1979 Ad

Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, The, March-April, 2005 by Amin Ghaziani

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, on October 14, 1979, an estimated 75,000 to 125,000 lesbians and gay men from all across America marched on Washington at a moment in the movement's history that was remarkably different from the current one. This was the first such March on Washington staged by American gays, rendering it in collective memory as the symbolic coming out and birth of a national movement for lesbian and gay rights. Gleaning insights into why this march happened and how it was organized both commemorates the 25th anniversary of the event and offers clues into contemporary gay culture and politics.

The gay liberation movement of the late 1970's legitimized a range of causes that it was advancing by linking itself to other grassroots demonstrations, especially the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington. Such connections helped to establish the movement as a progressive one and also emphasized the need for an autonomous lesbian and gay political presence. In a letter dated Sept. 10, 1979, and circulated to major gay organizations and leaders throughout the U.S., march coordinators Steve Ault and Joyce Hunter wrote,

  Dear Sisters and Brothers, On August 28, 1963, there was the first
  mass Civil Rights March on Washington. Lesbians and gay men were
  there, hidden in the crowd that cheered Martin Luther King Jr.'s
  dream. There have been many marches since then--anti-war, Earth Day,
  ERA--and slowly, lesbians and gay men began to raise our own banners
  and march behind them. Now, on October 14, 1979, lesbians and gay men,
  and our supporters, will march for our own dream: the dream of
  justice, equality, and freedom for twenty million lesbians and gay men
  in the United States.

It was our turn.

Where did the idea for this first march come from? The earliest paper trail dates the organizing back to a meeting held during Thanksgiving weekend in 1973 by the National Gay Mobilizing Committee in the student union at the University of Illinois' Urbana-Champaign campus. Jeff Graubart, who coordinated the meeting, said one of the goals of the proposed march was "to gain solidarity for the gay movement in the country, which ... is now isolated and fragmented." March co-coordinator Joyce Hunter echoed this concern six years later when she remarked that part of the goal for having a march was to transform a "highly fragmented movement that is local in focus into a reasonably unified movement."

The lesbian and gay movement had not yet achieved a national identity or self-consciousness. Ten years after Stonewall, political activity was not yet nationally networked, despite rising insurgent sensibilities provoked by an onslaught of local-level threats that attracted national media attention such as Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children Campaign" in Miami and Senator Briggs's Proposition 6 in California. Early organizers faced daunting barriers to creating a national movement. It had been only six years since the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Relatively few lesbians and gay men were out of the closet to their families, neighbors, and coworkers, and hence they were reluctant to participate in any public protest event. The gay press, according to march organizer Eric Rofes, was still in its infancy and mostly ineffective at reaching potential participants, while the "straight press" generally did not provide much coverage of the movement. Activists who were involved in the movement represented a broad spectrum of cultural backgrounds and had not yet developed the skills needed to work effectively across their own lines of difference. The challenge was to construct a unified, national movement using the fragments of locally insurgent activists, however burdened by their disparate cultural commitments.

The meeting at Urbana-Champaign never blossomed into an organizational infrastructure for a March on Washington. After 1973, the next major organized attempt to involve leaders from across the U.S. to contemplate a Washington march occurred five years later, in October 1978. A group calling itself the Committee for the March on Washington, based locally in Minneapolis, also began tossing around the idea of organizing a national demonstration in D.C. The Minneapolis Committee conceived the march with two intentions: to demonstrate to the nation that gay rights were part of the larger issue of human rights; and to unify what at the time were local, highly disconnected and scattered gay organizations. Unfortunately, a little over two weeks before a scheduled weekend meeting of lesbian and gay leaders from across the country, the Minneapolis group dissolved itself after deciding that serious internal disputes over racism and classism in the organizing process would keep it from effectively planning the march.

This event prompted San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk to assume responsibility for continuing efforts to organize the march. With him, the organizational epicenter shifted to San Francisco. Milk astutely recognized that infighting was intimately woven into the fabric of gay politics and culture but still believed that the march could symbolically unify an otherwise fragmented movement. In taking up the organizational efforts, Milk commented, "I hope that the gathering will take place on the weekend following the Fourth of July. That would have great symbolic impact, reminding people of the Declaration of Independence, in which gay people were left out."