(Although organizers told the paper there were 3,000, 8,000, or as many as 20,000 people there, a police officer estimated “at least 1,000.”) Shirtless men walked hand in hand and kissed publicly. According to the New York Times, the line of participants extended 15 blocks from head to foot. On June 28, thousands of people converged in Greenwich Village and began to march. But the response surprised even the most die-hard activists. Around 150 marchers marched from Civic Center Plaza to Washington Square shouting slogans like “Gay power to gay people.” The same day, a small group of San Franciscans marched down Polk Street, then had a “gay-in” picnic that was broken up by equestrian police.ĮRCHO and other New York groups had spent months planning the Manhattan event with the help of organizers like Brenda Howard, a bisexual activist who had cut her organizing teeth during the anti-Vietnam movement of the late 1960s.
The first occurred not in New York but in Chicago on June 27, 1970. Gay Liberation is for the homosexual who stands up, and fights back.” The first gay liberation marchesĪround the country, groups began to plan their own commemorative marches. “Gay Liberation is for the homosexual who refuses to accept such a condition. “The homosexual who wants to live a life of self-fulfillment in our current society has all the cards stacked against them,” read one 1970 article about the upcoming march in the Gay Liberation Front News. Unlike the Annual Reminders, the march would have no dress code-and its participants would focus less on politeness than pride. In New York, the event would be called the Christopher Street Liberation Day March in honor of the Stonewall Inn’s Greenwich Village location. They resolved to hold a march in New York each year in June to commemorate the Stonewall uprising, and encouraged other groups around the country to gather on the same day. At an ERCHO conference in late 1969, he proposed that the Philadelphia demonstrations morph into something new to “be more relevant, reach a greater number of people, and encompass the ideas and ideals of the larger struggle in which we are engaged-that of our fundamental human rights.”ĮRCHO agreed. Here's what it is.)Ĭraig Rodwell, an activist who had helped organize the Annual Reminders, was one of the participants in the Stonewall riots. ( Early LGBTQ activists used a boisterous protest tactic called zapping. Fed-up activists fueled their frustration into organization, sparking new groups, and planning larger-scale demonstrations. Suddenly, the gay liberation movement that had been percolating boiled over.
WASHINGTON GAY PRIDE T SHIRTS CODE
Fearing violence, organizers enacted a strict professional dress code and encouraged marching in an orderly picket line to put a non-threatening face forward.īut on June 28, 1969, the Stonewall uprising sent shock waves through heterosexual society, and galvanized LGBTQ people. The events, which they called the Annual Reminders, focused on obtaining basic citizenship rights and were subdued by design. In 1965, for example, members of the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations (ERCHO) began picketing each year on July 4 outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. ( How the Stonewall uprising ignited the modern LGBTQ rights movement.) Stonewall sparks a movementĭespite the rampant homophobia of the early 20th century, the LGBTQ community had made itself visible before. cities in 1970 were raucous celebrations of identity-and a provocative peek at the decades of activism to follow. Now known as the first Pride parades, the gay liberation marches that took place in New York and other U.S. In Stonewall’s wake, thousands of LGBTQ people took to the street to demand their civil rights. “Coming out” came with threats of violence and social ostracism.īut that changed in the aftermath of the 1969 Stonewall uprising-when a group of LGBTQ people rioted in response to a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City. For centuries, homosexuality had been stigmatized, criminalized, and persecuted. Their skepticism was for good reason: Until 1969, the thought of a large group of LGBTQ people celebrating their sexual orientation in public was unthinkable. “The idea … made them laugh wildly,” recalled D’Emilio during an oral history collected by OutHistory. When John D’Emilio heard a group of LGBTQ activists would be marching in the streets of New York in June 1970, he told his boyfriend and several of his gay friends.