photography, stonewall, LGBTQ+, queer, gay liberation, gay pride 

In June 1969, the Stonewall uprising occurred in Greenwich Village - an event that marked a coming out of New York's gay community. It was a refusal to accept underground, criminal status that was as important, in its way, as the Montgomery bus boycott was to the civil rights movement. As a direct outcome of Stonewall, gay pride marches were held in 1970 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, and eight decades Dash long push for the rights of LGBTQ people began.

The ultimate chronicler of New York's downtown scene, and therefore of a signal moment in gay culture, was Fred W. McDarrah, the first staff photographer and first picture editor of the legendary Village Voice. On the streets in the aftermath of Stonewall, at the first marches, and among the activists and artists who defined the movement through the 1990s, McDarrah's camera engaged with the period's chaos, anger, and intense optimism. As the critic Hilton Alles puts it in his forward, Madara deserves a lasting place in New York's alternative history not only for his documentation of a world in transformation but for his work as "An agent of change himself."