling regarding loss, and the delight of being alive myself.”
By the mid-90s, Mr. Cratsley, who had been diagnosed with H.I.V. in 1987, became too sick to continue his photography and the project came to an end. He died in 1998 at age 53.
Whether marching or mourning, partying or protesting, the millions of people who are expected to attend a Pride march this weekend will typify the “spirit of the parade,” as described by Mr. Cratsley. His photographs capture how this spirit both informs and transcends the march, manifesting most exquisitely in the moments of intimate togetherness that otherwise might go unseen.
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