Don’t Rain on Our Parade: A Review of Francisco Alvarado-Juárez’s Out of the Closets!

Christopher Street #6, 1976 © Francisco Alvarado-Juárez

BY EMMA CIESLIK May 11, 2025

The camera flicked around the marble walls of the gallery as more than twenty pairs of eyes stared back at me fiercely. Wearing vibrant floral hats, colorful dresses, and twirling a cigarette or boasting a parrot on their shoulder, the group smiled, laughed, and posed for the camera, looking on with an undeterred and sometimes unserious gaze. They have become some of my favorite views of the earliest Pride Marches, a community surviving despite New York City still enforcing “sodomy laws” against the LGBTQ+ community in the 1970s.

This past Thursday, I had the opportunity to preview Out of the Closets! Into the Streets!: New York City’s Pride March 1975-1976, an exhibition featuring 20 photographs taken by Francisco Alvarado-Juárez. Alvarado-Juárez photographed participants in New York City’s Christopher Street Liberation Day Marches--a precursor to modern Pride marches--in 1975 and 1976. In these photographs whose color contrasts sharply with the spare, marble walls of the Hispanic Museum and Library, queer and trans joy are on full display.

I sat down with Alvarado-Juárez, along with Manager of Digital Strategy and Marketing Brett Lazer and Senior Educator Ryan Pinchot, about why this exhibition is timely.

“It’s been three years in the making,” Alvarado-Juárez said, “so we did not know what was in store for us as a country, how things were going to go so bad with this current administration, so in many ways, the joy and celebration that you see in these photographs in an optimistic view for very dark times.”

Gay Liberation Parade, Christopher Street #2, 1975 © Francisco Alvarado-Juárez

Pinchot agreed, also adding that the collection highlights the role queer and trans people of color played in the fight for queer liberation--from Stonewall to the Christopher Street Liberation Day Marches - yet it is often LGBTQ+ people of color who are sidelined or ignored by the wider community even as they are the hardest hit by President Trump’s latest Executive Orders. “I think the racial and ethnic diversity,” Pinchot continued, “the presence of trans folxs and people of color so prominently in this series, highlights portions of the LGBTQ+ community as Francisco was alluding to that are specifically targeted in this moment.”

Pinchot explained that this exhibition--the second installment in the annual series Arte en el Alto Manhattan foregrounding artists from or living in the Upper Manhattan area--is part of a push within the Hispanic Society to “widen what we’re doing in our galleries,” he said, “who gets to speak in our galleries, what kind of subject matter is coming across.”

“When you look at these photographs,” Alvarado-Juárez said, “you realize that there are a lot of people of color there, particularly Hispanics, so clearly there was a sizable community of Hispanic gay individuals.” The photographs document, he continued, that “the Hispanic community had a very important role in opening up this experience to the main part of society,” in spearheading LGBTQ+ liberation and visibility during a time of decline in New York City.

Although trailblazer Sylvia Rivera—I previously wrote about MCCNY’s tribute held this past year—is not pictured in the photographs, her legacy and that of other queer and trans Latine pioneers resonates in these photographs--legacies like that of Juan Rivera, a gay Latino man who brought life and joy to New York drag bars in the 1970s and the Salsa Soul Sisters, a collective of Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous lesbians and queer women who advocated for their communities and kept each other safe in New York City from 1974 onwards. From their Gayzette newsletter to beach retreats and mental health resources, they fought the reduction of the LGBTQ+ community to white, cis gay men.

The Salsa Soul Sisters held dances and parties that brought people together. In a similar way, Alvarado-Juárez said, “the parades were really meant to emphasize the strength of the community and the bonds between the people and the parade, how much they really enjoyed each other.”

Gay Liberation Parade, Avenue of the Americas #2, 1975 © Francisco Alvarado-Juárez

At the Beginning of the Parade, 1976 © Francisco Alvarado-Juárez

In the following decade, New York City would be hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, at the same time as a new cohort of activists leveraged the community for survival. Lorena Borjas, mother of the trans community in Queens, immigrated from Mexico to the United States in 1981, where she hoped to live more freely as a woman. When she first arrived, Borjas shared an apartment with 20 other trans woman who survived through sex work, and Borjas fast became an advocate protecting trans people against human trafficking and abuse.

She walked the streets of New York, likely taking a similar path to Alvarado-Juárez, seeking out people who needed help, providing food, HIV testing and hormone therapy--even opening up her home as an HIV testing clinic and providing resources to receive gender affirming care. She went onto establish the Lorena Borjas Community Fund in 2008, providing bail to LGBTQ+ individuals and in 2015, became vice-president of Colectivo Intercultural TRNASgrediendo--eventually becoming the Executive Director. Sadly, Borjas passed away in 2020 from COVID-19 but her legacy lives on in the lives she touched.

Christopher Street #2, 1976 © Francisco Alvarado-Juárez

While her face and story, as well as that of Juan Rivera and the Salsa Soul Sister live on, the people captured in Alvarado-Juárez’s photography are currently unidentified. “It’s a big question now because it would be nice for us as an institution to locate some of the people and celebrate them,” Alvarado-Juárez said.

Alvarado-Juárez knows little about who each person is in the photographs. Born in Honduras, he immigrated to the United States and attended Stonybrook University, on Long Island, graduating with degrees in history and Latin American history. He thought he would be a scholar but came back to New York City after deciding that he wasn’t going to go for his master’s. He first started editing a literary magazine but discovered street photography when a friend lent him a camera. He lived near the route of the parade and stumbled on the march in 1975, taking spontaneous photographs of parade members celebrating six years after Stonewall.

“I joined them out of interest for the way that I felt about their energy and their joy of life,” Alvarado-Juárez said, “so I have to say that it was kind of a surprise at the beginning, then I got into it.” Each photo reveals “a very warm, friendly relationship,” Alvarado-Juárez continued, “which also leads people to question what is the relationship between me and all these folks that were photographed. It was just a casual, very intense friendship.”

He joined the parade intentionally the following year but admits that all of the photos--except for one--were not posed. Soon after the second march, he moved to Washington, DC, and although not closely involved in the DC LGBTQ+ community--whose history is about to explored in the Rainbow History Project’s upcoming exhibition Pickets, Protests, and Parades: The History of Gay Pride in Washington, he did print out and attach these photos to fences around the Capital. The photos largely lived hidden in his studio after that point before the Hispanic Society director Guillaume Kientz visited Alvarado-Juárez’s studio three years ago. There, he spotted the photos in the corner believing that it would not be of interest.

Kientz was eager to share the photographs with the world--putting the original photographs on display until August 31st. Eight of the photographs were also reproduced as much larger versions that are currently on display in outside kiosks. They will remain there for a year, continuing the celebration and standing in defiance of ongoing anti-trans and queer legislation long after the original photographs leave the Museum. As Brett Lazer, Manager of Digital Strategy and Marketing at the Hispanic Society, said, the exhibition represents the Society’s deep commitment to foregrounding diverse Latine voices.

And with every trip, attendees help to identify key members of the community, maybe they see themselves pictured in the vivid Kodachrome images or maybe they see a friend or loved ones who has left but whose legacy lives on through their community. Either way, it’s a joyous collection that conveys the strength and survival of a community that has refused to concede ground to far-right political forces, that has refused to look away in times of joy and in times of struggle.

Out of the Closet! Into the Streets!: New York City’s Pride March 1975-1976 will be on display at the Hispanic Society until August 31, 2025.