What’s Changed—and What Hasn’t—in 50 Years of Pride Parades

[Steve]

Recalling the first years of Pride celebrations in the early 1970s, photographer Stanley Stellar remembers how all the energy was concentrated in a small area of Christopher Street in New York City’s West Village. At the time, it was the rare neighborhood where gay people could go and meet in public, and Pride parades operated at a neighborhood-level size too — a far cry from the estimated five million people who attended last July’s World Pride event in New York City, the largest LGBTQ celebration in history.

“It started as a small social thing,” Stellar, now 75, recalls. “There were marchers too — very brave souls with signs, like Marsha P. Johnson, who inspired all of us. When people would taunt us, cars would drive by and spit at us, yell at us constantly, Marsha would be there, looking outrageous and glorious in her own aesthetic, and she would say ‘pay them no mind.’ That’s what the ‘P’ is for, is ‘pay them no mind, don’t let them stop us.’”

That unstoppable spirit is now marking its 50th anniversary: the first Pride parades took place in the U.S. in 1970, a year after the uprising at the Stonewall Inn that many consider to be the catalyst for the modern LGBTQ liberation movement. In a year when large gatherings are prevented by the coronavirus and many Pride events have been cancelled or postponed, over 500 Pride and LGBTQIA+ community organizations from 91 countries will participate in Global Pride on June 27. But, over the decades, Pride parades have evolved in a way that goes beyond the number of participants — and, having photographed five decades worth of them, Stellar has seen that evolution firsthand. “That was the epicenter of the gay world,” he says of the early years of Pride.

The Stonewall Uprising took place over a series of nights at the end of June 1969. Although the LGBTQ community had pushed back against police discrimination in several other smaller occasions in the late 1960s in cities like San Francisco and L.A., Stonewall cut through in an unprecedented way.

“People were ready for an event like Stonewall, and they had the communication and the planning in place to start talking right away,” says Katherine McFarland Bruce, author of Pride Parades: How a Parade Changed the World. Activist groups in L.A. and Chicago, which also held Pride Parades in 1970, immediately made connections with counterparts in New York to plan actions around the anniversary. Where in L.A., the spirit was more about having fun and celebrating, Bruce says, New York was planned more as an action to connect activists. “We have to come out into the open and stop being ashamed, or else people will go on treating us as freaks,” one attendee at the parade in New York City told the New York Times in 1970. “ This march is an affirmation and declaration of our new pride.”

By 1980, Pride parades had taken place around the world in cities like Montreal, London, Mexico City and Sydney. But as that decade got underway, the tone of the events shifted, as the tragedies of the AIDS crisis became central to actions and demonstrations. By this time, Stellar had a large circle of queer friends and started making more photos of the community to document their every day lives. “I really felt like I owed it to us, as in the queer ‘us,’ to start just photographing who I knew and who I thought was worthy of being remembered,” says Stellar, who has an upcoming digital exhibition hosted by Kapp Kapp Gallery, with 10% of proceeds going to support the Marsha P. Johnson Institute.

To Bruce, Pride shows how the LGBTQ community has been able to consistently demand action and visibility around the issues of the day.

Where in the 1980s, groups organized around the AIDS crisis, the 1990s saw greater media visibility for LGBTQ people in public life, leading to more businesses starting to come on board for Pride participation. While the Stonewall anniversary had long provided the timing for annual Pride events, President Bill Clinton issued a proclamation in 1999 that every June would be Gay and Lesbian Pride Month in the U.S. (President Barack Obama broadened the definition in 2008, when he issued a proclamation that the month of June be commemorated as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.)

The early 2000s then saw greater campaigning for same-sex marriage. During the summer of 2010, Bruce did contemporary research for her book, attending six different Pride parades across the U.S., including one in San Diego, home to the nation’s largest concentration of military personnel, where campaigning was concentrated on repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. “I think Pride is a vehicle for LGBT groups to make the issues of the day heard both in their own community and in the wider civic community to which they belong,” Bruce reflects — adding that in recent years, campaigns for racial justice and transgender rights have become more prominent.

 

 

 

[ColtMann]

what a nice little story - my only contribution to gay pride has been - a carful of teenage jox cruised by and yelled Queer! and I responded Jealous? they almost wrecked the car.