Photo: Boyd Lewis courtesy of Touching Up Our Roots.Īmong members, who were young and mostly white, many had cut their teeth on the other social movements of the 1960s, including women’s liberation, anti-war and civil rights fights. Pride celebrations have grown from an annual march to a celebratory weekend festival with hundreds of thousands of attendees. The 1972 Pride demonstration in Atlanta was organized by the Gay Liberation Front. “People couldn’t be relaxed.”Īfter the Ansley raid, a group of fed-up activists huddled at New Morning Cafe near Emory University and launched the Georgia chapter of the Gay Liberation Front. “There were women who really had to live a double life,” said Drue, a lesbian. Lesbians lived in a world with a different set of rules, which often included the crushing social pressure to marry young, have children and follow the South’s traditional gender roles. “It was like another world that was laid on top of the world that everybody else sees.” “It was a secret world,” said Gil Robison, an LGBTQ activist who grew up near Tucker. Explore Timeline: Major moments in Atlanta LGBTQ historyīy the 1960s, a handful of bars began springing up near Midtown that quietly catered to gay clientele. Some were able to live a little more openly, and Atlanta became a magnet for young LGTBQ people from small towns all over the South. In 1953, police used a two-way mirror before arresting 20 men for having sex in the basement toilets of one of Atlanta’s public libraries.Īt that time, many gay Atlantans were closeted, even entering heterosexual marriages, fearful they could lose their jobs and be shunned by their families if they were found out. Law enforcement had long targeted the city’s LGBTQ population, particularly gay men, in hangout spots like Piedmont Park and along what was known as “the strip” on Peachtree Street. Lobby card from “Lonesome Cowboys.” Contributed by Booth Museum The goal of the raid, Fulton’s solicitor general later told the Atlanta Constitution, was to identify anyone with “records for previous sex offenses.” But for many the true intent was obvious. “They were arresting a lot of gay men, just arresting them on anything they could find.” “They had cameras with flashbulbs and they were taking everyone’s picture,” Abby Drue, an Atlanta nonprofit chief who was in the theater, recounted during a recent interview. Officers arrested the manager and projectionist for pornography, confiscated the film reel and lined up members of the audience. Roughly 15 minutes into the film, the lights flipped as police burst into the theater and locked the doors behind them. Explore Photos: Atlanta's Gay Pride march through the years Nearly 900 miles away, some 70 moviegoers had settled into their seats at the Ansley Mall Mini Cinema in Midtown for a Tuesday evening showing of Andy Warhol’s “Lonesome Cowboys.” The western satire, which featured gay sex scenes, had become an immediate target of local law enforcement who believed it violated obscenity laws. It was six weeks after cops had raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay hangout in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, galvanizing the fight for LGBTQ liberation. That we’re not the problem.”įor many local activists the match was lit nearly two years earlier, on Aug. “It was mostly about feeling good,” said Phil Lambert, a Vietnam veteran who was in attendance. Even today, six years after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, Congress, statehouses and the courts continue to grapple with LGBTQ protections, “religious freedom” and transgender youths.īut for the hundred or so Atlantans who participated in the city’s first pride march, the event was a turning point, a moment when, for the first time, they could publicly celebrate a part of themselves that society had long demanded they keep hidden.
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It would take decades for attitudes and laws to change.
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#When is gay pride atlanta 2021 archive#
(Jerome McClendon / AJC Archive at GSU Library AJCN015-026a)
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About 1,200 marchers began downtown and marched up to Piedmont Park. Atlanta Gay Rights Alliance and others leading the Pride parade through Atlanta, June 25, 1977.