October 22, 2004
Serving the Carolinas Since 1979
Volume 25, Number 22
Vote 2004: EqualityNC PAC Endorsements, p.4Local: Drag Bingo October 30, p.19
The 1st Queer March on Washington
A Veteran Community
Organizer Commemorates
the Twenty-fifth
Anniversary
By Eric Rofes
Contributing Writer
The first March on Washington for
Lesbian and Gay Rights and Liberation
drew 100,000 people to the streets of the
District of Columbia on October 14,
1979, at a moment in our community's
history vastly different from the one we
occupy today. As I thumb through my
scrapbook and archives of organizing
materials from that effort, and as I listen
to the record and the videotapes pro
duced capturing the '79 march, a range
of memories and conflicted feelings
rush through me. Clearly, the world has
changed in our lifetimes.
In 1979, I was a 24 year old
schoolteacher and member of Boston's
radical Gay Community News collec
tive. That winter, a group of collective
members rented a car and drove
through the New England snows to
what would become an historic event at
the Quaker Meeting House in
Philadelphia. Converging that week
end were over 200 grassroots activists
from throughout the nation who came
together to debate whether or not to
launch the massive organizing effort we
knew it would take to bring our
rank-and-file to Washington.
I am surprised how much I
recall about that weekend.
The frigid winter air
became electric as out gay,
lesbian, bisexual and
transgender activists met
counterparts from other
locales (yes, bi and trans
organizers were there from
the start). Women's music
met disco clones; revolution
ary socialists unKea arms witn
the nascent gay leadership of the
Democratic Party; smug San
Franciscans sat side-by-side with smug
.\ew i oncers. wnue voices were pre
sent aiming to interrupt the energy flow
towards marching, it was clear from the
outset that the chamber was filled with
men and women eager to ratify a call to
march. The 60s were still alive for many
of us, and marches on our nation's cap
ital retained tremendous symbolic
power: to hit the radar screen as a
national movement demanded a pil
grimage to Washington.
Our work that weekend was tom by
the divisions of the day: tensions
between lesbians and gay men, racism
and calls for specific outreach to com
munities of color, attempts by Left sec
tarian groups to dominate organizing
efforts. Yet we united around visionary
ideals of a world without homophobia,
sexism, and racism,
and a movement
which valued
economic
justice,
youth lib
eration,
and sex
ual and
repro
ductive
free
dom.
The tepid
national
gay groups
sent mostly
stealth emissaries
to tne event, nopmg tnat
the rag-tag refugees from the 60s who
embarrassed them so, would become
enmeshed in internal bickering over
narrow political points and grind to a
halt the drive to march before it got out
of the gate.
Their hopes were dashed by a .vote
which endorsed the march and that
weekend a call went out from
Philadelphia to queers around the
United States to use whatever means
necessary to bring the masses to
Washington. I threw myself into the
effort, chairing the national policy com
mittee and serving as one of the lead
media organizers. A follow-up meeting
that summer in Houston and one in
Washington, D.C. cemented our deter
mination to work through the highly
charged politics of the time (debates
about trans inclusion became ugly) to
bring off the march of our dreams. It
was a heady time but an exhausting
time, those years before faxes, phone
conferencing, and e-mail. We licked
thousands of envelopes, plastered
posters on the sides of buildings, and
found ourselves facing personal phone
bills for hundreds of dollars.
Our challenge was formidable: we
knew we needed to turn out a large
number of queers but no one had done
this before. While some of the coastal
and urban communities already were
home to networks and formal organiza
tions, we had to work overtime to iden
tify and catalyze gay people in manv
states. I remember the frustration we
encountered thumbing through early
gay guides, trying to identify activists
in Arkansas, Alabama, North Dakota
and Montana and the delight at our
New York City headquarters when a
call came in informing us that Alaska
was sending a delegation to the
Houston meeting.
continued on page 13
Why We Marched
Hie 1979 march commemorated the
10th anniversary of the Stonewall
Riots, which occurred in 1969 when
New York City police attempted to
raid a gay bar in Greenwich Village.
Anita Bryant had been on her
homophobic rampage for a couple
of years and, in November 1978,
openly gay San Francisco supervi
sor Harvey Milk was assassinated.
For these reason, people came
together to march on Ortober 14.
The demonstration had as its mani
festo five specific demands:
1. Passage of a comprehensive
lesbian/gay rights bill in Congress;
2. Issuance of a presidential exec
utive order banning discrimination
based on sexual orientation in the
Federal government, the military
and federally-contracted private
employment;
3. The repeal of all anti
lesbian/gay laws;
4. The end of discrimination in les
bian mother and gay father cases;
5. The protection of lesbian and
gay youth from any laws which are
used to discriminate against,
oppress, and/or harass them in
their homes, schools, jobs and
social environment