Pride: Then & Now

The angst in Manhattan’s West Village had been percolating for some time. The massive wave of riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. the year before may have inadvertently set the clock for our own initiation into chaos. Widespread unrest in Europe and the Middle East and a senseless war raging in Southeast Asia aggravated the situation further. The summer air was ripe for rebellion.

The first organization to form following the riots, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), was considered radical. Only by revolting against sexism, patriarchy and capitalism simultaneously could negative attitudes toward women, lesbians, gays and other minorities be changed. The revolution would require, according to founding GLF member Steven Dansky, “a shift in perception of reality so persistent that it radically altered assumptions about gender and sexuality”—a calling so ambitious it would demand at every turn a fierce devotion and lasting cooperation between seemingly disparate groups—if it hoped to succeed.

"Why the Gay Rights Movement Has No National Leader", Jeremy Peters writes, "The gay movement has always had a problem of achieving a dignity or moral imperative that the black civil rights movement had, or the women’s rights movement claimed. Because this movement is fundamentally about the right to be sexual, it’s hard for the larger public to see that as a moral issue" (2009). But how much of the revolution was about sexuality? And how much was about the prejudice that surrounded it? These questions led me to an inspiring group of activists. What I found was more than a history lesson. The fact that the LGBT community has made remarkable progress in the years since Stonewall is a testament, not to the resilience of one leader, but to the solidarity and perseverance of many.

These excerpts are taken from my conversations with founding GLF members in the summer of 2009, forty years after a group of fearless and determined youth took to the streets of Gotham in search of freedom.

Steven F. Dansky

Formative GLF Member

Longtime political activist Steven F. Dansky was a formative member of the modern gay liberation movement. His work has been cited in nearly every book on early gay liberation, spanning more than three decades, from The Gay Militants (1971) to American Social Movements: Gay Rights Movement (2003). Dansky had been involved during the HIV pandemic for more than 15 years.

UM: Explain the Gay Liberation Front.

SFD: Within weeks of the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was founded. It was the first post-Stonewall Uprising lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) organization. Although homophile rights activists had been organizing for decades, the Stonewall Uprising ushered in a new militancy. The entrance of GLF was onto the most turbulent stage in this country’s history, within a historical continuum, an era marked by a vigorous civil rights, an emergent second wave of feminism, and at the height of aggressive anti-Vietnam War movement. The wellspring for a LBTG movement was overflowing, and GLF was poised to develop from sexual urgency to political activism.

GLF forged the roots of activism with particular audacity, staging activist demonstrations in Times Square and Greenwich Village; at sites of institutional bigotry such as St. Patrick’s Cathedral; against media

Perry Brass

Founding GLF Member

Perry Brass was born in Savannah, GA, but reborn in New York City in November, 1969 when he joined the Gay Liberation Front and the GLF newspaper Come Out! He has since published 14 books including How to Survive Your Own Gay Life, his work has been included in 25 anthologies, and 50 of his poems have been set to music.

UM: How would you compare the GLF, back in the day, to the modern gay rights movement? How much of the GLF’s original vision, would you say, has survived?

PB: I think that the gay movement has evolved somewhat evolutionarily: it has adapted to the times, which is a good thing in some ways and a terrible, ugly thing in other ways. One thing that most people don’t take into consideration, and that we, as gay liberationists from GLF understood from the get-go, is that almost dyed-in-the-wool prevalence of internalized homophobia, that insidious repugnance queer men, especially, feel toward each other. No other minority group has it to the degree we have, and for good reason. As Harry Hay said, “Because our parents rejected us, we reject each other.” Therefore, we now see a gay movement (and I don’t say “gay liberation movement,” because I feel that gay liberation pretty much died about 1974) infected with celebrity worship, that denies the real importance of LGBT leaders who come out of the movement (in other words, we must be recognized by the straights before we’ll recognize each other), that is totally money oriented, that goes from crisis to crisis with very little history or foundation behind it. GLF had none of that. We wanted to create an authentic gay culture, a real gay media, and a gay world that was part of the bigger world and yet distinct enough from the mainstream for us to survive intact in it.

John Knoebel

Founding GLF Member

An active member of the Gay Liberation Front beginning in November 1969, John Knoebel eventually founded the Effeminists, a group of gay men who opposed sexism, and co-authored “The Effeminist Manifesto” with Steven Dansky and Kenneth Pitchford which originally appeared in Double F: a Magazine of Effeminism (published from 1972 to 1976). Knoebel is currently the Vice President of Consumer Marketing for the nation’s two largest LGBT magazines: The Advocate and Out.

UM: GLF convened a meeting with Black Panther co-founder and leader Huey Newton at Jane Fonda’s penthouse. You were there. Give us the scoop.

JK: Shortly after his release from prison in 1970, Huey Newton released an important essay entitled, “A Letter from Huey Newton to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters about the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” which is considered the first pro-gay, pro-woman proclamation to come out of the black civil rights movement.

In it, Huey Newton asked Panthers to confront their prejudices and re-examine their attitudes towards women and homosexuals. He stated, “We [Panthers] have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society.” Later in the letter, he said, “there is nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. And maybe I’m now injecting some of my prejudice by saying that “even a homosexual can be a revolutionary.” Quite the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary.”

PRIDE: THEN & NOW

A Timeline

June 28, 1969: New York City Police raid Stonewall Inn, as they had done many times before. The patrons, who were tired of this practice, revolted and fought back. The Stonewall Riots were the spark that ignited the Pride movement across the world.

June 28, 1970: The gay community of NYC’s Christopher Street unite and march on what became the First Pride March, just a year later after the Stonewall Riots.

October 14, 1978: The first openly gay elected official in California and gay activist, Harvey Milk, was assasinated.

October 14, 1979: The First National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights took place and drew up to 125,000 members of the LGBT community and straight allies marched to demand equal civil rights.

June 5, 1982: The first documented case of the “gay cancer,” which was later called AIDS, was made public. This was the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, which shaped much of the gay community and activism.

June 24, 1984: Heritage of Pride was founded to take over planning and production of NYC Pride.

June 7, 1989: Denmark becomes the first country in the world to legalize registered partnerships for same-sex couples, which provided almost all of the same qualities as marriage.

February 28, 1994: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy was instituted. The policy prohibited military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants, while barring openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service.

September 21, 1996: The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was enacted as United States federal law. DOMA defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages granted under the laws of other states.

April 26, 2000: Vermont passes legislation to allow same-sex couples to unite in civil union, which was viewed with basically being the same as a same-sex marriage at the time and the first of its kind in the USA.

February 11, 2004: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom directs the city-county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, leading to the beginning of marriage equality in California.

March 11, 2004: A month later, during a very short lived ruling, California Supreme Court orders a halt of all same-sex couples marriage licenses. Therefore, leaving about 4,000 married same-sex couples in limbo.

May 17, 2004: Massachusetts becomes the first US state to legalize same-sex marriage.

November 4, 2008: California voters approved Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal.

August 4, 2010: a federal judge ruled that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional under and barred its enforcement.

June 26, 2013: US v. Windsor, US Supreme Court holds that restricting federal interpretation of “marriage” and “spouse” to apply only to opposite-sex unions, is unconstitutional.

June 28, 2015: The US Supreme Court rules that marriage equality is now the law of the land.

April 15, 2019: Pete Buttigieg, becomes the first openly gay man to launch a US Presidential candidacy, and kisses his husband on stage.