FEATURE
A History of Boston Pride Libby Bouvier and Mark Krone, on behalf of The History Project By
with photographs courtesy of The History Project (www.historyproject.org)
Before [Stonewall], I wanted to go around and convince the straight world we were okay. And after Stonewall we told the straight world that we didn't give a damn what they thought. We were going to do what we were going to do and we weren't going to ask their permission.
Latina/Latino LGBTQ A little past midnight, youth and young adults on June 28, 1969, the temwho slept in nearby perature hovered around Christopher Park, the 80 degrees in New York’s Stonewall Inn was their Greenwich Village. On stable domicile.” Therefore, long, hot summer nights in –Martha Shelley, Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), New York Chapter the movement launched by the 60s, the air crackled Stonewall, was started not with possibility, but also violence. It felt like something was always about to happen. Still, no one by the well-connected or well-off, but by young white runaways, drag could have predicted that a worldwide movement was about to erupt queens, trans people, and people of color. The next night in Boston, the hot summer air rushed through the in a dive bar that didn’t even have running water. Fanning herself against the heat, Martha Shelley, a leader in the door at Sporter’s, a gay bar on Cambridge Street. Along with it came New York chapter of the DOB, showed visitors from Boston around news from New York. Bill Conrad, who worked the door that night, the Sheridan Square neighborhood. The Boston women had come recalls, “Sure, people were talking about [the uprising], the place was down to discuss opening a DOB chapter back home. As they turned buzzing about it. They’d walk up to each other and ask if their friends onto Christopher Street, they saw a melee outside the Stonewall Inn. had heard about it.” Until the mid-60s, Sporter’s itself was routinely Years later, Shelley told author Martin Duberman, "We saw these peo- raided by Boston police, who lined patrons up against the walls, yelling ple, who looked younger than I was, throwing things at cops. One of slurs at them and demanding identification. “If you didn’t have ID, the women turned to me and said, 'What's going on here?' I said, 'Oh, they’d arrest you and put your name in the paper,” says Conrad. Police harassment of bar patrons decreased markedly in Boston by the late it's a riot. These things happen in New York all the time.'” But this was different. What looked like a riot was actually an up- 60s, but persisted in New York, especially at the Stonewall Inn. rising. A routine police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a little-known bar that many middle-class gay people would never think to visit, became 45 Years of Boston Pride a pitched battle, when the queer patrons retaliated. Skirmishes between LGBT people and police continued in the West Village over the next While it is impossible to include every event and group associated week. with Pride, with this concise history we offer a peek into each year. Although many of the photographs taken that night were of young Some years, political issues burned at the forefront while in others, the white men, the Stonewall Inn attracted a largely Latin@ and African- weather was the top story. We know that labeling the event a “march” American clientele. According to author and activist Rev. Irene Mon- or “parade” has significant meaning. To avoid choosing a single label, roe, who was there, “On the first night of the Stonewall riots, African we use them interchangeably throughout. Americans and Latinos likely were the largest percentage of the proA widely held misconception about the Boston Pride March is testors, because we heavily frequented the bar. For homeless black and that it began the year after Stonewall. But the first March occurred two
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