They went to the police commission to apply for a parade permit—which required a sponsoring organization. “We didn’t have an organization yet that was incorporated other than our church,” Perry recalled. Morris proposed they call it “Christopher Street West”—in honor of the Stonewall uprising a year earlier. Before the meeting with the police commission, Perry remembers, “we had agreed at first that we wouldn’t use the word homosexual until we had to.” Chief Ed Davis kept asking who they represented. “After about an hour, [the police were] getting nasty a little bit,” so Perry finally said, “We represent the homosexual community of Los Angeles”—a simple statement, but a historic one. “And with that, oh, my god, all hell broke loose … Chief Davis said, ‘Did you know that homosexuality was illegal in the state of California?’ I said, ‘No, sir, it’s not.’” The chief then told the commission that, as long as felony laws against oral copulation and sodomy were on the books, they “would be ill-advised to discommode the people to have a burglars’ or robbers’ parade—or a homosexuals’ parade.”44
At the end of the meeting, however, the police commission agreed to issue a permit—if the applicants could post two bonds, one for $1 million, the other for $500,000. The bonds, they were told, were “to pay the merchants whose windows are going to be broken out when people start throwing rocks at you all in the street.” “My God,” Perry recalled, “it was the Jews in Germany all over again. If a Jew ducked a rock and it broke out a window, the Jew had to pay for it. So they were doing the same thing with the queer community: the queers are gonna pay for it.” In addition, the commission said “you will post in cash the amount of $1,500 to pay for the policemen that it will take to protect you.” “We thanked them profusely,” Perry recalled, “and said we’d be back.”45
They went to attorney Herbert E. Selwyn, a longtime defender of gays in the courts and a lawyer with the ACLU of Southern California. He met with the commission and persuaded them to drop the bond requirements—but they insisted on the requirement of a $1,500 payment for police protection. Selwyn and the ACLU took that issue to the California Superior Court, where the judge, Richard Schauer, declared: “These people are taxpayers like anybody else. They don’t have to put up any money to hold a parade. You don’t require it of other groups, you’re not going to require it of them.” He ordered the commission to issue the parade permit and ordered the police to protect the marchers as they would any other group, without charging them for protection.46
The first officially recognized gay pride parade in US history stepped off on Sunday afternoon, June 28, 1970, at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and McCadden Place, just east of Highland Avenue. Two thousand people showed up, Perry said, to “march, drive their floats, and walk their pets. I’ve never felt so empowered in my life.” And along the parade route, he recalled, “50,000 people showed up to watch us march. I’d never seen more hats and dark shades in my life!” (Meanwhile, back in New York, gay leaders had failed to get a parade permit “and had to march on the sidewalks, without any formation,” Perry recalled.)
“The parade was incredible for its time,” Perry reflected. “We didn’t get the bands that we wanted, so my roommate, Willie Smith, drove the parade route in his VW minibus, playing World War II German marches from an amplification system he’d hooked up. Willie’s thinking? Since the Los Angeles police department treated us like the oppressed of WWII, they might actually enjoy the music and leave us alone.”47
The parade down Hollywood Boulevard “had a little bit of everything,” he said. The Society of Anubis took the lead with its float—they had 800 members, divided equally between gays and lesbians, plus a state charter stating their official purpose was to overturn unjust sex laws and “present to the public a true picture of the homosexual as a worthwhile member of society.” Another group carried a sign that said “Heterosexuals for Homosexual Freedom.” The parade included a guy with an Alaskan husky and a sign that read “We Don’t All Walk Poodles” (he led what Perry called “the pet-walking section”). A photograph of the guy and the dog was later published in a Time magazine article about “the new gay militancy.” The GLF of Los Angeles came down Hollywood Boulevard carrying banners and shouting, “Two, four, six, eight, gay is just as good as straight.” Perry recalled that a gay group from Orange County brought a large sign that read “Homosexuals for Ronald Reagan.” “I heard a woman on the sidewalk say, ‘I can forgive them for being homosexual, but I will never forgive them for supporting Reagan.’”
And just in case people watching missed the point about fighting LAPD harassment, a float featured a man on a cross with a sign that read “In Memory of Those Killed by the Pigs.” Another group made a similar point with a different approach: a “flock of shrieking drag queens” appeared, “running every which way to escape club-wielding guys dressed as cops.”48
Troy Perry was asked, forty-three years later, what he remembered most about that day. He replied:
The thing that stood out in my mind was that there was no one picketing against us. When we came around the corner [onto Hollywood Boulevard] we didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know how many people were there—and to see that crowd. At first, I started tearing up, and then I said, No, you’re not, this is a happy day, a good day, you’re going to wave to the crowd. And people just cheered as we went down the boulevard.49
Morris Kight, a week after the parade, described it as “joyful, folksy, funky, and happy,” noting that the parade “received more public notice than all the homosexual activities in the past combined. Sidewalks crammed with people came to watch.” The “friendliness” of onlookers was wonderful, he said, but the thing that “counts for most, is that Gays are a lot taller, a lot stronger, a lot freer, a lot more honest with themselves.”50
That first gay pride march opened the door to the flowering of gay L.A. The next year, 1971, the LA Gay and Lesbian Community Service Center opened, the nation’s first and largest of its kind. Of course, there were plenty of attacks and setbacks—in 1973 the MCC at Twenty-Second and Union was burned down—and of course the AIDS crisis lay ahead. But defeating the LAPD and stepping out in the sunlight on Hollywood Boulevard that June day of 1970 marked a turning point for gay L.A. Kight, for one, called it the happiest moment of his life.51
What about the women? The story up to this point is almost all about men. However, photos of the Black Cat Tavern protest show several young women among the demonstrators. Women attended the first meetings of the Metropolitan Community Church; they celebrated at the first Gay-In in Griffith Park; they marched in the first gay pride parade down Hollywood Boulevard. And of course, women had been arrested by the LAPD in raids on lesbian bars. The crime for which gay women were arrested in the Fifties and Sixties was “masquerading” or “impersonation”—wearing masculine clothing. At the beginning of the Second World War—the era of Rosie the Riveter, who wore men’s work clothes—LA Mayor Fletcher Bowron asked the city council to ban the wearing of pants by women who worked at city hall; he said that it was worse to see “masculine women much more than feminine traits in men,” and that the city should not allow the war to “undermine those things we like to consider feminine and ladylike.”52 The courts had declared in 1950 that laws prohibiting women from wearing men’s clothes were unconstitutional, but police raids on lesbian bars continued in the 1960s, Faderman and Timmons report, with the LAPD vice squad arresting women on charges of drunkenness or prostitution. But the leadership and organization of the gay movement in L.A. up to 1970, and the editors and writers for the gay magazines, were virtually all male. It was not until 1971, Faderman and Timmons conclude, that “both ‘gay women’ and ‘lesbian feminists’ came to the conclusion that “women had to do it for themselves.”53 That’s a different story, a story about the Seventies. The story of the gay movement up to 1970 is thus a story about men as leaders and organizers.
Historians of gay L.A. always emphasize that the movement started in L.A. “before Stonewall”; it was host to the first protest march, the first publication of the Advocate, the first gay church, the first invocation