Ryan McGinley Photographs New York Pride 2018
Ryan McGinley Photographs New York Pride 2018
New York City Pride took place on Sunday, in the spirit of queer celebration—and with a sense of looking to the future, as midterm elections finally loom two years after Donald Trump was elected to the presidency. Almost immediately after his inauguration in January 2017 (when Mike Pence, a conservative Christian who has expressed support for conversion therapy, was also sworn into office), mentions of many social issues, including a page dedicated to LGBTQIA rights, were removed from WhiteHouse.gov, which activists, who had at long last achieved marriage equality under Barack Obama, took as an omen of things to come. Less than a year later, Trump announced a ban on transgender Americans from serving in the military. Another setback was the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, a constitutional originalist like Antonin Scalia, and an avid supporter of religious liberty; just last month, Gorsuch helped the Court narrowly rule in favor of Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.
But things are, tentatively, looking up: A so-called rainbow wave of LGBTQIA candidates has surged in primary elections around the country, including trans activist and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland. In Texas, Sheriff Lupe Valdez could become both the first Latinx and the first openly gay governor; elsewhere in the state, Gina Ortiz Jones, if she wins a congressional seat, would achieve a whole host of milestones: the first lesbian, the first Iraq War veteran, and the only first-generation Filipina-American to represent Texas in the House. And in New York, almost 50 years after the Stonewall riots ushered in the gay rights movement, former Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon, an out lesbian, is running in New York, against the very establishment incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo, as an outsider challenger who has been unbowed by the Democratic leadership, including Hillary Clinton, endorsing her opponent.
Photographer Ryan McGinley, in his third year of shooting the event for Vogue, captured the joy and exuberance of the weekend’s festivities in Manhattan, including the Dyke March that started at Bryant Park on Saturday, followed by the Pride march on Sunday. New York City Pride might be one of the largest and most heavily sponsored gatherings of its kind in the world, but it’s also among the most diverse—the rainbow contains far more kinds of queer and gender nonconforming New Yorkers than the stripes depicted on the Pride flag.
