Before there was Pride, there was Christopher Street. The West Village thoroughfare lent its name to the Liberation Day Marches, which grew out of another turning point in queer history: the 1969 Stonewall uprising.
“Out of the Closets! Into the Streets!,” a new exhibition at New York’s Hispanic Society Museum & Library, brings the spirit of those early parades into focus through the lens of Francisco Alvarado-Juárez, a Honduran-born artist who documented the marches in 1975 and 1976.
Shooting on richly saturated Kodachrome, Alvarado-Juárez captured a perfect storm of protest and pageantry: sequins and feather boas commingling with hand-drawn political slogans and ephemera. The resulting images—featuring activists, lovers, and loners—distill a heady mixture of glamour and indignation.
The show, which opens May 8, offers a timely reminder that LGBTQIA+ history made in New York had a domino effect around the world. Figures like Sylvia Rivera, a founding member of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, whom Alvarado-Juárez lensed in the series, paved the way for generations to follow, their activism extending far beyond Christopher Street’s eight-block expanse.
Today, most major cities have their own Pride march, yet the photographs on view at the Hispanic Society still act as urgent reminders of just how easily progress is eclipsed and justice forsaken. Yet 50 years later, the community represented in these images is as indelible as the message they leave us with, which might best be summarized by a note provided by the Liberation Day Committee in 1970: “We are Gay and proud. No one can convince us otherwise."
