“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. Dudley made the photos in this collection during pride parades between 19.
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