The Annual Reminder
John Trumbull's 1819 painting, Declaration of Independence, depicts the five-man drafting committeeof the Declaration of Independence presenting their work to the Second Continental Congress.
Wait, one more email on the Stonewall Uprising booklet!? It’s July… we don’t have to talk about that anymore, right? Well first, people who are LGBTQ+ are generally LBGTQ+ all year long. Second, more specifically, today is July 4th - United States’ Independence Day - and today also plays a role in the Pride story in the United States.
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
As I mentioned in the booklet, when Arthur Evans was drafting the preamble to the constitution of the Gay Activists Alliance, he specifically referenced the Declaration of Independence to acknowledge the place of LGBTQ+ rights in US history.
However, it doesn’t end there. The precursor to the first Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day March, was actually the “Annual Reminder” marches in Philadelphia on Independence Day. Craig Rodwell and Mattachine New York started the marches in 1965 to remind people at the birth place of the country that there was still a group that lacked basic rights. Because one of the goals was to fight for rights against employment discrimination (something that didn’t happen nationwide until the Supreme Court decision 55 years later), they had a strict dress code to wear suits to look “employable”. In that same effort to be “respectable” they were also not supposed chant or hold hands.(1)
The second Annual Reminder day in 1966.
Then on July 4th, 1969, in the immediate wake of the Stonewall Uprising, the energized activists from New York dared something new: they held hands in public. When interviewed by the media, they demanded change and pointed to the recent uprising in New York.(2) Sensing the change after the march, Rodwell worked with others to present a proposal at the November 1969 Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations (3) to move the location of the next Annual Reminder from Philadelphia to New York City and move the date back to be held on the last Saturday in June to “commemorate the 1969 spontaneous demonstrations on Christopher Street”. They would also remove the strict dress code and code of conduct and communicate with other LGBTQ+ organizations (4) throughout the country to encourage them to hold their own marches.(5) The resulting Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day March that is described in the booklet was the precursor of today’s Pride marches.
Why no “Straight Pride”?
A question that is sometimes asked during LBGTQ+ Pride month is: “Why don’t we have Straight (or cisgender) Pride?” My short answer is because straight couples have never had to fear being beaten (by police or vigilantes) for holding hands in public. Being proud and open about being LGBTQ+ was, and still often is, an act of bravery and resistance and so it is something special worth celebrating.
On a related note, “cisgender” is not derogatory as some reactionaries like to complain. “Cis-“ is merely a Latin prefix meaning “on this side of”.(6) Likewise, when chemists use the prefix to denote molecules with cis arrangements of substituents, they are not insulting the molecules.
Nothing New Under the Sun
To quote the Ecclesiastes 1:9
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
A final note, while the integration of LGBTQ+ people is new for post-colonial European cultures, it is not new for other cultures or humans in general (or penguins and dolphins for that matter). For example, “two-spirit” people have been documented as part of 155 different tribes throughout Turtle Island (what many now call North America). Two Spirit is actually an umbrella term we now use for a wide range of gender identities.(7) The Jesuit Relations, the 17th Century chronicles by Jesuits of their experiences with indigenous Americans, is full of examples of what the Jesuits called “hermaphrodites” because they didn’t have a better term. For a much deeper dive on the topic check out the Chastening the Past review of The Dawn of Everything.(8)
Happy Independence Day!
Notes
David Carter, Stonewall : the riots that sparked the gay revolution. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004), chap. 2, Yomu.
Carter, Stonewall. chap. 6, Yomu.
“Homophile” was a term used at the time in place of “homosexual” to emphasize the love aspect more than the sexual aspect in order to combat some of the stereotypes.
It is important here to note that while I am lumping the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights into one struggle - because I think it should be that way - not everyone in the movement always thought of it that way. For example, despite their key involvement in the Stonewall Uprising, transgender people were not always welcome in the movement and had to fight for their inclusion.
Carter, Stonewall. chap. 13, Yomu.
Cis-. Wikitionary. Retrieved July 2, 2023. https://en.wikitionary.org/wiki/cis-
Sarah Prager, A Child’s Introduction to Pride: The Inspirational History and Culture of the LGBTIA+ Community. (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2023). page 24.
Chastening the Past. Strange Matters. Retrieved July 2, 2023. https://strangematters.coop/dawn-of-everything-graeber-wengrow-review/ The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow has been a big influence on a lot of my work. This review of it does a great job of appreciating the book while identifying how it missed questions of gender and sexuality. Wengrow was actually fairly appreciative of the review. It’s a long one but worth the time.