LGBTQ+ Pride Through The Decades

Our Historic Image Archive includes thousands of photos documenting the people and architecture of the Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo, as well as New York City, from the late 18th to the early 21st century. In honor of Pride, today we explore some of our LGBTQ+ digital photo archives.

In 2021, longtime Greenwich Village resident Robert Fisch donated his collection of photographs from the 1980s through today, documenting the Greenwich Village of his youth in the 1980s, landmarks and familiar sights of the neighborhood and city in the decades since then.

His photography meshed with his coming of age in the LGBT community; he documented his attendance at meetings of “Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York” at the Gay And Lesbian Community Center on West 13th Street. In addition, he took many photos of the annual NYC Gay Pride Parade.

Jillian Jonas was the house photographer at the legendary boy bar on St. Mark’s Place in the mid-1990’s, where she captured thousands of images of drag performers who mixed gender-bending and illusion with downtown in-your-face attitude. Her first collection and second collection include images not only from boy bar, but the Gay Pride Festival, the Pyramid Club, Wigstock, and various other downtown nightlife, LGBTQ+ events, and performance venues of the early-to-mid 1990s.

Her pictures capture a golden age of LGBTQ+ nightlife and performance, as well as an edgy slice of life when drag and blurred boundaries of gender were just beginning to make inroads into the broader public consciousness, largely through this vibrant local scene. 

Click here to see the Robert Fisch collection. Click here to see Jillian Jonas collection #1 and here for #2. Click here to read more about the history of Pride. Do you have historic Pride photos to share? Please contact us!