Ellen Broidy offers her perspective in this 2018 interview from the National Park Service’s Stonewall Oral History Project. In this 2010 Village Voice piece, Fred Sargeant, one of the principal organizers along with his partner Craig Rodwell, Ellen Broidy, and Linda Rhodes, wrote about that first New York march and how it came to be. And this Washington Blade article offers detail on how that first march came about through Craig Rodwell’s original proposal. This article from the History Channel looks at how the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march in New York City was organized and how the first anniversary of Stonewall was marked with marches in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
In this third Stonewall 50 episode, we take you back to that transformational year through the voices of just some of the people who lived it and led it. Instead of asking to be accepted, activists now shouted their demands on the streets: “What do we want? Gay rights! When do we want them? Now!” And in the aftermath of a police raid where “fems, nances, fags, and queens” chased the police- instead of the other way around-activists fully embraced their new power, chanting “Say it loud! Gay and proud!” Veteran homophile activists joined with LGBTQ folks who had earned their stripes in the Black civil rights movement, the anti-war effort, and the women’s movement to launch new, in-your-face organizations dedicated to confronting the system-the discrimination, harassment, and criminalization-that forced gay people to live in fear. Even before the six nights of confrontations outside the Stonewall Inn had come to an end, meetings were called by movement leaders to channel the anger and energy released by the multi-day melee on the streets of Greenwich Village. The Stonewall uprising was followed by a year of intensive organizing.
This new “gay liberation” phase of the movement didn’t just happen. And pre-Stonewall activists, who numbered in the hundreds, were joined by thousands-even tens of thousands-of newly energized activists committed to fighting for gay liberation. By the time of the June 1969 Stonewall uprising, the “homophile” movement was nearly two decades old and there were between 50 to 60 organizations across the country.īut Stonewall was definitely the start of something -and something big, because one year later, when LGBTQ people gathered at Sheridan Square to mark the uprising’s first anniversary and the start of the Christopher Street Liberation Day march, there were 1,500 organizations. Episode Notesįrom Eric Marcus : After listening to Making Gay History’s first two Stonewall 50 episodes, you know that Stonewall isn’t where it all began. Donna Gottschalk-lesbian, feminist, activist, photographer, artist-at the first Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day march in New York City, June 28, 1970.