LGBT Pride: How a Struggle Became a Celebration

Under the shadow of the shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the usually festive and celebratory LGBT pride traditions will take on a more mournful tone this month.

Raucous parties and parades with lavish floats, go-go dancers, loud music and drag queen shows have become annual features of pride events as celebrations of sexual and gender diversity. But even the most lighthearted pride traditions grew, in part, out of discord: specifically, the riots at Stonewall Inn in New York City during the summer of 1969.

These riots, and the celebrations that came to memorialize them, were a direct response from the LGBT community to extensive over-policing and brutality. Civilians, too, terrorized LGBT people, committing hate crimes on the streets and at gay establishments, violence that continues to this day.

Taking pride in and celebrating LGBT life became a central part of the community's struggle against these challenges and against the lack of many legal protections.

But LGBT activism and political organization were brewing long before the words “gay pride” or “Stonewall” entered the national consciousness.

Anti-LGBT Violence

Police busts of LGBT spaces were commonplace throughout the '50s and '60s.

Raids were often justified with laws designed to target LGBT people. As Miriam Frank, author of "Out In the Union," explained, in the '60s in New York City, you could be arrested for wearing three pieces of clothing that were believed to be for the opposite gender, on the charge of “impersonation.”

When police would raid LGBT establishments, using these kinds of laws as pretexts, they were frequently aggressive and abusive. They would line people up, take them into a bathroom to confirm their sex, and arrest those who didn't conform to expectations about their gender. In addition to being arrested, LGBT people risked being publicly outed, fired from their jobs and institutionalized.

Violent attacks on LGBT establishments by civilians have also taken place across the country, just as they did in Orlando. In 1973, a gay bar in New Orleans was set on fire in a case of suspected arson, and 31 people were killed. No one was ever charged, and there was very little national media coverage about it at the time.

"There’s a lot of attacks on gays bars, sometimes by individual or groups, often street violence against people who are coming and going to gay bars," said Marc Stein, professor of history at San Francisco State University.

LGBT businesses, health centers, community centers and other public sites have also been targeted for attacks over the years. Stein himself worked at a LGBT newspaper that had been targeted with violence.

But despite the threats, these places were and are of vital importance to people who felt excluded or ignored in the rest of society.

“It is important for us to remember that gay bars have historically served as sanctuaries for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people,” said Julio Capó Jr., professor of history at University of Massachusetts Amherst. “Visiting one was an act of defiance against a state that criminalized you, a family that may have been ashamed of you, or communities and employers that shunned you.”

Prior to the existence of any large-scale activist organizations forthrightly describing themselves as gay, groups of people known as “homophiles” formed in the '50s under more opaque names such as the Mattachine Society, representing gay men, and its lesbian counterpart, the Daughters of Bilitis.

Pablo Ben, professor of history at San Diego State University, explained that though the homophile movement had roots in the radical and disruptive politics of labor and the Communist Party, subsequent movement leaders were more conservative and aimed to be non-threatening in their advocacy. Writers arguing in favor of LGBT causes would often use pseudonyms to preserve their anonymity at this time.

Stonewall Inn, 1969

Frustration about the oppression and violence against the LGBT community reached a flashpoint in June of 1969.

The Stonewall Inn bar in Greenwich Village of New York City catered specifically to LGBT clientele. It was run by the Mafia at the time, which was usually able to pay off sources and receive tips when police raids were coming. The Mafia would also blackmail wealthier LGBT people who patronized the Inn.

“The Mafia was willing to profit LGBT people, but at the same time was very homophobic,” Ben said. “So it wasn’t a very welcoming environment, but it was the only environment where people could sit and eat, where people could kiss, could dance, could share an evening together.”

Early in the morning of June 28, 1969, police decided to raid Stonewall Inn, catching the patrons off guard. In response to the invasion and aggression of the police, the patrons decided to fight back.

No one is exactly sure how the riot, which included attacks against the police and their vehicles, started, but there’s a general consensus that it was a spontaneous impulse. Crowds of people, many of whom hadn't been at the bar that night, gathered, lighting fires and breaking windows. Patrons who had been handcuffed escaped, and police themselves ended up barricading themselves inside the bar.

“There’s so many people who claim to have started the riot,” said Frank. “As some have said, if you could count the number of people who said they were there, there would have been an army. It’s legendary.”

Clashes between the police and LGBT people had broken out previously at public establishments before at Cooper’s Donuts in Los Angeles in 1959 and at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco in 1966.

"Stonewall was not a first, it was simply a breakthrough," said Frank.

And as Stein noted, there were demonstrations, riots and protests pressing for LGBT rights, especially throughout the '60s. Influenced by other growing radical groups, including those for civil rights for blacks, women’s rights and the anti-war movement, groups advocating civil rights for gay people saw the importance of more public activism. Each year on July 4 from 1965 to 1969, protesters marched in support of LGBT rights in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, an event known as the "Annual Reminder."

It was the Stonewall riots, however, that drew national attention and fueled the larger LGBT movement.

Those who organized the Annual Reminder decided to hold the event in 1970 in New York City in commemoration of the riots. It became an annual tradition; pride festivals and the designation of June as LGBT Pride Month evolved out of these events.

Organizations like the Gay Liberation Front, which was the first such group to use "gay" in its name, formed shortly after and adopted bold messages of social change. They were unafraid to publicly identify themselves as a part of the struggle.

The movement after Stonewall

Police raids of LGBT establishments declined into the '70s as the LGBT movement gained traction, though they did not disappear entirely.

Activists were able to change local anti-LGBT ordinances, so police had less justification for the busts. Eventually, some of the most discriminatory state laws were changed. By the end of the '80s, half of the states had ended sodomy laws that criminalized gay sex, which had a profound impact.

“Even though sodomy laws were not frequently enforced, because it was very difficult for police to catch people in the act, they were used as the political foundation for attacks on the LGBT community," Stein explained. "Because they could always say, ‘well, you’re engaging in criminal acts.’”

As the laws were changed, the culture shifted too, and tolerance for extensive invasions on LGBT spaces waned. The movement for gay pride encouraged more LGBT people out of the closet, it became more difficult to discriminate against them.

However, as Stein pointed out, police violence occurred disproportionately toward LGBT people of color, sex workers and homeless members of their community in the following years.

And violence continues to this day, even on nights celebrating a movement that arose in response to such targeted threats. Often, minority groups within the LGBT community still suffer the most.

“The tragic attacks at Pulse did not just occur at a gay bar,” notes Capó. “It also seems to have disproportionately affected young queers of color who remain among the most vulnerable to prejudice, harassment and violence.”

“Some re-tellings of Stonewall," he continued, "have either diminished or erased the critical role that queer and transgender people of color played in inciting that revolution and affecting change.”

Ben argued that the intensity of the anger presently targeted toward LGBT people and spaces may be a symptom of the progress the movement has achieved.

“As LGBT people have achieved more and more rights, there’s a desperate reaction from those who didn’t want this to happen, who feel totally defeated,” he explained. “They don’t know what to do, because, you could say, they lost the war. So they react in this manner.”

But even as the existence of frightening threats persist, celebrations of LGBT pride remain of fundamental importance to many members of the community and movement.

"Commemorating pride entails the public assertion of your queer identity, not unlike many had long done and continue to do in the more private spaces of gay bars and clubs," said Capó. "Claiming these public spaces, of course, was and remains a bold political act."

Lead image credit: Jordy91 via Wikimedia Commons