2025 NYC Pride Guide - Flipbook - Page 21
Los Angeles
Black Cat Tavern
When fourteen people were beaten
and arrested for dancing together at
a New Year’s celebration in the popular Silver Lake gay bar, the Black Cat,
over 600 community members turned
out to protest, making it the largest
LGBTQ+ protest in America to date at
the time.
969
ork
onewall Riots
prising
arly hours of June 28,
ommunity members at the
wall Inn, a bar in Greenwich
New York City, resisted a
aid, sparking six days of
strations and conflicts with
orcement. Though not the
sh for LGBTQ+ equality, this
moment is widely regarded
ning point that ignited the
n LGBTQ+ rights movement,
ding equal rights and viswhich led to annual Pride
tions worldwide.
AT THIS PIVOTAL MOMENT
WITH THE RISE OF ANTILGBTQIA+ LEGISLATION, WE
LOOK TO THESE TRAILBLAIZING
ANCESTORS FOR INSPIRATION.
1970
New York
Lavender Menace at NOW
By the 1970s, organized LGBTQ+
groups were bringing the fight for
respect, rights and visibility to new
venues. When author and president of the National Organizmation
for Women (NOW) Betty Friedan
referred to lesbians as a “lavender
menace” infiltrating the women’s
movement, fifty women wore “lavender menace” shirts and disrupted
NOW’s Second Congress to Unite
Women at NYC’s Intermediate
School 70 / O. Henry School (now
known as the NYC Lab School for
Collaborative Studies.) One year
later, NOW passed a resolution recognizing the “oppression of lesbians as a legitimate concern of
feminism.”
1970
Chicago
The Normandy Bar
Even into the 1970s and ‘80s,
many popular gay bars, like The
Normandy in Chicago, refused to
allow same-sex dancing, enforced
strict gendered dress rules and
often harassed or outright banned
Black patrons. The nascent Gay
Liberation Front (GLF) of Chicago
chose The Normandy for one of
their first acts of protest. After the
GLF arranged a rival dance and a
protest with over 2,000 people in
attendance, The Normandy agreed
to all of GLF’s demands, and soon,
the other bars in Chicago followed
suit.
/ //
1967
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