“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 fuelled their frustration into organisation, sparking new groups, and planning larger-scale demonstrations. Suddenly, the gay liberation movement that had been percolating boiled over.
#When was the nation first gay pride parade code#
Fearing violence, organisers 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 galvanised 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 Organisations (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 stigmatised, criminalised, 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.