My Rollei & I Return to NYC Pride

Although I regularly participated in Gay Pride Parades from 1990 until 2007, my husband and I got out of the habit of marching in later years as parenthood claimed more and more of our energy. The one recent time we did attend with our daughter, in 2018, we were struck not only by the corporate character of many of the floats—envisioned, one imagines, by the same branding teams tasked with making Super Bowl ads—but also by the truncated parade route. The March now begins well south of the Columbus Circle step-off that was common back in the day, and that all but guaranteed a confrontation with a troop of determined Haters assembled every year on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. While I don’t miss those pseudo-religious troglodytes—at the height of the AIDS pandemic, they brandished a coffin festooned with crosses and the words “Here Lies a Queer Who Marched Last Year”—there was an underlying urgency to the marches of that earlier time that seemed all but absent in the era of legalized gay marriage and increasing trans rights.

As the political pendulum has swung back violently in so many places over the past decade, it felt good and right to be back in the West Village in 2026, even if only in the late afternoon, as the parade was dispersing and the after-party shifted into gear. What struck me most this year, alongside the astonishing diversity on the streets and waterfront, was the elation on the faces of the participants, including my own. It’s a feeling I remember well. It comes not only from participating in a raucous street party on a gorgeous June Sunday—that might be true of any summer festival—but from the wild conviction that can take hold on a day when 500,000 or more LGBTQ+ people descend on a scant square mile of city. In such a crowd it’s possible to believe that all the world is gay: that bigotry and violence have vanished like so much multicolored confetti.

As I look over the joyful portraits from this year’s March, something of that fizzy feeling lingers, even as I’m aware that this annual swell of elation—like every rainbow—remains fleeting.

Thanks for having a look.

Technical Note: all photos made with my Rolleiflex 2.8F Planar on Kodak Tri-X 400, developed in Kodak HC-110 (Dilution H), and printed on Ilford FBMG Classic or Ilford Multigrade RC paper. Prints digitized with my iPhone.

FEATURED IMAGE: Fierce, 2026

Feel free to visit my website www.leica1933.com to see more of my work.

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