Tracing the Internal Queer Revolution

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series about the gay-rights movement and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

The very first Pride parade in Los Angeles was organized alphabetically. Toward the front of the march, The Advocate newspaper presented “a carload of groovy guys in bikini swimsuits,” as described by the Reverend Troy Perry in his memoir, The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay. “This was a mass of muscle calculated to turn everyone on. It did.” Soon came a group from Orange County whose sign read Homosexuals for Ronald Reagan (“I can forgive them for being homosexuals, but not for being for Ronald Reagan,” a bystander cracked). Later arrived “shrieking drag queens,” leather-clad motorcyclists, “a young beautiful man fastened on a cross” to protest police brutality, and a pet section. “One fellow had a big white husky dog on a leash,” Perry wrote. “He had a sign on his dog reading, ‘All of us don’t walk poodles.’”

The parade was in 1970, the same year as New York’s inaugural Christopher Street Liberation Day, and to read Perry’s account excerpted in the recently released Stonewall Reader anthology is to see how the visual signatures of gay liberation were set from the start. The famous flag wouldn’t arrive till 1978, but all along the aesthetic was rainbowlike: politics and pleasure, flesh and sacrament, stupid puns and serious slogans. As parades bustle in cities around the world this June, as celebrants and celebrities and even lawmakers don glitter, Pride remains a visceral and visual fest. It’s meant to, as Perry put it, turn everyone on—not just sexually, though that too.