Sale 2514 - The Pride Sale, June 20, 2019

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE CATALOGUE By Eric Marcus Thirty years ago I was commissioned to write an oral history book about my people. Growing up as a gay Jewish kid in far eastern Queens, New York, in the 1960s and 70s, I didn’t know I had a people, let alone a history. I knew about the Jewish part, but the gay part was a complete unknown. By the time I started researching my book, which I came to call Making Gay History , I knew a bit about the struggles LGBTQ+ people had faced and the fight for equal rights, mostly from what I’d read in the press and experienced on my own, but the gaps were many. Soon, however, I began to record intimate conversations with LGBTQ+ activists and champions of the past. Hearing firsthand about our rich, compelling, sometimes infuriating, at other times joyous history was a process of wide-eyed, breathtaking discovery. Sharing those stories—first in my book and more recently in a podcast of the same name that draws on the original decades-old recordings—was and remains a privilege. I recently had that experience of breathless discovery all over again as I sat with Nicholas Lowry and his colleagues at a large conference table behind the scenes at Swann Auction Galleries. I knew they’d planned to share with me a sampling of the objects they’d gathered for a first-of-its-kind auction of photos, art, and ephemera related in some way to my people and our history. But I hadn’t anticipated that I was about to become a time traveler as each object catapulted me from a back room on East 25th Street in Manhattan to another place and time—to Harvey Milk’s office in San Francisco’s City Hall, to Candy Darling’s closet, and into Oscar Wilde’s hands. I think of myself as a story collector. I generally don’t collect things. But with each reveal, with each piece of history I held, I found myself wondering whether it would fit in my backpack (not to mention my budget). Maybe the portfolio of a hundred photographs of pride parades, each annotated by Allen Ginsberg—including photographs of iconic trans activist Marsha P. Johnson. Definitely Candy Darling’s