Gay Day: The Golden Age of the Christopher Street Parade, 1974-1983
Photographs by Hank O’Neal; captions by Allen Ginsberg;
preface by William S. Burroughs; essay by Neil Miller
Abrams Image. 160 pages, $24.95
IN THE OLD DAYS of television, the late comedian Steve Allen had a regular routine on his show in which he would set up a camera at the corner of Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles and make funny comments about the people who passed by. Allen Ginsberg’s captions for Gay Day, a coffee table book of black-and-white photographs of the Gay Pride Day Parade in New York City, are reminiscent of that. “Allen [Ginsberg] would look at a photograph,” writes Hank O’Neal in his introduction for the book, whose title was coined by Ginsberg, “and as he thought about the image and responded to it, would simply write down the first thing that came to his mind.”
