Since 1965, a small, polite group of gays and lesbians had been picketing outside Liberty Hall.
Fred Sargeant wrote in The Village Voice : “Before Stonewall, gay leaders had primarily promoted silent vigils and polite pickets, such as the ‘Annual Reminder’ in Philadelphia. The police who had been sent to protect the marchers turned their backs on them to signal their disdain, but the march went on protected nonetheless. There had never been enough of them to allow this luxury of blatant selfhood. But they had never before conquered so much new ground they hadn’t declared themselves anywhere as public as Central Park, where befuddled onlookers gathered to witness their approximation of freedom. It’s not that the people in these photos had never been open before many were open at the bars and clubs that catered to them and on the late-night piers of the Hudson River, open with anyone who asked, a few open even with their families. It is our hope that the day will come when homosexuals will be an integral part of society - being treated as human beings.” The flier added that such a change “can only be the result of a long hard struggle against bigotry, prejudice, persecution, exploitation - even genocide.” It further read, “Gay Liberation is for the homosexual who stands up, and fights back.”
The flier that announced the first Pride march in New York, the Christopher Street Liberation Day March in 1970, said in part: “What it will all come to no one can tell. Declaring yourself is now so routine (at least among people in more liberal communities) that we forget the desperation in Harvey Milk’s 1978 entreaty that everyone who was gay come out if any progress was to be made. The drag queens and gender-nonbinary youth at such events can appear preoccupied with their own ecstatic exhibitionism.īut Pride was not always so unabashedly celebratory for a long time, it was a radical assault on mainstream values, a means to defy the belief that homosexuality was a sin, an illness and a crime, that gay people were subhuman. They are fiestas that percolate through the cities and sometimes small towns of the developed world, as well as some parts of the rest of the world, and they mark the fact that gay people exist in numbers, provide documentary evidence that we have more fun and are more fabulous than anyone else, that we are gay in the old sense of the word. When we hear of Pride marches today, we tend to think of fuss and feathers, of men more than half-naked waving from rainbow-hued, Lurex-draped parade floats, of Dykes on Bikes who gun their motors in defiance of gender norms, of waving gay and trans celebrities.