The First Pride Was A Riot

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The First Pride Was A Riot


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By Taylor Henderson
@cornbreadsays

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Watch Now: Pride Today Trending Stories & News
Don't Forget: The First Pride Was a Riot
"Pride is a protest. It began as one in 1969. And while we've come a long way, it still is a protest today because not all members of our community are treated equally," writes PRIDE 's Taylor Henderson.
I can hear the faint sounds of explosions as I sit on my balcony in West Hollywood.
Protests I couldn't bring myself to attend were processing through my neighborhood Saturday. But loud bangs, seven helicopters circling overhead, and endless sirens echoing through my normally quiet street confirmed my fears: it hadn't remained as peaceful as it intended to be.
These protests popped up around the country to honor George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and the many more over the years who have died at the hands of police violence. Many protests were able to remain peaceful , while some were derailed. 
Twitter made it was easy to see what was going on in Los Angeles. It almost felt like I watched police cars go up in flames in real-time. Thousands crowded the intersection of Fairfax and Beverly, the sidewalks I'd jogged down just three days prior. Faces were covered. But the anger, the sadness, and the fear were etched into every photo and video.
I watched the police approach the protestors in riot gear, attempting to deescalate the situation while actually doing the opposite. I watched friends get shoved onto the ground and hit with batons. I watched people dressed head-to-toe in black smash windows of places I've shopped. I watched white women spraypaint "Black Lives Matter " on the side of a Starbucks at The Grove, and Black women tell them to stop. "They're going to blame Black people for this," they kept repeating. I watched people stop their cars in the middle of the street to run inside businesses to loot, taking advantage of the chaos. 
I didn't feel sad though. I didn't mourn the broken glass and cars set ablaze. Material things can be replaced. The life of George Floyd—and the many other victims of police brutality—cannot. 
I poured myself a heavy glass of wine for my nerves. The city of Los Angeles pushed an alert about a citywide curfew at the exact moment my mother texted me. She'd recognized some of the buildings on the news as places she visited, storefronts just blocks away from me. "People are mad and sad," she typed out to her two children. "You guys be careful in this sadistic world."
One of the gay epicenters of the world was thrust into chaos, and Pride Month would begin in just under 48 hours. Scrolling through my social media, I was struck by the number of white gay men—who hadn't bothered to mention the deaths of Floyd or Ahmaud Arbery or Tony McDade—seething about the looting in their neighborhood. "I can't even go outside to walk my dog," one wrote on Facebook, unconcerned about the deaths but ready to digitally fight the masses over the slightest inconvenience. 
Y'all know the Stonewall uprising began as a riot, right? 
In the 1960s, it was illegal for two men to engage in any kind of romantic physical expression. Variant gender expressions incited vicious responses from the public and police. Gay bars were the only refuge for LGBTQ+ people, where they could be left alone and celebrate themselves. And those venues were still hunted down.
In the twilight hours of June 28, 1969, NYC police raided the Stonewall Inn. Officers physically assaulted and hauled people out of the bar for arrest. The clientele was done putting up with the mistreatment and Black trans women, like Marsha P. Johnson, clapped back against the brutality. She, and many more LGBTQ+ folks, unknowingly sparked a revolution. For six days, Greenwich Village was thrust into protests and violent clashes with the law.
Pride is a protest. It began as one in 1969. And while we've come a long way, it still is a protest today because not all members of our community are treated equally.
Walking around my West Hollywood neighborhood Sunday morning, I kept pausing to read the graffiti still covering many of the storefronts I often passed by. "I can't breathe," they read. "Fuck crook'd cops." "Fuck capitalism." "Eat the rich." "Make America pay for its crimes against Black lives."
To quote Martin Luther King Jr., "A riot is the language of the unheard." 
And we are unheard. The system is broken. People are dying. Are the police listening? Is our government? It doesn't feel like they are when deaths keep happening over and over again at the hands of the institutions that are supposed to protect us, and all the killers get sentenced to is administrative leave with a slap on the wrists. 
It's infuriating. And terrifying. Especially when the people who are dying look like you. When this has been happening not for decades, but centuries, traced back all the way to slavery . When a community of parents has to teach their children how to behave around cops before they learn how to write in cursive. When you're gaslit with platitudes like, "Statistically, it won't happen to you." But it happened to your cousin, and your friend, and your's ex's father. When police refuse to reprimand or prosecute their own because they'd rather protect each other than really reevaluate their fatal practices that disproportionally affect Black people. When the president of our country casually tweets, " When the looting starts, the shooting starts," invoking a direct quote from a police chief during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It feels hopeless. 
Black LGBTQ+ people see the silence of our white friends. We see your outrage at looting, but not a word over the piles of bodies.
We always talk about LGBTQ+ community, but we all have to come together inside of this community, and beyond, to condemn the bad, fix the broken bits, and move steadily into the future — some might say like a Pride parade. 
Taylor Henderson is the deputy editor of PRIDE . Follow him on Twitter @cornbreadsays .
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Even though Pride is often viewed as a party or parade, its origins stem from a refusal to accept the police violence plaguing the LGBTQ community. The event often considered the spark of the gay rights movement was the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. Patrons of a New York City bar, The Stonewall Inn, were routinely harassed by the police, subjected to degrading strip searches, and consistently at the mercy of police raids. Homosexuality was illegal, and bars and clubs were often the only places LGBTQ individuals could express themselves. However, during a police raid on June 28, 1969, people at the Stonewall didn’t just sit back and wait to get arrested. They fought back.
Nor did neighbors just walk past. They stood by, becoming increasingly agitated at the escalating police brutality. Within minutes, hundreds of people were resisting the police violence. This had become a riot. The police became outnumbered and scared, eventually barricading themselves inside the bar.
And for five more days, protests erupted in the city, sometimes including thousands of people. On the one-year anniversary of the riot, several demonstrators marched past the Stonewall, marking the first Pride Parade. Though this event was not the first instance of LGBTQ people fighting back against police violence or discrimination, it has come to symbolize the beginning of a movement.
But like many important historical events, the concept of Pride has been rewritten and reconstituted for the sake of profit. For example, even though the LGBTQ community has rates of alcohol dependency up to five times higher than the general population, Pride Parades exhibit float after float of alcohol sponsors. Even though LGBTQ individuals are more likely to live in poverty , many Pride celebrations require expensive entrance fees just to join in on the festivities. Even though up to 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ, there exist a plenitude of gay cruise lines and luxury travel companies, ready to sell you a vacation at Pride festivals.
And the stores trying to sell us their support don’t care about human rights. Target won’t provide adequate sick pay to employees during COVID-19 , but they’ll plaster Pride posters and sell rainbow colored clothing. Starbucks has been publicly donating money to LGBTQ foundations, while simultaneously using prison labor. Nike is giving money to organizations benefiting LGBTQ communities, though it recently blocked labor rights groups from monitoring its factories .
During Pride month, we should remember and celebrate the struggles of LGBTQ people for the right, and the right of future generations, to exist. We should see the similarities in the riots and protests today, in which Black people are refusing to let police violence plague their communities any longer.
And we should also remember, that it has only been when regular people stand up and fight back that we see changes. But making sure our resistance doesn’t get co-opted by corporations looking to make a buck off our struggles is going to require an even bigger vision. One where we stand in solidarity together, against the system that works to rob us all of our humanity and of our livelihoods.
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The collective anger and anguish following the murders of Tony McDade, Riah Milton, and Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells—the latest media-reported deaths in the epidemic facing the Black trans community—have sparked a return to the radical roots of the gay liberation movement, particularly the Stonewall Riots, also known as the Stonewall Uprising.
On the night of June 27, 1969, the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular bar for LGBTQ+ New Yorkers. Their raid sparked a violent uprising and the catalyzing moment of the gay liberation movement. At the forefront of these protests, were Black and brown trans people, including Martha P. Johnson who some have coined the “Rosa Parks” of the gay liberation movement.
Despite being vanguards of the gay liberation movement, trans people did not share the same gains as the rest of the LGBTQ+ community. At the first Pride march—the Christopher Street Liberation Day March—held the following year, members of the transgender community were relegated to the back of the parade procession.
In 1989, civil rights activist and a leading scholar on critical race theory, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to describe the complex and often overlapping identities that create multiple levels of oppression and social injustice for marginalized populations. In her 2016 Ted Talk, Crenshaw described how people are “facing all kinds of dilemmas and challenges as a consequence of intersectionality, intersections of race and gender, of heterosexism, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, all of these social dynamics come together and create challenges that are sometimes quite unique”.
This was true for Marsha and other trans people of color who were often the victims of both racial and gender-related violence. Unfortunately, with their Blackness and transness inextricably intertwined, the Black trans community remains particularly vulnerable and continues to face disproportionate levels of violence.
In July 1992, when Marsha’s body was discovered in the Hudson River, her death was grossly underreported by the media and the police ruled it a suicide. Despite the suspicious circumstances surrounding her death and pressure from her family and friends, there are still many unanswered questions. Marsha’s death is a brutal reminder of the racist, queerphobic, and transphobic violence that precipitated the riot at Stonewall, persisted through the 1990s, and plagues us today.
Tony McDade, Riah Milton, and Dominique “Rem’mie Fells” were all killed in the early days of June. Initial police reports deadnamed all three victims—using their names assigned at birth rather than their chosen names— and misgendered them, further showcasing that, even in death, Black trans people are robbed of their identities.
Despite being disproportionately attacked due to the intersection of their identities, Black trans people have struggled to find a sense of belonging in both the Black Lives Matter movement and the gay rights movement. But times are changing.
On June 14, 2020, an estimated 15,000 people participated in the Brooklyn Liberation march for Black trans lives. Inspired by the 1917 NAACP Silent Protest Parade where demonstrators donned all white while calling for the end of violence against the Black community, the Brooklyn demonstrators, in a sea of sprawling white, represented a historic and stunning modern display of solidarity.
As we close out Pride Month, this year and every year, we honor Marsha P. Johnson’s legacy and remember her timeless words: there’s no pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.
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It’s June and rainbow paraphernalia is popping up everywhere, with references to “all the colors” and friends of Dorothy. Our world is awash with pink and lavender sloganism. It’s become more of a marketing hook than a rallying cry when buttons, banners, and flyers claim, “The first Pride was a riot!”
Though a snappy catchphrase, it is hardly accurate. The Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 was indeed an aggressive reaction by our communities to the frequent police harassment of the patrons at queer bars, among them, the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village. But “Pride celebrations” as we have come to know them today in the United States did not first occur until one year later. The marches and rallies, parades and festivals, dances and picnics that followed in 1970 and since have largely been commemorations of that historic fighting back, as we stood up for ourselves and our demand for our rights. They are an annual reminder to all of society that we’re here, we’re visible, and you cannot ignore us.
Some have put a call out that they want to “take Pride back to its roots,” yet so few actually know what Pride roots are in their cities. Such was my experience a few years back, when I started to do a bit of research into San Francisco Pride’s own history. In preparation for the 50th anniversary celebration, I found a lot of ephemera I had never seen before. Thanks to the SF Chronicle /SF Gate’s massive archive, and historians Gerard Koskovich and Amy Sueyoshi at the GLBT Historical Society and Museum, with Don Romesburg of Sonoma State, this information is no longer buried. (Their curated show from 2020, Labor of Love: The Birth of San Francisco Pride, 1970–1980 , is still available to view online.)
While I will caveat that this evolution is very much American-based, outside our borders the beginnings of Pride were often borne out of and/or encompassed violence and riots, none of which have anything to do with Stonewall. Homophobic nations, in particular, have had bloody clashes. Yes, those were riots.
But our documentation cites that Chicago and San Francisco were the first to hold Pride events on Saturday, June 27, 1970, with Los Angeles and New York following suit on Sunday, June 28. Here, about twenty to thirty hippies and “hair fairies” marched peacefully from Aquatic Park to Civic Center by way of Polk Street. There were no angry protests along the way: no stages, no speakers or music and performers when they got to their destination. Then the marchers broke off into smaller groups and headed to various bars, to go dance together, as same-sex dancing was frowned upon back then. There’s your protest! The next day, 200 or so people showed up at the Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park for a peaceful “gay-in” until equestrian police and Honda cops shut it down. A number of people were detained for several hours at the Park District Station before being released without charge. The incident led one of the organizers, Leo Laurence, to say, “If they continue to persecute minorities like ours, we have no choice but armed revolution.”
There was no subsequent Parade in 1971, but I’ve heard a large picnic took place that last weekend in June, also in Golden Gate Park, to mark the anniversary of Stonewall.
Christopher Street West, as it was then known, provided the city with its first official Pride Parade in 1972, the route extending along Market Street from Montgomery Street to Civic Center. Estimates say that about 15,000 people came out to see 2,000 marchers with elaborate floats, horseback riders, marching bands, choruses, and drag queens decked out in finery. Speeches from the stage and comments from the crowd denounced Mayor Joseph Alioto for not proclaiming the day as “Gay Liberation Day.”
Renamed the Gay Freedom Day Parade in 1973, the SF Pride Parade took another route, this time starting at Sansome and Post Streets, culminating at Lafayette Park in Pacific Heights. Again, the mood of the day was a celebratory commemoration of our movement’s desire to be out, loud, and proud, honoring the memory of the patrons who fought back.
And on it went every year. Our Pride continued to feature banners and signs calling for an end to discrimination, stop the war, and demand equality; all amid the
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