A R T S & C U LT U R E
LGBTQ Freedom Trail For Pride Week 2015 The History Project invites you to revisit important sites and moments in the rich LGBTQ history of Boston. By
Joan Ilacqua and Andrew Elder, on behalf of The History Project
The first official Gay Pride March in Boston was held on Saturday, June 26, 1971. The march, a distinctly political event, followed a week of workshops on issues related to the emerging lesbian and gay community, including coming out and gay spirituality. The march stopped and rallied at four major points: the Bay Village bar Jacques, Boston Police Headquarters on Berkeley Street, the Massachusetts State House, and St. Paul’s Cathedral on Tremont Street. At each stop, a speech was made and a list of demands was presented. The march concluded with a closet smashing and book dumping on the Boston Common. On the 45th anniversary of the first Pride, we are highlighting a few of Boston’s myriad LGBTQ historical sites. Each of these sites represents an aspect of Boston’s LGBTQ history, and you’ll learn something more about the places you walk past every day, about where you live, work, worship, and play.
Jacques Cabaret 79 Broadway Jacques opened in 1938, and became a gay bar in the mid 1940s. After serving as the city’s only lesbian bar from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, Jacques evolved into a venue for drag performers. Boston’s first Gay Pride March began at Jacques, which is now the city’s oldest surviving LGBTQ establishment, to confront a number of community concerns. Of primary importance was the club’s increasing problem with misogyny and the treatment of lesbian patrons.
Charles Street Meeting House - 70 Charles Street The Charles Street Meeting House was once home to several early lesbian and gay activist groups and publications. The Gay Community News (GCN), which ran from 1973 to 1992 as a weekly and until 1999 as a quarterly, published its first issue here. GCN was an influential publication in Boston, across the country, and around the world. The fourth issue of GCN described the Charles Street Meeting House as “best known to the gay community as a gay community 94 | Boston Pride 2015
center.” The Meeting House hosted a multitude of events including Gay Liberation Front weekly dances for gay youth and the gay crisis hotline. The hotline was staffed by volunteers who talked with people who phoned in with no one else to turn to, and was one of the very few gay help resources in the early 1970s.
Public Garden The Public Garden was commissioned in 1837, almost 200 years after the Boston Common was designated a public park in 1634. The three-acre lake in the Public Garden contains a small island that was once a peninsula, but the peninsula proved to be so popular with lovers that it was cut off from the land to prevent “misuse” of the spot. The Public Garden was long Drag queen Sylvia Sidney. a popular gay cruising site in Boston, especially before World War II Credit: Courtesy of The through the 1980s. The Four Seasons History Project (unknown hotel now stands where hustlers once photographer) patrolled opposite the Public Garden, and in the 1980s, the city changed traffic patterns to discourage drivers from circling and cruising “The Block”. The Public Garden is also home to a swan couple, Romeo and Juliet, two female swans who have been nesting here since 2005. The Public Garden is a site for other moments in Boston’s LGBTQ history, too. The Public Garden is where Boston’s most famous (or infamous) drag queen, Sylvia Sidney, received his stage name. Sylvia, who preferred male pronouns, described the moment in an interview with The History Project: “I went down to what they call Queen’s Row in the Public Garden. It was a dirt road. They had benches. Some older queens were there. They said, ‘Oh, hi, honey! How are you? Aren’t you cute!’ I wasn’t really cute at all. They said, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘Sidney.’ They said ‘We’ll call you Sylvia.’ They called everybody a name. There was a Bette Davis; there was a Helen Morgan. There was a queen who looked like Katharine Hepburn. She had a twin brother – the Hepburn sisters.”
