Playing Our Song?

Thirty-nine years ago this weekend, I stage managed a dozen or more young wall street associates to monitor the first Gay Pride march. Stonewall had happened just a year earlier, and the march was an imaginative attempt to commemorate something, with no clear sense what would come of the attempt or, indeed, of Stonewall itself.

This was the era of Vietnam, and protest marches were routine and sometimes violent. The Jewish Defense League provoked as many confrontations with the police as Meir Kahane could maneouver. I was in Chicago for the wretched Democratic Convention of 1968; I was not in Grant Park for the still famous police riot, having been locked with the other self-important drones into the convention site at the Stockyards, but we all knew lots of people who had been gassed, if not clubbed by the cops. This famous photograph had been taken just a few weeks before the first Pride march.

A program had been set up with the City Bar Association to provide lawyers to monitor demonstrations, either planned or spontaneous. The police were cooperative because they determined (pretty correctly) that reports from neutral lawyers describing proper police behavior would do much to silence rumors of police violence and curb efforts by demonstrators to provoke the cops. We received modest training and credentials so we could cross police lines. My job was to turn out the lawyers, who tended to be eager to have an pro bono excuse to get out of the office, and a riot is always fun to watch, from a safe distance. I assume that most of the volunteers to monitor the pride march were sympathetic to the demonstrators and that few were themselves gay. I didn't ask. It didn't matter.

The concern on that first march was very much violence. Primarily police violence (they had started Stonewall after all, maybe) but also violence from also shocked passers by, many of whom had heard of Stonewall, but none of them had yet heard of Pride. I don't think we had the word "homophobe" yet in our working vocabularies. I know we scarcely had "gay" yet. But the first march was supposed to end near the entrance to a Catholic church in Greenwich Village, and a large crowd of people was correctly expected to be assembled on the steps and no one knew how'd they react to a throng of guys who were not yet gays but certainly were fags and queers and pansies and farries and (when women weren't around) cock suckers.

I don't really remember much about the march itself. I was at the receiving end in the Village, and trying to communicate with the the volunteers stretched along the route. Cell phones hadn't been invented yet either. The important thing was that there was no violence. Not even a hint of it. The marchers were angry and scared and, most important, brave. It took a lot of guts to walk down the avenue in broad daylight, telling everyone who saw you that you were one of those fags, queers, whatevers. But they were disciplined too.

There weren't all that many participants. The messages they transmitted were very audacious and very political, though there were no pols marching that year. There were, as I recall, very few women. Maybe dykes hadn't been invented yet. The guys who marched, I think, were mostly pretty young.

It all worked. The event rapidly became an institution. Within a year or two, the lawyers stopped monitoring because there really was nothing to worry about and very few wall street associates were yet ready to join the parade.

I haven't been back since, until today. A couple friends held a small party in their Fifth Avenue apartment a few blocks from the parade's end, and invited me and a few others to come and watch. I watched maybe four hours of it. It was quite boring, and in that boredom there was a fascination. The world has changed a whole lot in less than forty years.

It was enormous, but not very well organized. There were plenty of political slogans and a superfluity of politicans running for office, but little sense of politics. There seemed to be few kids -- teens, college students, clearly under 30. There might have been more women marching than men. With some frequency guys came by wearing just their underwear, and in some of those cases it was not an unwise fashion decision. A few jock straps here and there, a few topless I-think-they-were-women. One middle aged guy marched down the center of Fifth Avenue, barefoot and wearing nothing but a cap which he held in front of the whole point of the parade, prompting me to worry a bit about what he'd do when I got to the end of the affair.

There wasn't much wit or rage. The floats were pretty much of a repetitive piece. The music was, due to special circumstances, almost entirely Michael Jackson, but he hadn't thrillered me all that much in the first place. Far from being a threat, the police provided a marching band for the front of the parade. I did notice that while there were brass and other winds in the police band, there were no clarinets. I suppose playing a clarinet is as close as one can get to sucking a cock in a marching band, so maybe that was a political statement.

All in all, it was about as exciting as the home coming parades I remember from high school. They were sort of exciting, in an empty sort of way. But it took no bravery to march for the football team, or to march down Fifth Avenue today. It was such a different scene in 1970.

I probably don't need to go back again. I have the memorable one in mind.