Why Do We Celebrate Pride Month In June? The Birth of Pride

Learn the history of Pride Month and Why We Celebrate in June! In this video, learn the LGBTQ+ history about why we celebrate Pride month and where the celebration comes originally comes from in this audio only episode of Closeted History: LGBTQ+ Stories of the Past.

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📕 TABLE OF CONTENTS 📕

00:00 Start

00:32 Introduction

01:51 One Year After Stonewall

05:57 Challenges Along The Way

09:16 Key Icons

10:22 Impact of Christopher Street Liberation

12:25 Conclusion

📚 Resources Mentioned In the Show

Pride Flyer: https://sites.psu.edu/christopherstliberationday/files/2018/07/PrideFlier1Final.jpg.CROP_.article920-large-1hjwfyq-768x983.jpg

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Hi, welcome to Closeted History! Your number #1 spot to learn the Queer and Trans history you never knew! To learn more, check out our website ➡️ [www.closetedhistory.com] Wanna work with us? Check out our media kit ➡️ https://beacons.ai/closetedhistory/mediakit

My name is Destiny (she/they) and I am the creator behind the podcast. Educator, creative, and fellow LG(B)T(Q)+ community member.

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Full Transcript

[Music]

This is Destiny Clarke from "Discovered with Destiny," and you're listening to "Closeted History: LGBTQ+ Stories Past," the show where together we explore the queer history you never knew. It's all about education, learning, and making LGBTQ+ stories of the past, which have previously been hidden from our society, more accessible for everyone.

[Music]

Hi, how are you? Thanks so much for coming back for Season One, Episode Two of "Closeted History: LGBTQ+ Stories of the Past." If this is your first time tuning in, welcome, and I hope that you stick around. I'm your host, Destiny Clark. My pronouns are she/her, and let's dive into this episode.

In this episode, we will explore the very first Pride parades: when, where, and how they took place, and how this celebration has evolved over time. I thought it would be appropriate since it is Pride Month, and we can learn together the history of how this celebration came to be what it is today. But before we get started, I just wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who listened to the first episode and has supported me along the way of this new creative endeavor. It really means so much to me to not only be able to share my creative project with others, but a creative project that is so personal to me and that I feel so passionately about. So again, thank you so much, and a special shout out to my partner, Louise, who made the intro music that you just heard and the outro that you'll hear at the end.

If you didn't get a chance to listen to the last episode, I would check it out so that you can get some context about the Stonewall Inn.

Alright, so let's start a year after the uprising at Stonewall. There were so many LGBTQ+ organizations that were coordinating and coming together after the events at Stonewall that night. In addition to the pre-existing groups, there were several others that were formed. It's rumored that prior to Stonewall, there were 50 to 60 LGBTQ+ organizations, and a year later, there were over 1500, one of them being the Gay Liberation Front. They had many locations and chapters all across the country, like in New York, LA, Boston, San Francisco, and even in Illinois. They had grown into groups that met regularly, discussed issues, created publications, and even held workshops.

There were several parades that took place all over the U.S., and we're going to talk about them in order. So on Saturday, June 27, 1970, the Chicago Gay Liberation held a march. It was the last Saturday of June, and the organizers hoped they would reach more shoppers in the Magnificent Mile area of downtown Chicago at the time. And it's interesting because I always thought that New York was the first city to celebrate the anniversary, but it was Chicago, which makes me love Chicago even more. Subsequent Chicago parades had been held on the last Sunday of June, coinciding with the date of many similar parades elsewhere. But on that particular parade for the first one, it was actually held on the 27th, so it was the very first one.

In California, San Francisco held a march on June 27th as well, and they had what they called a "gay-in" on June 28, 1970. There was also a march on June 28th in LA, which, like the other Pride events, had some complications in securing a permit, but we'll talk about that a little bit later in the episode. Organizers received death threats up until the day of the event, but despite their troubles, they had over a thousand LGBTQ+ community members come to march in their parade down Hollywood Boulevard, which is pretty amazing.

And then what's referred to as the "official Christopher Street Liberation Day March" was held on June 28, 1970, in New York City. So when you look up the first Pride parade, this is what comes up, even though technically the first one was in Chicago because they celebrated the day before. This march was planned from Greenwich Village along Christopher Street to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, and what started with just a few hundred people ended in thousands. I'm not sure of the exact number. When I was doing the research, some sources said like 5,000, and then others said as many as ten thousand. But I did find the flyer for the March and the gay-in that the Gay Liberation Front planned in New York. I'll leave it in the show notes for you below, but it starts out with an inspirational message about how this March was much more than just the anniversary of Stonewall. It had been a year of living in the mindset of liberation for the LGBTQ+ community, which was very different from the ideas that were held before then. Things were different after the uprising at Stonewall. The flyer says that the community, and this is a quote, "at last have realized that they will never be able to be liberated by politely asking the system. Freedom is never given; it must be taken." And I just love that. The way that the community came together unapologetically and stood up for their rights and liberation is really, really inspiring.

Next, I want to highlight some of the challenges that these organizations experienced while trying to plan their events. On November 2nd, 1969, a few short months after the events at Stonewall, Craig Rodwell, his partner Fred Sergeant, Ellen Brody, and Linda Rhodes proposed the first Pride march to be held in New York City by way of a resolution at the Eastern Regional Conference of homophile organizations, with the acronym ERCO, and this conference and meeting took place in Philadelphia.

But all of the attendees at this meeting in Philadelphia voted for the March, except for the Madison Society of New York, which abstained, which I found very interesting. The Madison Society's advocacy methods were described as obsolete in the post-Stonewall world. They did things more like "sip-ins" and quiet picketing. So they voted against having the march in New York initially. However, later on, the replacement of the president of the Madison in New York by Michael Kotis in April 1970 ended in opposition to the March.

Another piece of conflict that I wanted to highlight was the parade in New York didn't have a police permit. So early member of the Gay Liberation Front and Marshal of the first Pride March, Mark Mark Siegel, says that they held self-defense classes in order to protect themselves, just in case, because they weren't sure what was going to happen. This makes sense given the violence that happened just a year before at Stonewall, plus the sit-ins, the raids, and much more in between.

And the last piece of conflict that I wanted to highlight was Morris Kite of the Gay Liberation Front. He was the founder of the LA chapter. Reverend Troy Perry of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches and Reverend Bob Humphries, who represented the United States Mission, he was the founder. They all planned a parade in LA, but securing a permit from the city proved to be really difficult. They named their organization Christopher Street West in an attempt to be more ambiguous in order to get approved for the permit. However, Los Angeles Police Chief Edward M. Davis told one of the organizers, "As far as I'm concerned," and this is a quote, "granting a permit to a group of homosexuals to parade down Hollywood Boulevard would be the same as giving a permit to a group of thieves and robbers."

Yeah, the police commission finally granted the permit, but with the fees exceeding 1.5 million dollars. At this point, the ACLU stepped in, and the commission dropped all of its requirements except for a fifteen hundred dollar fee for police service, which was later dismissed as well by the California Superior Court.

Next, let's highlight some key icons. So Craig Rodwell and his partner Fred Sergeant, as I mentioned before, Ellen Brody, Michael Brown, Marty Nixon, and Foster Gunnison of Madison. They made up the core group of the CSLD umbrella committee. And other mainstays of the Gay Liberation Front organizing committee were Judy Miller, Jack Waluska, Steve Jerry, and Brenda Howard, who has actually been referred to as the mother of Pride, and she was a bisexual activist. There were so many people and organizations that helped make the parades possible that it feels almost impossible to highlight everyone who made the event special and even capable of existing. Of course, it could not be without the pioneers who were present at the Stonewall Inn Uprising as well since this was to commemorate the anniversary.

So I'd like to talk about the impact of the Christopher Street Liberation. The Christopher Street Liberation had a positive impact on the LGBTQ+ community by raising awareness of the issues they faced and helping to fuel the Gay Liberation movement. So "The Times" quoted Michael Brown, who was 29 and a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front. He described the March as, and this is a quote, "an affirmation and declaration of our new Pride." The first marches were both serious protests and fun and served as a way to inspire others and bring awareness to this moment.

The marches were repeated in the following years, and more and more Pride marches started up in other cities throughout the world. In Atlanta and New York City, the marches were called Gay Liberation marches, and the day of celebration was called Gay Liberation Day. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, they became known as Gay Freedom marches, and the day was called Gay Freedom Day.

As more cities and even smaller towns began holding their celebrations, these names spread and evolved. In the 1980s, there was what's been described as a cultural shift in the gay movement. Activists who didn't share the same radical ideologies, mostly due to the emergence of big organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and also because of the AIDS crisis, which unfortunately took the lives of so many of the original activists. But at this point, many groups started to drop the original Gay Liberation and Gay Freedom from the names and instead replaced it with Gay Pride.

Now, we see a huge influence from corporations and rainbow washing in advertising, apparel, merchandising, and more, which is a whole other thing for another day.

But in conclusion, the first Pride Parade serves as a reminder of the courageous acts of those who came before us in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights and equality. Their brave and bold actions help us still commemorate Pride Month, its origins, and the event that led us here today.

Thanks for making it all the way to the end of the episode with me. You can find the transcript and all the links listed in the show notes. I'd love to hear what you thought of this episode. You can send me a message on the podcast Instagram at @closetedhistory or reach out to me via my website, discoveredwithdestiny.com/contact.

If you'd like to support the podcast, the best way to do so is to share an episode with a friend and leave a review. I hope you continue to learn more LGBTQ+ history with me in the next episode as we embark on our learning journey together. As always, thank you for listening. You are important, and your story matters. Until the next time, friend.

[Music]

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The History Behind The Pride Flag

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The Stonewall Inn: 53 Years Later