Rainbow Pilgrimage

For several weeks now New York has been preparing for the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, "the riots that sparked the gay revolution."

The city developed a marketing campaign under the banner "Rainbow Pilgrimage" to attract even more than the 10% estimated GLBT visitors among the 47 million people who came to the city last year... What a change from the years leading to Stonewall when New York City's mayor wanted to get rid of gay presence from its streets.

The LGBT Community Center presents several Summer Exhibitions including Gay Front Liberation Front (1969-1971): A 40th Anniversary Retrospective. It's and ideal place to start visiting Greenwich Village. The New York Public Library, which houses a very extensive collection of LGTB archives, has put together a small, and touching, exhibition with photographs, newspaper articles and other materials documenting one year in the early gay rights movement, 1969: The Year of Gay Liberation, curated by Jason Baumann (read the article Looking Back 40 Years in the current issue of Gay City News). Baumann who is the library's coordinator of the LGBT collection, has a very useful blog, lgbt@nypl.

The celebrations will culminate in the Annual LGBT Pride March in Manhattan on Sunday 28 June, exactly forty years after the rebellion. If Albany can figure out the mess created by the tentative political coup by Republicans in the State Senate, and pass the bill on same-sex marriage before... it will be an apotheosis...

Most young gays don't realize how much things have changed over those years. They take for granted the freedom they enjoy today. Things did not happen by chance. There were pioneers, courageous men and women who chose to fight and exposed themselves.

Stonewall - The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter (St. Martin's Press, 2004, 352p) is the best account available of what happened, and why, during these days of 1969. The book reads like an page-turner investigation while being a wonderful scholarly achievement. It's a great read whether or not you intend to visit the city this month. As Carter writes in his conclusion:

The true legacy of the Stonewall Riots is the ongoing struggle for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality. While this fight is far from over, it is now a worldwide movement that has won many significant victories, most of them flowing from those six days in the summer of 1969 when gay people found the courage to stand up for themselves on the streets of Greenwich Village.

2009.06.14