With NYC welcoming over 3 million global visitors to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and World Pride, we wanted to activate on-the-ground to champion queer culture in a meaningful and uniquely insta-grammy way.
Most people know something about the history of Stonewall, but New York's queer history predate that pivotal moment in the fight for LGBTQ+ civil rights. We asked ourselves, what could we do to celebrate lesser known queers histories that are as rich, textured, and date as far back as the city itself?
Working with the pre-eminent account @lgbt_history, #UntoldPride brought queer histories to the streets, in OOH installations across the city and surrounding boroughs. What's more, each unit is located in or near the location where the history took place.
Each wall featured a lesser know Pride history; A wall celebrating the Ubangi Club in Harlem, a queer center of the Harlem renaissance, Blues and Sally's bar, a safe haven for POC drag and trans performers and a centre of the 1980's ball scene, and the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the worlds largest collection of queer female histories.
By pairing these histories with portraits of over 50 local community members, we explored how these important people, places and organizations have impacted the next generation, and enabled them to make their own mark.
Along with many others, we had the honor of celebrating:
The Ubangi Club in Harlem, a queer center of the Harlem renaissance. While many know about this period of creative flowering of Black arts and culture, the importance of queer people to the moment is often under represented.
The Christopher St Piers. The queer community will always need space to connect & create and for decades queer New Yorkers—youth, people of color, found family on The Piers.
Blues and Sallys bar, located in the same space in the 70's and 80's. In 1982 raid at Blues, a midtown bar popular with queer people of color, starkly showed that police harassment of more marginalized LGBTQs didn't end at Stonewall. At famed nightclubs Sally's Hideaway & Sally's II, legendary drag & trans performers taught others to celebrate LGBTQ culture, creating family & history along the way.
The Lesbian Herstory Archives, an organization that has worked tirelessly to preserve queer female histories. The Lesbian Herstory Archives centers & celebrates lesbian history, without apology, documenting everything from literature to sexual behavior. We wanted to celebrate the incredible women that banded together to preserve document and celebrate their lives and those who have come before them.
While elegantly simple, the production of the units required weeks of licensing discussion for each of the images and personal histories featured. The team had the privilege of meeting with many photographers, featured persons and family members of those featured along the way, often face to face, to gather the images, learn more about each of their stories, and to make sure each and every person featured felt comfortable, and celebrated in a way they felt true to them.
The units drove dynamic engagement, with thousands of UGC posts to #UntoldPride featuring the installations, creating a digital archive of these histories that will preserve them forever.
By scanning #Nametag stickers on the activation, users could go to @lgbt_history to explore the organizations, people and places featured for them to explore on Instagram.
But most importantly, the units showed the LGTBQ+ community, that use our platform every day, that Instagram is a safe and supportive place to share, preserve and create queer histories that for so long have been under documented.
