The New Yorker:

From 1970: A year after the Stonewall riot, a crowd of young people marched for gay rights in New York City.

By Anthony Hiss

On June 29, 1969, city police raided the Stonewall Inn, a well-known gay bar on Christopher Street, in Greenwich Village. A gay bar is a bar frequented by homosexuals. The Stonewall was raided for alleged violations of the liquor laws, and, as is the custom, the place was cleared and many of the customers as well as the employees of the bar were arrested. For the first time in a raid on such a bar, however, the patrons did not go quietly but fought back—and fought back against both the police and the bar itself. Homosexuals in New York have for a long time been harassed by policemen and exploited by bar owners. The Sunday before last, in commemoration of the events of a year ago, ten thousand homosexuals paraded from the Village, up Sixth Avenue, to the Sheep Meadow, in Central Park.

The parade was organized by the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee, and it began at two in the afternoon from a staging area on Washington Place, just off Sixth. Half an hour before the parade, a good-sized crowd had gathered and was ready to march. The crowd was mostly young, but not entirely, and it consisted of both young men and young women. Parade marshals, from the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee, were standing around wearing orange armbands. They handed out flyers that said, “Welcome to the first-anniversary celebration of the Gay Liberation movement. We are united today to affirm our pride, our life-style, and our commitment to each other.” A number of policemen were also standing around, looking benevolent and keeping an eye on things. Many of the marchers were carrying banners that identified them as members of homosexual organizations, like the Gay Liberation Front, the Mattachine Society, and the Gay Activists Alliance. The symbol of the G.A.A. is a lambda, which physicists use as a symbol for wavelength, and many of the kids were wearing purple T-shirts with yellow lambdas on them.

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