Saul and Sandy wanted to capture the celebration, the love, and the rage, and in so doing, to capture the heart of a movement. Unlike other photographers, he didn’t “just see people jumping around and dancing,” he says. “It was this kind of test I was giving myself: Can we document this movement that is also a parade?” Saul remembers.
The pair started shooting the parades in 1984 because they believed they were witnessing history. So Saul and Sandy came to our pride brunch with cameras in hand. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and anger at the world’s indifference to the disease was growing, generating radical groups like ACT Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). In retrospect, it seems inevitable that I would bring along Saul Bromberger, a photographer at the East Bay newspaper where I was a reporter, and his then girlfriend and now wife, Sandra Hoover.Īt the time, Saul and Sandy were already four years into a project that would last until 1990: documenting the San Francisco gay pride parade. I can’t remember exactly how we all ended up going to Gay Pride brunch together at my friend Marta’s house that Sunday morning, in June of 1988.
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