Celebrating Pride 2025
In honor of Pride Month, we revisit images from the archive celebrating LGBTQ+ communities around the world, 56 years after Stonewall
On June 28, 1969, Greenwich Village in New York City held its own in an uprising against one of the many police raids at the Stonewall Inn. Gay activists and their allies banded together in a monumental defiance that helped secure rights for the LGBTQ+ community in the years to come.
56 years on, repressive laws and social mores that restrict LGBTQ+ liberties persist. Today, homosexuality is still criminalized in 65 countries around the world. The current U.S. administration has withdrawn orders supporting health advancements for LGBTQ+ youth. Eliminating the federal recognition of transgender people, it also denies federal funding from programs that promote “gender ideology.” Yet, as the Magnum archive shows, non-violent opposition always breeds new forms. An embrace on a New York street corner when homosexuality was illegal. Displays of devotion and tenderness in Lebanon. Celebrations of queer and trans people across borders. The body unbound.
There is an explicit erotic tension in Herbert List’s images of sun-soaked bathers, taken in the 1930s-50s. An openly gay photographer, his masterful air of suspense lies in what doesn’t happen, despite his subjects’ sensual proximity and latent desire. “Photography is the art of leaving out,” List said, “[…] Less is almost invariably more.” His chiseled compositions of young Olympian figures often slip into surrealism, allowing him to get closer to a forbidden reality, and, in his earlier photographs, a creative evasion from the rise of Nazi power. While these images are now well-recognized, they weren’t published until over a decade after List’s death, in Junge Männer (1988).
Ernest Cole fled apartheid in South Africa in 1966 and arrived in New York City. He turned his lens towards the Black experience in America, documenting the gay presence he would have never witnessed publicly in his home country. New York, however, was not a progressive paragon. It wasn’t until 1980, as a result of the New York v. Onofre case, that homosexuality was decriminalized, and even then, only in “private, discreet” circumstances.
Cole also witnessed the first Pride parade in June 1970 that marched from New York’s Greenwich Village to Central Park, commemorating the one-year anniversary of Stonewall. His image shows members of the New York Mattachine Society, a secret organization founded by Harry Hay in Los Angeles in 1950. Adopting elements from the structure of the Communist Party, the Society was an instrumental force in LGBTQ+ activism and gained a following across the country.
Since then, Pride events have burgeoned in full force. Martin Parr’s more recent images capture Pride demonstrations in both the U.S. and the U.K., showing the evolution and steadfast power of the placard.
Constantine Manos, a decades-long Magnum member who sadly passed away in January this year, was one of the first openly gay Magnum photographers. He captured a number of landmark LGBTQ+ events: the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in 1993; the 25th Anniversary of Stonewall in 1994; a Pride event in Providence, Massachusetts in 1998; and in 2004, the first legal same-sex marriages in the U.S, also in Provincetown, where Manos settled with his partner in 2008.
In 1972, Harvey Milk opened Castro Camera, a camera shop in the Castro District of San Francisco. As his popularity as a gay rights activist grew, he organized the Castro Street Fair to promote local gay-owned businesses and recognize the flourishing LGBTQ+ community. In 1978, he joined the city’s Board of Supervisors, becoming one of the first openly gay elected officials in America. That same year, Milk was assassinated alongside San Francisco mayor George Moscone by a fellow member of the Board of Supervisors. Two years after Milk was killed, Paul Fusco documented the defiant revelry in Milk’s honor at the Fair, which still lives on today.
One of Fusco’s most notable series is of the residents at the Ambassador Hotel. He photographed AIDS patients and their carers supporting one another as they grappled with the health crisis and fought for their lives.
Myriam Boulos’s debut photobook What’s Ours explores how the queer body occupies space with its many modes of tenderness. These heightened moments of somatic freedom reverberate alongside social upheaval, revolution, and the Beirut port explosion in Lebanon, where “any sexual intercourse contrary to the order of nature” is currently condemned.
In this retrospective, pride is continuously reclaimed, from LGBTQ+ marches to the most intimate gestures, marking each era of our evolving social landscape. While Herbert List’s groundbreaking homoerotic photographs suggest “the forced cultural invisibility of same-sex couples and homosexual life,” as Peer-Olaf Richter of the Herbert List Estate notes, today, photography has the power to render queer life all the more visible.
Discover a collection of LGBTQ+ articles and photo series here.
