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Why We Have Pride!
Late in the 19th century, as large cities allowed for greater anonymity, a new pattern of homosexual expression surfaced and by 1915 was “a community distinctly organized.” For the most part hidden from view because of social hostility, an urban gay subculture had come into existence by the 1920s and 1930s. Here in Tampa Bay the lovely minarettes of our skyline mark the riverside park that was so popular for cruising in our city's younger days.
By the 1960s, influenced by the black civil rights movement, activists such as Franklin Kameny and Barbara Gittings picketed government agencies in Washington to protest discriminatory employment policies. In San Francisco, Martin, Lyon, and others targeted police harassment. By 1969, perhaps fifty organizations existed in the United States, with memberships of a few thousand.
Then, on Friday evening, June 27, 1969, the police in New York City raided a Greenwich Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. Contrary to expectations, the patrons fought back, provoking three nights of rioting in the area accompanied by the appearance of “gay power” slogans on the buildings. Almost overnight, a massive grassroots gay liberations movement was born. In 1970, 5,000 gay men and lesbians marched in New York City to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and Pride, more or less, was born.
Progess spawned opposition. In 1977 the singer Anita Bryant led a campaign to repeal a gay rights ordinance in Florida. Her success encouraged others, and by the early 1980s, a well-organized conservative force had materialized to target the gay rights movement. Politicians, such as Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and fundamentalist ministers, such as Jerry Falwell of Lynchburg, Virginia, who formed Moral Majority, Inc., joined forces to slow the progress of the gay movement.
The onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s stimulated further organizing within the gay community. AIDS made political mobilization a matter of life and death. With a large majority of the cases striking male homosexuals, the gay community in short order created a host of organizations, such as the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City, to provide services and assistance to those infected. Local and national gay civil rights groups also grew in size and number, as the community sought to increase funding for research and education and to win protection against discrimination. A personal and social tragedy of immense proportions, AIDS paradoxically strengthened the political arm of the gay movement.
More recently in Tampa Bay we have seen a backlash against the gay community, reminding us that the future is in our own hands and the movement foreward must never stop.
Milestones in the Gay Rights Movement
While many minority groups are the target for prejudice... and discrimination... in our society, few persons face this hostility without the support and acceptance of their family as do many gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth.
Virginia Uribe and Karen Harbeck
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