Fight for rights
The gay rights march in 1977 started small but drew thousands
The 1977 gay rights march in Houston started small but drew thousands.
Fifty years ago last month, Larry Bagneris was in a seedy Greenwich Village bar when police busted in. It was his first time there, but his friend knew what to do. Grabbing Bagneris, he hustled them down the hall, into the bathroom, and out the window onto the street. It was a close call with the police — and with history.
The police raided that bar again the next month, in the wee hours of Saturday, June 28 but that time the rousted bar patrons fought back. As the police filled the paddy wagon outside, onlookers began tossing rocks at officers, who quickly barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall Inn.
Over the next six days, protesters descended on the bar to take a stand in a city where even drinking in a bar with same-sex friends could lead to an arrest. The rocktossers — assembled street kids, drag queens and others tired of being pushed around — eventually dispersed, but not before the bar on Christopher Street had become a landmark in America’s long march to civil rights for all.
Friday marks the golden anniversary of Stonewall, and the celebrations in New York have already begun. They’ll culminate next Sunday, June 30, with a massive Pride march. Houston’s own pride march, its 41st, took place Saturday.
Our march, though, is about more than celebrating Stonewall. Gay history happened in a lot more places than just New York City and San Francisco. It happened all over America, before and after the Stonewall Inn became famous.
And it certainly happened in Houston. In fact, you could argue that no place in America outside of the coasts played a larger role
in readying America to become the place it is today — where in most cities acceptance of the legal and human rights of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and — increasingly — transgender men and women is the norm.
Bagneris arrived in Houston in the year after Stonewall with a newly minted college diploma and a job in the management trainee program at Foley’s department store downtown. He found a large gay and lesbian community in Montrose that mostly stayed undercover.
“Gay life was something to be shunned,” he told me this week from New York, where he’s celebrating the Stonewall anniversary.
He was used to harassment and secrecy. As a boy in New Orleans, he tried to pray away his attraction to men, but when that didn’t work, he visited a psychiatrist at age 16. “He told me the only other way out was electric shock therapy,” Bagneris said. “I stood up and told him to stick it … . I got out as fast as I could, and I am so glad I escaped having my brain fried.”
Stonewall offered proof that running away and staying quiet weren’t the only options gay people had.
“This movement had came along, and here was the image of people fighting back,” he said. “It stayed with me.”
Others took strength, too. Within months, chapters of the radical Gay Liberation Front formed in dozens of U.S. cities, big and small. By the following June, gay activists in New York had organized the nation’s first Pride march, and over the next decade mid-sized and big cities across the U.S. followed suit. (Houston’s first Pride march took place in 1978, and was followed in ’79 by a much larger version, replete with floats and sponsors.)
But by 1972, the Gay Liberation Front had folded, a victim of squabbles over gender, race and the question of how militant its politics should be. In most cities, too, the backlash to increased visibility was brutal.
The collective memory of Stonewall was already fading by the time Pokey Anderson arrived in Houston in about 1972, fresh out of college. “I didn’t even know about Stonewall,” she said. . “I had been busy in college and not really paying attention. I wasn’t even out until I arrived in Houston.”
She found Houston’s large gay community tucked away in house parties and Montrose bars, still often living in fear. The bars, Anderson recalled, weren’t always safe. Police raids, especially before elections, were a steady threat. Any raid could lead to exposure, and in the 1970s, exposure meant you could be arrested, fired, or evicted.
Other risks were visible, too. “There were bullet holes in the windows of some of the bars we frequented,” Anderson said.
That oppression helped bring gay people together.
Texas had recently passed a state law making gay sex a crime. And Anderson soon grew tired of the constant mockery and insults lawmakers used every time the question of gay sex arose. So in 1975, she formed with three others the Gay Political Caucus, which still exists as the Houston LGBT Political Caucus.. At home in her Montrose apartment she pitched a few friends a simple idea: “Why don’t we form a gay political bloc and interview candidates and just announce who we’re for and against?”
Soon, she said, 200 people were attending Gay Political Caucus meetings in the upstairs rooms of Montrose bars.
Houston’s gay community was finding its voice.
But it would be another two years before it was really heard.
Anita Bryant, an immensely popular singer and former Miss America contender, had led voters in Dade County, Fla., to repeal a county ordinance that added housing and employment protections for gay people. She instantly became a leading voice against acceptance of homosexuality. A forerunner of anti-gay activists such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, she was hugely popular: For four years in a row, Good Housekeeping readers voted her the most admired woman in America.
The backlash to Stonewall had gone national.
Bryant also electrified Houston’s nascent gay rights movement.
A month after the Florida vote, the State Bar of Texas invited her to Houston to perform at its annual convention.
“Anita Bryant was stirring up her hate, and Ray Hill — bless his heart, I still miss him — said we needed to protest,” Judge Phyllis Frye remembered.
“Harvey Milk was doing all his stuff out in California, and there were big fights there over gay rights and teachers. Ray set about organizing a march on the Hyatt Regency, where Anita was going to perform.”
To spread the word, Frye, who had been out as a transgender woman since 1971, and others headed to the bars on Montrose.
“We didn’t have Internet back then or Facebook,” she said. The news spread by word of mouth: The plan was to gather at a parking lot at a gay bar in Montrose, and walk downtown.
At first, the protest didn’t seem like a big deal. “We were really disappointed at turnout,” Frye said, “but it was time to go, and we began walking down the sidewalks” along Bagby and Brazos streets, when something funny happened. “As we walked, people who had been afraid to meet at the parking lot were standing in the side streets near their cars. As we moved past them, they joined us.
“Before long, the police captain who had ordered us to stay on the sidewalks told his people to move us out onto the streets and begin blocking traffic. There were just too many of us for the sidewalks.”
News reports from the next day said 4,000 people had joined the march, though many now remember it being even larger. Houston had had its own Stonewall.
“The Anita Bryant march brought me out,” recalled Bagneris, who now lives in New Orleans. “Seeing all those people with us just blew my mind. So when we got to the Hyatt and someone put a radio microphone in my mouth, I just went with it.”
Like that, Bagneris was out of the closet.
So, in a way, was Houston’s whole gay community. Over the next couple of years, Houston would host an international symposium for women’s rights, launch its own gay pride parades and began to formalize a local gay agenda.
Perhaps surprisingly, given its politics at the time, Houston became a leader in the fight for LGBT rights. “All of these things that weren’t happening in other major cities in the South had been festering in Houston,” Bagneris recalled. “Houston just had this incredible energy because of the diversity of our movement, which included women and people of color.”
As the nation turns its attention to New York over the next week, I’ll raise a glass to Stonewall. But it’s Houston’s own gay rights history and the heroes who created it here that I’ll be saluting most.