Q U E E R

“These images are less about documenting an event and more about conjuring a mirror: a reflection of the tenderness, rebellion, and wonder that make queerness a world of its own.“

The summer of 2019 marked fifty years since the pivotal events at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, when New York’s queer community finally said no more to the discrimination and harassment it had endured for generations. Stonewall wasn’t the first queer uprising in history, but it became one of the most enduring. What began as a riot became a spark—the ignition of what we now know as Pride, and the modern LGBTQIA+ equality movement.

That same summer, WorldPride—the global demonstration for queer rights—was held in the United States for the first time. The convergence of these two anniversaries created the largest queer gathering in history.

I knew I needed to document it. My inspiration came from Tom Bianchi’s Fire Island Pines series, which captured the intimacy, joy, and rawness of queer life in the 1970s and early ’80s. His use of Polaroid gave those images both immediacy and grit, lending them a timeless, tactile quality. I’ve long been drawn to Polaroid as a medium, though I’ve rarely used it for documentary or socio-political work. For this project, it felt not only appropriate but necessary: a medium that could speak to history while holding the urgency of the present.

Though Bianchi’s images came a few years after Stonewall (1975–1983), channeling his aesthetic felt like a way to both honor the lineage of queer refuge and highlight our contemporary moment. Just as Fire Island offered queer people a sanctuary apart from the mainstream, so too does Pride week create a temporary, subversive world of our own.

The imperfect nature of Polaroid—the muted palette, the soft edges, the deliberate pace—stood in stark contrast to the endless streams of iPhone images around me. Each frame required care and attention, demanding intimacy. This slowness invited me to look closer, to see not only the spectacle of WorldPride but the small, human truths within it: gestures, glances, touches, laughter.

This body of work aligns past and present through juxtaposition—historical text alongside contemporary, personal photographs. It is not a bird’s-eye view but an intimate, ground-level portrait of a community in motion, honoring the riot that was, the liberation we still chase, and the everyday tenderness that binds us together.

<3 liam