I'd like to start out by wishing everyone who's listening a very happy Pride. Today marks the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the 3-day clash between queer people and the police that took place in New York City in 1969. The Stonewall Riots were a flashpoint in the struggle for gay rights - a spark which led to the rise of gay liberation groups like the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance. And here we are, 55 years later, and many of the people listening to this episode have probably celebrated this year by going to a Pride Parade. There are now over a hundred Pride Parades celebrated in the month of June across the United States, but it wasn't always that way. This is the story of how we went from riots to marches to parades.
The first of what would become known as Pride Parades happened in 1970 on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Activists organized three marches, called the Christopher Street Liberation Day Marches, in New York City, LA, and Chicago. The biggest one, unsurprisingly, was in New York City, where more than 3,000 queer people took to the street with chants like “Gay is Good,” coined by gay activist Frank Kameny. Kameny was inspired by the black civil rights chant “Black is Beautiful,” coined by Stokely Carmichael. The march in LA was dubbed Christopher Street West, and included over a thousand people marching through West Hollywood, with many thousand more onlookers surrounding them.
The Christopher Street Liberation Day marches were the first of their kind for queer people in terms of sheer numbers, but also in terms of the message. Up until this point, most marches that were held, including the Annual Reminder March in Philadelphia, were solemn affairs. The Annual Reminder March was organized by homophile organizations. Homophile was the term used by gay activists at the time. You might recognize the names of the organizations: the Mattachine Society, which was a gay men's organization; the Daughters of Bilitis, which was a lesbian organization; and Philadelphia’s own Janus Society, a gay men and women’s organization. The Annual Reminder marches focused on presenting an image of gay people to the general public which portrayed gay people as just like them and nothing to be afraid of, and focused on gaining respect from cishet society.
Counter to this image, quite a few patrons at the Stonewall Inn on the first night of the riot, and certainly in the two days following that night, who confronted the police were people who do not fit into that “respectable” image of white, professional, middle class, clean cut, and cisgender. Respectability politics has always been at the cost of the most marginalized in our community.
The energy from the Stonewall Riots was one not of respectability, but of gay liberation, or gay freedom, a common slogan used on signs and chanted during the marches. Rather than focusing on assimilating gay people into mainstream society, gay liberation sought freedom for gay people to live as their true selves, regardless of what those true selves were. Gay liberation included people of color, transgender people, poor people, and anyone who didn't fit into the norms set by mainstream society. The chants used during the Christopher Street Liberation Day March reflected that desire to live true authentic lives as queer people who didn’t fit into the heteronormative, straight-laced image that the homophile organizations pushed for. A popular rallying cry marchers used was, “2, 4, 6, 8, gay is just as good as straight!” The marchers weren't accepting their status as second class citizens anymore. They wanted gay power, a slogan which was graffitied on The Stonewall Inn in the days after the riots.
[This next sentence is an incomplete sentence, and I’m not sure of your point.]But just as important as political messaging is the aspect of fun. These marches were not the solemn affairs like the Annual Reminder marches that had come before them. People took to the streets wearing not suits and ties but cutoffs and tank tops. There were people of all gender expressions from butches to femmes to drag queens, and they came to make some noise. A major goal of the March was to be visible. Queer people were no longer accepting that they had to remain in the shadows or assimilate into cishet society. When being visibly gay or gender diverse could cost you your job, cost you your family, and get you sent to prison or worse, being visible was a powerful political statement.
But, it also begs the question of who gets to be visible, a question which continues to frustrate the queer community even today. Many of the marchers in that first March in 1970 were middle class cisgender white men, because they had the social security to recover from people learning that they were gay. For many, many other people, it was simply too dangerous to be out and visible. There were, of course, people who chose to do it anyway, and there are people in the community, like trans people and people of color, who never had the choice of assimilating in the first place. This division led to the creation of parallel marches, such as the Dyke March, the Trans March, and the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries marches, along with pride parades for Black and Latino members of the queer community. In the years after 1970, Pride Marches started popping up in other cities like San Francisco, Detroit, Dallas, Atlanta, and Philadelphia.
By 1975 the marches were turning less political, and more like the parades we know and love today. The signs and chants were more about celebration than calls to action.
There were still political marches of course, like the Marches on Washington in 1979, 1987, and 1993, with the latter two heavily focused on government AIDS policy. During the early years of the AIDS epidemic, Pride Parades brought back some of their political edge too, with gay rights organizations like ACT-UP joining in Pride parades and demanding government action to address AIDS.
By 1990, there were more than 50 Pride parades across the United States, and the cultural tides were starting to turn ever so slightly in terms of gay acceptance, and corporations started getting involved in Pride parades. While there were still massive amounts of homophobia during the 90s, especially with regard to AIDS, for some companies it was no longer an immediate marketing death sentence if they put their brand next to gay people.
This corporatization of Pride continued as gay acceptance became more mainstream, and many Pride parades today are chock-full of corporate sponsors. Private corporations using queer bodies and queer spaces for marketing is known as rainbow capitalism, and it has been criticized from the moment that companies got involved in Pride. A frequent subject of criticism is alcohol sponsors at Pride, which alienate members of the gay community who are sober, and can encourage alcohol addiction, which is more common among LGBTQ+ people than their cisgender and heterosexual peers. In fact, we are now seeing pushback against the corporatization of Pride, with cities like Philadelphia moving away from the Pride parade and bringing back the Pride marches, which focus more on queer people taking up public space and being their authentic selves than on corporations.
Being visible and seeing yourself among a sea of other queer people is incredibly validating. Even in today's political climate, which is broadly more accepting of queer people than it was during the Stonewall Riots 55 years ago, being out and being proud is still making a political statement. Pride in the face of pushback, pride in the face of queerphobia, and pride in the face of backsliding queer rights is brave, and it's powerful, and that is the point of Pride marches and parades. Whether you are able to be out or you are choosing safety this Pride, we will continue to fight for a world where you don't have to make that choice. That is the goal of gay liberation, and that is the reason why Pride marches began.
Thank you for joining us for the third episode of This Month in Queer History. Take care, and join us next month for our fourth episode, about the gay vigilante group the Lavender Panthers.
