As New York City readies to host WorldPride this year, the New York Public Library is commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots with the February 14 launch of an expansive new exhibition Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50.
Running through July 14, the exhibition is anchored through the photographs of pioneering photojournalists Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies, who documented pivotal moments from the LGBTQ movement throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
NYPL is also exhibiting items from its archival holdings in LGBTQ history, including posters, flyers, and original documents from its archives, also available online as part of the NYPL’s vast digital collection.
Panels and screenings include Stonewall 50 - 16mm Film Screening: Out at Work (February 15); The Drag March & Your Other Tales of Glamour and Resistance: A Storytelling Workshop (March 14); Start a Revolution Film Series: Before Stonewall (1985) (June 8); and more.
Lahusen and Davies’ work is also the subject of an accompanying book Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet Into the Stonewall Era, which will be published March 5. Jason Baumann coordinates the New York Public Library’s LGBT Initiative, and provides historical context for the 116 color photographs published in the book.
The exhibit is augmented with core reading book lists covering LGBTQ history and activism, in addition to essential LGBTQ memoirs. NYPL is also partnering with Penguin Classics to produce The Stonewall Reader, an anthology of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots.
Visit NYPL.org/Stonewall50.
