Speaker 1: But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
Speaker 1: the Outspoken Podcast Network. Hey, it's Jordan. I wanted to
Speaker 1: share some exciting news. We've been nominated for Outstanding Podcast
Speaker 1: of the Year at the Glad Awards. This is the
Speaker 1: top recognition for queer media in our industry, and I
Speaker 1: just wanted to say thank you so much, because we
Speaker 1: couldn't have done this without you. Your emails, your messages
Speaker 1: to me on Instagram and TikTok. They mean so much
Speaker 1: to me and they keep me really encouraged and fired up.
Speaker 1: So keep sending them and keep telling me what you
Speaker 1: think of the episodes. I love hearing from you. Now
Speaker 1: let's get into the show.
Speaker 2: The marches now are parades. This was a march. This
Speaker 2: was a march. This was a civil rights march. There
Speaker 2: were no floats, there were no corporate sponsors. All the
Speaker 2: signs were handmade. What seems today like a paltry number
Speaker 2: of people, you know, in the thousands, as opposed in
Speaker 2: the hundreds of thousands approaching the millions. To me, it
Speaker 2: looked like this strong. It was our community doing it
Speaker 2: by ourselves and for ourselves. And we immediately started screaming,
Speaker 2: you know, join us, Join us.
Speaker 1: As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South,
Speaker 1: I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
Speaker 1: ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
Speaker 1: that by seeking out our history, and what I've found
Speaker 1: are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love.
Speaker 1: In this episode, we'll meet Ellen Broidy, one of the
Speaker 1: organizers of the first ever Pride March, held in New
Speaker 1: York in nineteen seventy. We'll learn about the original goals
Speaker 1: of that first Pride March, and over half a century later,
Speaker 1: whether Ellen thinks we've accomplished them. For my Heart Podcast,
Speaker 1: I'm Jordan and Solves, and this is what we loved.
Speaker 1: I remember my first Pride March. I was fifteen years
Speaker 1: old in Houston, Texas, the city that I grew up in,
Speaker 1: and I had a really good friend of mine who
Speaker 1: was openly gay that I went to high school with,
Speaker 1: and she begged me to come to the Pride parade
Speaker 1: with her. Most of the people in my life had
Speaker 1: already suspected that I was gay, but I was so
Speaker 1: deeply ashamed that I didn't want to admit it even
Speaker 1: to myself. And I thought, oh my, oh my, God,
Speaker 1: if anyone sees me going to the Pride parade, it
Speaker 1: will confirm all of these accusations. But I let her
Speaker 1: convince me. To be honest, It wasn't this euphoric moment
Speaker 1: when I suddenly felt so seen and heard and inspired
Speaker 1: to come out. It was in the sweltering heat of
Speaker 1: the Texas summer, and I remember feeling so out of place.
Speaker 1: I tried to dress in what I thought was my
Speaker 1: straightest outfit ever in case anyone saw me, basketball shorts
Speaker 1: and a red polo with the collar popped. I can't
Speaker 1: even say that this was of the times, because it
Speaker 1: honestly would have been tragic in any era. But what
Speaker 1: I do remember is a little debate that happened on
Speaker 1: the street corner. It was between one of the church hecklers,
Speaker 1: who was saying all gay people were going to Hell,
Speaker 1: and a gay queen who was probably in college. He
Speaker 1: was small, sporting gene schwartz and a tank top that
Speaker 1: showed his humble but noticeable build, and was wearing Harry
Speaker 1: Potter glasses with rainbow glitter on his face. A femme queen.
Speaker 1: I remember the heckler screaming up Bible verse after Bible verse.
Speaker 1: But I also remember the queen pulling out his own
Speaker 1: Bible verses to defend being gay. He seemed really eloquent
Speaker 1: and so calm. This was twenty eleven. I had never
Speaker 1: seen anyone so confidently defend being gay. I hadn't seen
Speaker 1: that many gay people up until that point. Actually, it
Speaker 1: was clear that he came to Pride to have fun
Speaker 1: with his friends, but it was also clear that he
Speaker 1: was there to take up the space he believed he deserved,
Speaker 1: exactly as who he was. My next guest, doctor Ellen Broidy,
Speaker 1: probably had that same feeling when she attended her first
Speaker 1: Pride March. The first Pride March, ever, she was actually
Speaker 1: the person that proposed it, and, along with others, helped
Speaker 1: organize it. It took place one year after Stonewall in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy in New York City. At the time, being
Speaker 1: queer was considered criminal and a mental illness, but this
Speaker 1: was also during a time of great social progress in America.
Speaker 2: I grew up in a home with two parents who
Speaker 2: were in fact activists. My mother was for many years
Speaker 2: the only white employee at the National Urban League. My
Speaker 2: father was a white collar worker. They were both quite
Speaker 2: aware of the inequalities that exist in our country. And
Speaker 2: remember this is back in the forties and fifties. They
Speaker 2: would take me to marches and demonstrations. I remember actually
Speaker 2: going with my mother to picket a Woolworths in Manhattan.
Speaker 2: What was Wolworth's, a wo Worst and Selix was a
Speaker 2: large department store chain. They were basically one floor. They
Speaker 2: were called five and dimes. There's a place where you
Speaker 2: could get inexpensive things. The Woolworths had segregated lunch counters
Speaker 2: in the South. Some of the first actions that these
Speaker 2: students took in the South were at Woolworth's lunch counters.
Speaker 1: And so you and your mom were going to just.
Speaker 2: Pick it outside. It was just, you know, a statement
Speaker 2: of statement of support.
Speaker 1: When was the first moment that you knew you were gay?
Speaker 2: It didn't have to do a sort of my personal
Speaker 2: attraction to individuals, more of a personal attraction to a concept.
Speaker 2: I went to elementary school in Greenwich Village and I
Speaker 2: would see people in the street who, even at a
Speaker 2: young age, I could clearly identify as belonging to a
Speaker 2: certain community, and it almost like a light went off.
Speaker 2: That's my community. That's where it was completely separated out
Speaker 2: from attraction, from sexuality, from any kind of physicality. It
Speaker 2: was almost this sense of there's a community out there
Speaker 2: of people like me. Whatever that might mean to a
Speaker 2: twelve year old, but that was my first sort of recognition.
Speaker 2: And I also remember like being on the bus going
Speaker 2: to school and knowing it's like I had this physical
Speaker 2: core in the middle of my being telling me who
Speaker 2: I was and leading me. You might say I was
Speaker 2: led by my gut, and I guess that's the easiest
Speaker 2: way to say it.
Speaker 1: And what was it like being a queer person in
Speaker 1: the fifty and sixties in America?
Speaker 2: It wasn't so long after the McCarthy era, you know,
Speaker 2: inco comedy queer was It was very clear that being
Speaker 2: gay in America was being an outlaw. However, I kind
Speaker 2: of enjoyed that. I enjoyed the illicitness of it, the
Speaker 2: illegality of it. I enjoyed the transgression, even though I
Speaker 2: had learned through no particular example, and nobody taught me this,
Speaker 2: but I had learned at that point that you'd be quiet,
Speaker 2: you'd be careful, you take care because it was dangerous.
Speaker 2: I mean, people were being beaten up in the streets.
Speaker 2: There were bar rays going on all the time. Even
Speaker 2: though I was too young to even frequent any of
Speaker 2: those places, I knew enough to know what was going on.
Speaker 1: So Ellen, before you went to NYU, you were at
Speaker 1: Boston College, and while you were there you had a
Speaker 1: nervous breakdown. And I'm wondering, was that because you were
Speaker 1: coming to terms with your sexuality?
Speaker 2: Oh, I had a between high school, I went to college,
Speaker 2: I went to Boston University. I lasted just under a
Speaker 2: quarter before I had a complete and total meltdown, and
Speaker 2: I'm not sure why, but I had to leave school.
Speaker 2: I was hospitalized for quite some time, but then came
Speaker 2: out of the hospital and went to NYU. And I
Speaker 2: really don't think that my emerging sense of self or
Speaker 2: the repressive environment led to whatever was that caused me
Speaker 2: to collapse emotionally or mentally. When I was at Boston
Speaker 2: University those three plus months, I wouldn't exactly call it
Speaker 2: a gay community, but my best friends were two gay
Speaker 2: men and a lesbian, so we were clearly out to
Speaker 2: each other. In fact, when I said to the psychiatrists
Speaker 2: who also was a lesbian who I was assigned to
Speaker 2: in the hospital, my problems are because I'm a lesbian's
Speaker 2: you know, that's why I'm here, That's why I had
Speaker 2: self destructive behavior. Yeah, yah yah. And she looked at
Speaker 2: me and she said, you are too messed up to
Speaker 2: call yourself something that indicates you know how to love.
Speaker 2: That was a pretty positive thing to say to a
Speaker 2: messed up eighteen year old. Don't blame it on who
Speaker 2: you are, your sexuality. There's a lot of other stuff
Speaker 2: going on here, but that core of who you are
Speaker 2: is not the problem.
Speaker 1: Hmm.
Speaker 2: She was an amazing woman. Her name was doctor Catherine Thales.
Speaker 1: Well, fast forwarding a little bit too. When you get
Speaker 1: to NYU, you become involved with an organization called the
Speaker 1: Student Homophile League League. Yes, tell us what that is
Speaker 1: and why you became involved and sort of what it
Speaker 1: was like being a part of that group. This was
Speaker 1: the sixties.
Speaker 2: This was the sixties. This was nineteen maybe sixty five
Speaker 2: or sixty six, sort of around the same time the
Speaker 2: Oscar Wild Memorial Bookshop opened. But a man named Stephen Donaldson,
Speaker 2: who was a student at Columbia, had started a group,
Speaker 2: the first group in the nation forgb We did not
Speaker 2: have LGBTQ, we didn't have the whole alphabet. At that
Speaker 2: point it was lesbians, gays, and one or two bisexuals.
Speaker 2: We didn't trust because we thought they did good. And
Speaker 2: three or four of us from NYU met in Stephen's
Speaker 2: dorm room one day and asked about the possibility of
Speaker 2: starting It wasn't exactly a chapter, but borrowing the name
Speaker 2: Student Homophile League and starting our own group at NYU,
Speaker 2: and Stephen said fine. We would meet in a room
Speaker 2: in the student union, and of course a lot of
Speaker 2: the young people were deeply in the closet and we'd
Speaker 2: have the door open where the meeting was being held,
Speaker 2: and you'd see kids walking back and forth and back
Speaker 2: and forth before they decided they could come in. So
Speaker 2: it took It took courage. You know, they're looking around,
Speaker 2: who's looking at me? Who else is here on the
Speaker 2: fourth floor of the student union. But they came in,
Speaker 2: they joined, and it became a rather active group.
Speaker 1: What was it like coming out to your family?
Speaker 2: I'd agreed to do a TV show in New York
Speaker 2: on the PBS, on the public television station. It was me,
Speaker 2: Jack Nichols, elij Clark, and I can't remember who else.
Speaker 2: And I knew that my parents watched this show. I
Speaker 2: wasn't out to them yet, but I knew they watched
Speaker 2: the show. So I decided, brilliant that I probably should
Speaker 2: tell my mother. So I called her up and I
Speaker 2: invited her out to lunch. We went to lunch right
Speaker 2: across from her office building. Every single person in the
Speaker 2: agency must have come by the restaurant while we were there.
Speaker 2: My mother was so was wound up. She was so tight.
Speaker 2: She was sure I was going to say I had cancer,
Speaker 2: I'd flunked out of college, some horrific thing. And I
Speaker 2: blurted out a crazy conglomeration of lesbian, gay homess. I
Speaker 2: didn't even know the word that I used. She leans
Speaker 2: back in her chair. All the tension drains from her face.
Speaker 2: It was kind of amazing. It was almost like watching
Speaker 2: a cartoon. And she says, I've known since you were three.
Speaker 2: So I said, why didn't you tell me? She said,
Speaker 2: I didn't think it was any of my business. You'd
Speaker 2: find out on your own, in your own good time.
Speaker 2: But and it was always a butt with my mother.
Speaker 2: My mother. Butt was her favorite word. But don't tell
Speaker 2: your father. You'd be able to take it. He won't
Speaker 2: be able to deal with it. I'm an only child
Speaker 2: also won't be able to deal with it. So fine,
Speaker 2: I don't tell my father. I do the show. The
Speaker 2: next morning, I'm coming home from class. And this was
Speaker 2: in the days of no cell phones, of course, just
Speaker 2: your regular yellow phone on the wall. We lived in
Speaker 2: a fifth floor walk up, and I swear you could
Speaker 2: hear the angry phone ringing from the first floor. Yet
Speaker 2: on the phone, it's mother. She says, the shit's hit
Speaker 2: the fan, and she hangs up. My father had been
Speaker 2: at lunch that day after the show, and some a colleague,
Speaker 2: a work colleague, not a friend, a work colleague came
Speaker 2: by and said, I saw your daughter on TV last night,
Speaker 2: and proceeded to out me to my father in the
Speaker 2: middle of a business lunch.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: He was furious, having nothing to do with my being
Speaker 2: a lesbian and everything to do with the fact that
Speaker 2: my mother and I didn't trust him.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: We had that blow up and that was it. Then
Speaker 2: it was just his anger at feeling ignored, avoided, eliminated, whatever,
Speaker 2: not being trusted.
Speaker 1: In June of nineteen sixty nine, the Stonewall Riots happened
Speaker 1: when a bunch of street queens stood their ground against
Speaker 1: the cops and won. Ellen was spending the summer on
Speaker 1: Fire Island, but word got to her fast. The riots
Speaker 1: brought attention and support to the gay community for the
Speaker 1: discrimination they faced, and her activist friends knew how important
Speaker 1: this momentum was to capitalize on. One month after Stonewall,
Speaker 1: the first radical LGBT activist group was born. It was
Speaker 1: called the Gay Liberation Front or GLF for short, and
Speaker 1: when Ellen got back from Fire Island, she joined it.
Speaker 1: In November of that year, queer activists held a meeting
Speaker 1: called the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations. Ellen attended,
Speaker 1: and it was there that she proposed the first ever
Speaker 1: annual pride demonstration. It was to be called the Christopher
Speaker 1: Street Liberation Day March. In nineteen sixty nine, Stonewall happens,
Speaker 1: and you present the idea of a march to commemorate
Speaker 1: the one year anniversary. Tell us how you came up
Speaker 1: with that idea, how you presented it, and what the
Speaker 1: goal of the march was.
Speaker 2: Yes, I was working, in quotes at the Oscar Wild
Speaker 2: Memorial Bookshop. The end quotes means I was part of
Speaker 2: the unpaid staff, but I was there almost every afternoon
Speaker 2: because the original site of the Oscar Wild was in
Speaker 2: the middle of the NYU campus. This is before it
Speaker 2: moved over to Christopher Street in a much larger space.
Speaker 2: So Craig Rodwell and I were actually quite good friends.
Speaker 1: And tell us a little bit about what the Oscar
Speaker 1: World Bookstore was. Who Craig Rodwell is.
Speaker 2: Greig Rodwell was an amazing guy. He regrettably died in
Speaker 2: the eighties, I believe of stomach cancer. But Craig came
Speaker 2: from the Midwest. He had a rough life, a rough childhood,
Speaker 2: a very supportive mother, but he came from a single
Speaker 2: parent household. Knew he was gay, also pre natally, but
Speaker 2: he always had this dream to open up a bookshop
Speaker 2: that would handle gay and lesbian literature, positive stuff, novels, nonfiction.
Speaker 2: Of the few writers who were not saying we were
Speaker 2: either morally diseased or physically diseased or mentally diseased at
Speaker 2: any rate. He scraped together the money and he opened
Speaker 2: up this bookshop on Mercer Street, and I would hang
Speaker 2: out there. My partner Linda would come after work. Everybody
Speaker 2: would be there. It became sort of like a small
Speaker 2: community center. Stonewall happens in June of sixty nine. In
Speaker 2: November of sixty nine, there was a meeting in Philadelphia
Speaker 2: of something called the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations
Speaker 2: or ERCO, which drew groups most we from New York,
Speaker 2: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, but some groups for Fatherfield GLF
Speaker 2: had started by this point, so they were an organization
Speaker 2: that could have quote unquote delegates to this meeting, and
Speaker 2: I was going both as a member of GLF and
Speaker 2: as the president of the Gay Students Liberation at NYU.
Speaker 2: The night before we were going to go to Philadelphia,
Speaker 2: Craig and his then partner Fred Sargent, and myself and
Speaker 2: my partner Linda had dinner at Craig's apartment, and we
Speaker 2: started talking about what we thought was going to happen
Speaker 2: at this meeting, you know, what was going to be
Speaker 2: on the agenda, what was important, what was critical. And
Speaker 2: the more we talked, the more it became a parent
Speaker 2: that Stonewall and what happened at Stonewall really needed to
Speaker 2: feature large in whatever was going to be going on.
Speaker 2: We were talking, suddenly Craig disappears. He comes back. He
Speaker 2: has a pad and a pen. He says let's write
Speaker 2: a statement. Let's talk about what we can do to
Speaker 2: make Stonewall stay alive. I have to step back here
Speaker 2: because there's a lot of history that predates this, because
Speaker 2: we came up with a proposal based on a reaction
Speaker 2: to another demonstration supporting the rights of lesbians and gay
Speaker 2: men to be employed by the federal government because Frank
Speaker 2: Hammony had been fired for being gay from his position
Speaker 2: as a federal employee. So every year, for several years,
Speaker 2: this demonstration would go on. The men were required to
Speaker 2: wear jackets and ties, the women dresses or skirts. It
Speaker 2: was extraordinarily orderly. There was minimum age I think you
Speaker 2: had to be twenty one or older. And part of
Speaker 2: our proposal was to turn this annual event, this very
Speaker 2: regimented dress code, age delimited event into a major statement
Speaker 2: for game and lesbian liberation and gay lesbian pride. So
Speaker 2: that's what we were working with. And actually we talk
Speaker 2: about this in the proposal, but we mentioned that, and
Speaker 2: we mentioned no dress codes, no age limits.
Speaker 1: Stonewall marked a huge shift in gay American activism. Before Stonewall,
Speaker 1: the scene was dominated by two groups, the Mattachine Society
Speaker 1: for Gay Men and the daughters of Balitis for lesbians.
Speaker 1: Their goals were to work within the system to seek
Speaker 1: change through legal action and peaceful protest. They wanted to
Speaker 1: conform and assimilate into American society. But Ellen was part
Speaker 1: of Gay Liberation Front or GLF, a new generation of
Speaker 1: activists that didn't feel that way anymore. They didn't like
Speaker 1: society the way it was. They wanted radical change, an
Speaker 1: end to capitalism, an end to the nuclear family, and
Speaker 1: an end to the military. This created tension at the
Speaker 1: conference because both the radicals and the conformists were present.
Speaker 2: How I ended up making the proposal is that Craig
Speaker 2: was very much a lightning rod, controversial well controversial mostly
Speaker 2: He had butted heads with Matachine for years. He and
Speaker 2: Dick Leitch, who was the president of Matachine, were sort
Speaker 2: of on and off frenemies. It was always hard to
Speaker 2: figure out what their relationship was. But the concern was
Speaker 2: that if Craig made the proposal, the people in the
Speaker 2: room would look at the speaker, not the speech. It
Speaker 2: was decided that since I was credentialed at this meeting
Speaker 2: because of the NYU group, that there would be less pushback.
Speaker 2: So we wrote it collectively Craig knew better than to
Speaker 2: say that he should present it, and it fell to
Speaker 2: me to present it.
Speaker 1: How did it go?
Speaker 2: It passed with only one abstention, which was New York.
Speaker 1: They abstained and briefly kind of tell me what were
Speaker 1: the goals of this march?
Speaker 2: Visibility? I think that was that was probably the major goal.
Speaker 2: Visibility memorializing what happened at Stonewall, fighting back, the power
Speaker 2: to be in the streets as who you are, and
Speaker 2: the fact that it was open to everybody that you
Speaker 2: didn't you didn't have to conform to a certain idea
Speaker 2: of what a gay man or a lesbian was. We
Speaker 2: weren't asking anybody's permission to be who we were.
Speaker 1: And a couple of days before the march, leading up
Speaker 1: to the march, were you nervous at all about anything?
Speaker 2: I was terrified. We had no idea whether the people
Speaker 2: who were going to be lining the streets, on the
Speaker 2: fire escapes, looking at the windows were there to support
Speaker 2: us or to do us harm. It was a complete unknown,
Speaker 2: and that saur buying was also a complete unknown. What
Speaker 2: the behavior of the police would be. They were not
Speaker 2: given what happened to Stonewall. They were not exactly our friends.
Speaker 1: In other words, you were nervous about violence.
Speaker 2: Yes, I was not nervous about being seen and being
Speaker 2: in the street and making that kind of statement. I
Speaker 2: was nervous about something preventing us from making the statement
Speaker 2: that we needed to make. But I will say that
Speaker 2: the minute we stepped into the street and started marching
Speaker 2: up from the village to Central Park, all that fear dissipated.
Speaker 1: At this point, you're kind of on I guess, rocky
Speaker 1: terms with your dad and mom. After sort of coming up.
Speaker 2: The morning of the march, my father called me. He said,
Speaker 2: I know this is happening today. It was widely advertised
Speaker 2: in the city. I know this is happening today. You
Speaker 2: write down on the palm of your hand our lawyer's
Speaker 2: number if there's any trouble, if you get into trouble,
Speaker 2: if you're arrested, if you're harassed, if any authority gets
Speaker 2: in your face, that's your first phone call. Wow, he
Speaker 2: wrote me a poem. I can't even remember why he
Speaker 2: did it, what caused him to do it, But he
Speaker 2: wrote a poem. But the tone of it was, and
Speaker 2: the winds, the waves, nothing can wash away the love
Speaker 2: of a father for his child, I count myself extraordinarily blessed.
Speaker 1: So going back to the march, describe what that day
Speaker 1: was like. So you start the day off being kind
Speaker 1: of scared and nervous, understandably so, and walk me through
Speaker 1: kind of what you see, what you smell, what you hear.
Speaker 2: Getting to Christopher Street. We lived in the East Village,
Speaker 2: So going all the way across town to Christopher Street,
Speaker 2: what seems today like a paltry number of people, you know,
Speaker 2: in the thousands, as opposed in the hundreds of thousands
Speaker 2: approaching the millions. To me, it looked like this throng
Speaker 2: and that created a sense of safety because there is
Speaker 2: I mean, let's face it, there's there's in numbers. The
Speaker 2: marches now are parades. This was a march. This was
Speaker 2: a march. This was a civil rights march. There were
Speaker 2: no floats, there were no corporate sponsors, there were no
Speaker 2: police walking behind us like this was some sort of
Speaker 2: perverse Macy's Day parade. It was just people taking to
Speaker 2: the streets, owning the streets. All the signs were handmade.
Speaker 2: People were dressed in everything from the most flamboyant drag
Speaker 2: you can imagine too, you know, the separatest lesbians in
Speaker 2: their flannel shirts and workboots. It was our community doing
Speaker 2: it by ourselves and for ourselves. There were people lining
Speaker 2: the sidewalks, there were people on the on the fire escapes,
Speaker 2: there were people on the roofs. And we immediately started screaming,
Speaker 2: you know, join us, join us, out of the closets,
Speaker 2: into the streets, off of the sidewalks, into the streets.
Speaker 2: And unlike the New York Parade now barricades on both
Speaker 2: sides of the street, if you're not sort of officially
Speaker 2: in the parade, you're not in the parade. With this one,
Speaker 2: people were streaming off the sidewalk and walking with us.
Speaker 2: So that was that was That was like a stunning moment.
Speaker 1: Before recently retiring, Ellen was a librarian and a professor
Speaker 1: at UCLA in their Women's Studies department. But much before
Speaker 1: that she had proposed and helped organize the first ever
Speaker 1: annual Pride march. She remembers that day vividly. After marching
Speaker 1: through half of Manhattan, Ellen and the other protesters made
Speaker 1: it to Sheep's Meadow in Central Park. Oftentimes, queer people
Speaker 1: didn't gather in broad daylight together at that time in
Speaker 1: fear of violence or harassment. So this was a site
Speaker 1: many marchers had never seen before. The park filled with
Speaker 1: gay people, As queer historian Lilian Vaderman said, never in
Speaker 1: history had so many gay and lesbian people come together
Speaker 1: in one place for a common endeavor. It was a
Speaker 1: triumph for the community and for Ellen. I wonder if
Speaker 1: you have a favorite memory of that day or story.
Speaker 2: Mostly some of the internal change that I went through,
Speaker 2: from the fear of being in that situation to absolutely understanding, feeling, respecting,
Speaker 2: the joy of it. And by the time we got
Speaker 2: to the park two Sheet Meadow, it was a real party.
Speaker 2: The march itself was the political statement. Getting to the
Speaker 2: park and being in the park with all of these
Speaker 2: people was the celebratory statement. Not only had we made
Speaker 2: it sixty some blocks alive and in one piece, but
Speaker 2: we made it as a community.
Speaker 1: When you went home that day after the march, how
Speaker 1: did you feel about the future of the movement.
Speaker 2: I really thought we were on the cusp of a revolution.
Speaker 2: I thought that we had now, we had become the
Speaker 2: lavender stripe in the rainbow, and that there would be
Speaker 2: a people's revolution and things would change so markedly for
Speaker 2: all marginalized communities. And that's how I felt. For some time, we,
Speaker 2: honest to God, thought that we were now out part
Speaker 2: of a revolutionary movement that was going to change change
Speaker 2: this country in profound, profound ways. Us, the Black Panthers,
Speaker 2: the Young Lords, which was the Puerto Rican group, the
Speaker 2: women's movement, that we were going to make such profound
Speaker 2: changes that the country would never turn back to the
Speaker 2: class based, race based, gender based nation that we had
Speaker 2: come out of in the fifties.
Speaker 1: The Pride March is pretty different these days. You think
Speaker 1: then what you described as the first March, and I
Speaker 1: wonder what about it feels different for you?
Speaker 2: The Gay Liberation Front, those of us who have survived
Speaker 2: were grand marshals in twenty nineteen at the fiftieth anniversary
Speaker 2: of Stonewall. And I had been to marches off and
Speaker 2: on Los Angeles, San Francisco, the funny little thing we
Speaker 2: have in Santa Barbara, sometimes in New York. But it
Speaker 2: just struck me, you know, what am I doing leading
Speaker 2: a march with AT and T and Bank of America
Speaker 2: and the NYPD. You know, it's wonderful that they that
Speaker 2: we created. And I'll say this, this is ego maniacal,
Speaker 2: but that we created the space for those huge corporations,
Speaker 2: those huge entities to have lesbian and gay and buy
Speaker 2: and trans groups. So that made me feel good. It
Speaker 2: didn't make me feel good that one day a year
Speaker 2: they were patting themselves on the back to do this.
Speaker 2: I don't like the floats. I don't like the fact
Speaker 2: that there are barricades between the marchers and the folks
Speaker 2: watching the march. That doesn't feel like building community to me.
Speaker 2: On the other hand, when we went by, and because
Speaker 2: both my partner and I have some mobility issues, we
Speaker 2: were riding in a flatbed truck, and the love from
Speaker 2: the people behind the barricades on the other side of
Speaker 2: the barricades was just amazing, just amazing, and in some
Speaker 2: ways made me reflect back on how it felt at
Speaker 2: that first march.
Speaker 1: Do you think your goals were accomplished with that very
Speaker 1: first Pride March in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2: That is a complicated question, in part because I would
Speaker 2: be hard pressed to identify anybody at that first march
Speaker 2: who thought serving in the military or getting married was
Speaker 2: a goal. The goal really was liberation, revolution, other things,
Speaker 2: military service, marriage, those are important, and I think that
Speaker 2: those evolved out of what we started. The reformist parts
Speaker 2: of sort of a broader LGBTQ agenda were achieved, the
Speaker 2: revolutionary parts were not. So I think I mean clearly
Speaker 2: we started something and that something is still going on.
Speaker 1: Ellen, you've been an educator for a long time and
Speaker 1: you have worked with a lot of young people that
Speaker 1: engage in the queer history that you lived, and I
Speaker 1: wonder what about that gives you hope.
Speaker 2: I was in women's studies, and I was a librarian
Speaker 2: both at University of California, Irvine and at UCLA and
Speaker 2: then at UC Santa Barbara. I was a writing specialist
Speaker 2: or a minority scholars program. Those students, all of whom
Speaker 2: were either students of color or first generation in college,
Speaker 2: whether they were LGBTQ or straight, they all had the
Speaker 2: same fire in their gut that I remember having at
Speaker 2: nineteen and twenty and twenty one as an undergraduate. So
Speaker 2: they gave me great hope. I do get a sense
Speaker 2: that there are groups of young people who are not
Speaker 2: going to back down, who understand that we didn't accomp
Speaker 2: what we set out to accomplish, but we set a
Speaker 2: framework and we have to keep moving forward.
Speaker 1: This show is about history, but it's really about passing
Speaker 1: things down from one queer generation to the next. Stories, love, wisdom,
Speaker 1: what have you. What's one piece of wisdom that you
Speaker 1: want to give to young people, the next generation of
Speaker 1: young folks.
Speaker 2: We've been here throughout history, we will continue to be here,
Speaker 2: and you cannot wipe us off the face of the
Speaker 2: earth by saying that book can't be in the library,
Speaker 2: that class can't be taught, that word can't be spoken.
Speaker 2: We're not going away. You have a history. You can
Speaker 2: learn both from our victories and our failures, which we
Speaker 2: had many. But you can't be an activist. You can't
Speaker 2: be a political person if you're not a lifelong learner.
Speaker 2: If you're stuck in some idea, some concept, some immovable ideology,
Speaker 2: you're not going to go any place, which does not
Speaker 2: mean that you step back from what you truly believe.
Speaker 2: But you interrogate, You investigate, You ask questions. You look
Speaker 2: to others who may have answers. Some you'll agree with,
Speaker 2: some you won't. The younger generation is moving forward, is
Speaker 2: moving way beyond me, that's for sure. If they would
Speaker 2: occasionally turn around, smile and wave, we know you're there.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: What we Loved is hosted by me Jordan can solve this.
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Speaker 1: But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our
Speaker 1: producers are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger. Our
Speaker 1: executive producers are Me, Maya Howard and Katrina Norville. Original
Speaker 1: music by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Bronson and
Speaker 1: Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a
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Speaker 1: thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.