It is our hope that the day will come when homosexuals will be an integral part of society - being treated as human beings.” The flier added that such a change “can only be the result of a long hard struggle against bigotry, prejudice, persecution, exploitation - even genocide.” It further read, “Gay Liberation is for the homosexual who stands up, and fights back.” The flier that announced the first Pride march in New York, the Christopher Street Liberation Day March in 1970, said in part: “What it will all come to no one can tell. Declaring yourself is now so routine (at least among people in more liberal communities) that we forget the desperation in Harvey Milk’s 1978 entreaty that everyone who was gay come out if any progress was to be made. The drag queens and gender-nonbinary youth at such events can appear preoccupied with their own ecstatic exhibitionism.īut Pride was not always so unabashedly celebratory for a long time, it was a radical assault on mainstream values, a means to defy the belief that homosexuality was a sin, an illness and a crime, that gay people were subhuman. They are fiestas that percolate through the cities and sometimes small towns of the developed world, as well as some parts of the rest of the world, and they mark the fact that gay people exist in numbers, provide documentary evidence that we have more fun and are more fabulous than anyone else, that we are gay in the old sense of the word. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.When we hear of Pride marches today, we tend to think of fuss and feathers, of men more than half-naked waving from rainbow-hued, Lurex-draped parade floats, of Dykes on Bikes who gun their motors in defiance of gender norms, of waving gay and trans celebrities. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called "The Essential List". In honour of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, BBC's The Travel Show returns to The Stonewall Inn to meet Mark Segal, who was just 18 years old when police confronted him inside the bar and had no idea that the world would still be feeling the effects of that steamy summer night 50 years later.įor more on this and other stories, watch The BBC Travel Show – every weekend on the BBC News Channel and BBC World News. Instead of accompanying officers to the police station, Marsha Johnson, an African-American trans woman, fired the first shot – literally: she picked up a shot glass, threw it through a mirror and sparked a multi-day riot that birthed the modern gay rights movement and the inaugural pride parade in 1970.Īs people around the world take to the streets to revel in pride marches this June and July, it's easy to forget that these early public demonstrations weren't parties, they were defiant feats of resistance.
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So, when police burst through the doors just after 01:00 and demanded to see 200 patrons' identifications and physically verify their gender, one drag queen wasn't having it. The Stonewall Inn didn't have a liquor license, running water or fire escapes, but in an era when being gay was viewed as a crime, this scruffy Greenwich Village pub was one of the few sanctuaries where members of New York's LGBTQ community could openly express themselves without fear of harassment. Fifty years ago, in the early-morning hours of 28 June 1969, a police raid at a Mafia-run dive bar in New York City changed the course of history.