This text is a part of Hyperallergic’s 2025 Pleasure Month sequence, spotlighting moments from New York’s LGBTQ+ artwork historical past all through June.
In 1970, one yr after the legendary first brick shattered the home windows of the Stonewall Inn, hundreds took to the streets of Decrease Manhattan to take part within the Christopher Road Liberation Day March — an occasion that might later be remembered because the inaugural annual New York Metropolis Pleasure March. Held in coordination with sister occasions deliberate in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, it was a defining second in the US queer rights motion that shined a lightweight on the struggles of the LGBTQ+ neighborhood, who had been demanding equality for years via grassroots protest actions and exhibits of resistance towards police brutality and harassment.
Previous to Stonewall, many early protests for queer rights had been organized by the Homophile Motion — a predominantly White-led marketing campaign that emerged after World Warfare II and fought towards discriminatory anti-sodomy legal guidelines and different measures that criminalized lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, and transgender identities in schooling, employment, and broader society. This motion led to the founding of a number of dozen queer rights teams throughout the nation, just like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, which opted for cryptic names to keep away from utilizing explicitly queer phrases like “gay” and “lesbian.” These organizations usually targeted on elevating public consciousness of queer discrimination by conducting demonstrations such because the annual Fourth of July Reminder Day picket outdoors Independence Corridor in Philadelphia, which came about from 1965 to 1969.
Representatives of the Buffalo Radical Lesbians on the Christopher Road Homosexual Liberation Day March in 1971 (photograph by Yigal Mann/Pix/Michael Ochs Archives through Getty Photos)
However after Stonewall, many younger activists started discussing changing the Reminder Day protests with an annual demonstration to commemorate the rebellion. A number of of those conversations had been spearheaded by Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop proprietor Craig Rodwell and members of the nascent Homosexual Liberation Entrance (GLF), a bunch that proudly reclaimed queer figuring out phrases.
New York Metropolis Pleasure in 1989 on the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall revolt ({photograph} by Joseph T. Barna through Flickr)
“Say it clear, say it loud: Gay is good, gay is proud!” members chanted on Sunday, June 28, 1970, because the march progressed from Washington Place north up Sixth Avenue. Fred Sargent, one of many organizers, described the occasion within the Village Voice: “I was astonished; we stretched out as far as I could see, thousands of us,” he recalled. “There were no floats, no music, no boys in briefs. The cops turned their backs on us to convey their disdain, but the masses of people kept carrying signs and banners, chanting and waving to surprised onlookers.” After 50 blocks, the march culminated in an enormous celebration that organizers referred to as a “gay-in” at Central Park’s Sheep Meadow.
“ The politics [of the march] was just to end the closet,” Jay W. Walker, co-founder of the Reclaim Pleasure Coalition, instructed Hyperallergic. “To stop hiding. To stop being passive victims and to demand our human rights.”
At this time, New York Metropolis’s Pleasure March is organized by Heritage of Pleasure. (photograph Maya Pontone/Hyperallergic)
The celebration of Pleasure has advanced within the years since that first march, particularly because the queer rights motion gained momentum via occasions just like the 1979 Nationwide March on Washington for Lesbian and Homosexual Rights and AIDS advocacy all through the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s. This enlargement has additionally led to criticism of opportunistic practices like company “rainbow-washing,” during which corporations leverage LGBTQ+ symbolism of their advertising and marketing with out supporting queer rights in apply.
At this time, New York Metropolis’s Pleasure March is organized by the nonprofit Heritage of Pleasure, and its course has additionally modified considerably. For 20 years after the inaugural occasion, the procession concluded in Central Park; now, the march sometimes disperses at fifteenth Road and Seventh Avenue after weaving its means via the West Village on a route pre-approved by town’s police division.
Queer Liberation March for Black Lives and In opposition to Police Brutality in 2020 (photograph by Leandro Justen, courtesy Reclaim Pleasure Coalition)
These adjustments have led to various Pleasure festivities, such because the Reclaim Pleasure Coalition’s annual Queer Liberation March, which seeks to uphold the unique political mission of the inaugural march by rejecting company affect and police involvement. Based in 2019, the march is rooted in intersectional causes and has supported Black Lives Matter, incapacity justice, trans rights, and an finish to the US-backed Israeli struggle on Gaza over time.
“ When we had our very first Queer Liberation March, we ended with a big rally in Central Park on the Great Lawn and above our rally stage was a banner that read, ‘ None are free until all are free.’ That’s really the driving tenet of the march,” Walker mentioned.
Scheduled for this Sunday, June 29, this yr’s march will concentrate on the Trump administration’s ongoing assaults towards civil liberties, which have acutely focused immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and the incapacity neighborhood. The NYC Pleasure March and the NYC Dyke March may even happen this weekend.
“ We can’t separate the struggles,” march organizer Jasmina Jz Sinanović instructed Hyperallergic. “ We value human life … anything that’s damaging humanity is damaging queer people because queer people are human.”
