How Did Pride Become a Parade?

June is Pride Month.

Yes, it’s a time to wave the rainbow flag and celebrate the activism, resilience, and history of the LGBTQ+ community.

Each year, a growing number of cities hold their annual Pride Parade, a march that often features floats, protests, and crowds of supporters living loud and proud.

You might already be familiar with the history of the New York City Stonewall Riots, the tinderbox that ignited the modern LGBTQ movement in the United States as we know it, and the reason Pride Month is still celebrated in June.

Less familiar, however, is the history of the Pride Parade.

So how exactly did a Manhattan riot become a march, and how did a march become the international occasion we have today?

Let’s dig into those questions and see what they have to tell us about Pride, politics, and the ongoing evolution of community action.

But before we can start waving to crowds from floats, we’re going to have to look back at the history before Stonewall.

While the riots were a milestone in LGBTQ activism, there were a lot of activities and events leading up to it.

One important milestone was the Annual Reminder in Philadelphia, which provided a kind of blueprint for LGBTQ public gatherings moving forward.

On July 4th, 1965, somewhere around 40 people gathered outside Independence Hall.

Dressed in professional attire, they picketed for gay rights, becoming one of the largest known demonstrations for homosexual issues in the United States at that time.

Organized by the East Coast Homophile Organization, two of its most prominent leaders, Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings, placed an emphasis on assimilation.

Kameny had been dismissed from public service for his sexual orientation, and wanted to prove to all who attended the Annual Reminder that gay people could be just as professional and acceptable as anyone else.

The Annual Reminder became the first gay rights event to be repeated, and continued until 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots.

Commemorating Stonewall would replace it from then on.

The Annual Reminder wasn’t without its critics inside the movement, however, as many wondered if the event’s emphasis on “normalness” left out transgender and gender-variant members of the community.

Still, with the crowds it drew and the message it conveyed, the Annual Reminder showed that public community demonstrations, while risky, were worth considering as a tactic.

Which brings us to Stonewall.

The bar in Greenwich Village, New York, became the site of a clash between patrons and the police on June 28, 1969.

It was a long time coming, as police had been regularly harassing bar-goers at LGBTQ meeting places like Stonewall for years.

That morning was no different as police entered the Stonewall Inn, arrested employees for selling liquor without a license, and cleared out the bar, the second time in just a few days.

Only, this time, the patrons waiting outside didn’t clear and scatter.

They heckled the police, threw bottles at them, and made their anger loud and clear.

The police, who weren’t used to this kind of behavior, asked for reinforcements to barricade themselves inside the bar while around 400 people rioted outside.

The barricade was breached, the bar was set on fire, and all in all the riots went on, stopping and starting, for several more days.

The late 1960s was a time of social upheaval, as other communities were also fighting for racial and gender equality.

Stonewall was part of that revolutionary moment in history, and asserted the LGBTQ movement as a force to be reckoned with.

Stonewall became the rallying cry for change, and the riots were commemorated the very next year in what was called the Christopher Street Liberation March, named after the location of the Stonewall Inn.

We recognize it today as the very first Pride Parade.

We actually have some accounts from the organizers of the first Liberation March.

In The Village Voice, Fred Sargeant, who’d been present at the Stonewall riots, wrote about using the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop as a hub for the nascent movement.

The bookshop became a busy intersection for budding young activist groups like the Lavender Menace and the Gay Liberation Front.

It was these thinkers and activists who decided to keep the momentum of Stonewall going, and who would begin the tradition of the Pride parade.

But it was no easy task to get all the new LGBTQ advocacy groups on the same page, and organizing the first march was a massive undertaking.

Brenda Howard, sometimes called the “Mother of Pride” and (later) the founder of the New York Area Bisexual Network, rose to the challenge.

Howard is credited with turning the march into a week-long series of activities, including a dance.

This component would ultimately guide the march toward its evolution into a month-long event.

One year after Stonewall, the first Pride march in New York City took place on June 28, 1970.

It began on Washington Place and traveled along Sixth Avenue before ending with a “Gay-In” in Central Park.

The main goal was visibility: for a community that had been pushed to the margins of society, being out and proud was a revolutionary act.

It was a huge success, drawing over 5,000 attendees, five times more than the organizers expected.

And a new tradition was born, one that would last through the decades.

Concurrent marches commemorated Stonewall in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago (which actually beat NYC to the punch by one day).

In the beginning, most attendees wore their everyday clothes, but some began to wear elaborate costumes to punctuate the radical act of being seen.

Over time, the event took on a more celebratory tone, with Los Angeles becoming the first city to incorporate a festival component in 1974, a move credited to gay filmmaker Pat Rocco.

And Gilbert Baker’s rainbow Pride flag, first flew in San Francisco in 1978.

Music and floats were added as well.

When the organizers of the first Pride march gathered together, they couldn’t have known what their event would grow into.

Today, Pride parades are held around the world, and June remains not only a month to celebrate, but also to educate the next generation of LGBTQ+ people and allies on their history.

Today, there are too many Pride parades to count, and some are even held in countries where lawmakers have attempted to stop them, like in Poland, Turkey, and even a refugee camp in Kenya.

The legacy of Pride has helped keep alive the stories of movement legends like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, both of whom are only now being commemorated with a monument in New York City.

Johnson was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front, and later went on to establish the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries alongside Rivera.

The group was dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, gay youth, and trans women and anyone else who needed help.

But now, just as back then, there are debates over what Pride should be.

Some have criticized the corporatization of Pride, with companies participating in sponsored floats and events, while others say the parade should go back to its roots as purely a protest.

There are also lingering questions as to the inclusiveness of the Pride parade.

UK Black Pride, for example, was created due to the historic exclusion of black people at Pride.

A rainbow flag with a black and brown stripe was created to emphasize the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people of color, and was met with both support and controversy.

No matter what the future holds, one thing remains abundantly clear: the Pride parade was born out of the bravery and activism of organizers who wanted to change the world, and it’s here to stay.

So, Happy Pride everyone!