Their next step
After Stonewall, march pushed gay rights ahead
Fred Sargeant, free of expectations, climbed the base of a Manhattan light pole to look south toward Greenwich Village.
The gay rights activist, one of the organizers of the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, was both thrilled and stunned by the view: A line of militant protesters stretching for blocks toward its starting point at Waverly St. and Sixth Ave., a loud and unapologetic display that the spirit of the Stonewall riots was alive and growing one year later.
“People, as far as I could see,” he told the Daily News about the June 28, 1970, march in support of gay rights. “I just remember being struck by the thought that this was far beyond our expectations. We didn’t even know if people would show up.”
The seminal event, held on the first anniversary of the 1969 uprising, marks its own milestone this year — a halfcentury since the initial gathering of those first audacious marchers morphed into a massive annual parade that brought millions to New York City last year for the 50th anniversary of the riots.
March organizer Ellen Broidy, after joining other demonstrators gathered in Sheridan Square, recalled the sense of uncertainty that accompanied her arrival.
“I was a mix and mess of emotions,” she said. “I was exhilarated, nervous, joyous, scared — all at once. I had no idea what kind of reaction we would receive from the crowds lining the street. And more to the point, no sense of how the police would behave.”
Many of the cops simply turned their backs on the marchers as they headed north to a planned “Gay In” held in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park. But most of those watching from the sidewalk were more curious than caustic.
And to the marchers’ delight, a number of gay and lesbian onlookers left the concrete and came into the street, joining the group to walk uptown in a single closed-off lane on the left side of Sixth Ave.
“Say it loud! Gay and proud!” the marchers shouted in unison. “Say it loud! Gay power!”
The march provided the answer to an obvious question facing the activists in a post-Stonewall city: What next?
Much of the planning and logistics were handled inside the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Mercer St., owner Craig Rodwell’s Greenwich Village business dedicated to gay authors and literature. Rodwell, Sargeant, Broidy and Linda Rhodes comprised the quartet behind the initial push that put the march in motion.
“If I remember correctly, Craig hosted early planning meetings,” recalled Broidy. “In many ways, Craig was a revolutionary. The mere act of opening this kind of bookstore, the first of its kind in 1967, was a revolutionary act.”
This was not the over-thetop extravaganza of the new millennium, with blaring music and corporate sponsors and gaudy floats. This was a political statement by a nascent movement intent on getting its voices heard, with marchers coming in from
Washington, Boston and Cleveland.
Yet right up to the morning of the march, despite months of effort and organizing, there were fears the event was doomed.
Sargeant, 71, and a retired Stamford, Conn., police lieutenant, recalled the nervous wait for a city permit that arrived only hours before participants were due to gather at noon.
“They kept us hanging,” he said.
Crowd estimates ran from 2,000 to 20,000 along the 51block length of the march and the subsequent celebratory gathering in the park. Broidy remembered the wave of emotions along the route and inside the Sheep Meadow.
“Any sense of danger and trepidation dissipated,” she recalled. “I felt a sense of freedom and liberation unlike any I had ever experienced. Whatever concerns accompanied me to the start of the march had disappeared before we ever got out of the Village. I suspect the same was true for my sisters and brothers.”
The march made page one of The New York Times, beneath a headline declaring “Thousands of Homosexuals Hold a Protest Rally in Central Park.”
Rodwell died of stomach cancer in 1993. And both Broidy, now 75, and Sargeant wonder what he would make of the march’s current iteration, more party than protest.
“I am well aware that once the corporate genie has been let out of the bottle, there is no way to put it in back in,” said Broidy. “But I miss the sense of militancy, pride and celebration of the earliest marches — and bridle at the term ‘parade.’
“We marched for liberation.”