Finding Belonging on the Sidelines of Pride

The annual conversations around Pride marches, both in New York City and across the country, often focus on who should — or shouldn’t — be included. In past years these debates centered on floats about kink or participation by uniformed police officers; this year has seen pushback in San Francisco by pro-Palestinian groups over the presence of corporations with ties to Israel and protests in Houston over sponsorship by Chevron.

While these are crucial debates, they often mean that, paradoxically, what gets lost is a discussion of belonging in a broader sense. Pride retains its importance precisely because it gives the L.G.B.T.Q. community an annual opportunity not only to march but to convene, celebrate and be affectionate in a society that, in many places, doesn’t encourage displays of queer communion.

A trove of photographs that elegantly capture Pride in all its inclusive intimacy, focusing not only on the marchers but on the crowds reveling from the sidelines, illuminates how powerful that element can be. Forty years ago, the photographer Bruce Cratsley left his apartment, walked his two dogs over to West 29th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and started a project that lasted over a decade and captured what belonging at Pride truly looks like. “From the beginning,” Mr. Cratsley wrote, “I was excited by the parade’s exotic, somewhat chaotic sexiness and joy. I was hooked.”

Many of Mr. Cratsley’s most stirring pictures are either quiet portraits of people at ease or close-up shots that illuminate the smallest moments of tenderness, in the crowd: a hand grazing a back, a warm embrace, a nipple pinch.