[The year by year sections here were included on The noe defunct Pride Trust (London Pride) website in 1997. There presentation here is an act of digitial preservation.]
Intro: Our web site is up and running to keep you not only informed but educated. Over the next couple of months, we will be loading a series of articles depicting the story of "Lesbian and Gay Liberation over the Years". There will eventually be an article to represent every year from 1969 to the present day - so be sure to come back regularly!
If you have any interesting stories about Prides which you have attended, or suggestions for what you would like to see in the future, please e-mail xxx@XXX
1969.
It was Friday 27 June 1969, the day they buried Judy Garland. Neil McKenna recounts the birth of Gay Liberation.
Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine and his eight detectives from the NYCPD (Public Morals Section) had no reason to believe that tonight's raid on the gay Stonewall Inn was going to be any different from other raids in Greenwich Village that had led to the closing of two bars. As reason for raiding the police claimed that the Stonewall was selling liquor without a licence but the patrons of the Stonewall and other bars in the Village thought differently. They knew the bars were only allowed to stay open by express permission of the Mafia.
New York's crime syndicates extorted large sums of protection money from gay bars. Any who could, or would, not pay were either "persuaded" or closed down after a visit from Public Morals, who enforced the Mafia's stranglehold on the city's gay bars.
The raid on the Stonewall was brief and businesslike. The police arrested two barmen, three drag-queens and a lesbian. The customers were allowed to leave one-by-one as the police set about smashing up the Stonewall a bit. A crowd of these customers quickly gathered, augmented by the people who thronged Christopher Street and Sheridan Square. As each customer emerged from the Stonewall, cries of defiance and cheers went up from the swelling crowd.
But the mood of the crowd changed as the police escorted the barmen and the drag-queens to the waiting paddy-wagon. They booed defiant catcalls. A cry went up to overturn the paddy-wagon, but it was loaded and away before this could happen.
The anger subsided only temporarily, flaring again as the lesbian was escorted to a patrol car. She fought the police, managed to break away briefly but was recaptured and dragged to the car. Sensing the danger Pine ordered the car away.
The jeering crowd had become an angry mob. Shouts of "pigs" and "faggot cops" went up accompanied by a hail of coins and beer bottles. Hemmed into a small clearing immediately outside Stonewall the police decided to seek sanctuary inside, bolting the heavy wooden door against the crowd outside.
From within they could hear the sound of breaking glass and the thud of bricks and cobblestones hurled against the door which suddenly flies open. A rain of missiles pours into the bar. As police rush to shut the door, one of them is hit and starts to bleed.
The police are angry now. Pine rushes out towards the crowd and grabs a man who he drags into the bar. The police secure the door again and beat the man senseless before handcuffing him.
Outside the mob is howling for blood. An uprooted parking meter is used as a makeshift battering ram for the door which flies open again.
The police draw their guns and one says "We'll shoot the first motherfucker that comes through the door". As they wait for the mob to surge forward someone pours lighter fuel through the broken window - a match is thrown and the bar is in flames as police reinforcements arrive. It had lasted about 45 minutes.
When they woke on Saturday the gay community of Greenwich Village found notices, put up by the Mattachine Society, the city's "homophile" organisation, appealing for calm. But the atmosphere was tense throughout the day and violence was to erupt again that night.
There were an estimated 4,000 gay men, drag-queens and lesbians on the streets that night. For the next few hours civil war raged in Greenwich Village.
The mob fought the police with everything they had - molotov cocktails, bricks, cobblestones, sticks and parking meters. Trash cans were set alight adding to the flashing sirens of police patrol cars. In Waverly Place a large block of concrete landed on the hood of a patrol which was surrounded by dozens of men shaking and pounding it.
At the intersection of Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street the riot police were viciously clubbing a young man. A detachment of queens, some in drag, rushed over screaming "Save our Sister" and rescued him.
By 3.30am, Sunday morning, the riot had burnt itself out. Intermittent small incidents took place on the next four nights but the pent-up anger and fury of the gay community had been exhausted and replaced by an emotion they had never experienced before, Pride.
Gay poet Allen Ginsberg visited the scene, remarking that, "You know, the guys there were so beautiful - they've lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago".
Within a month the first Gay Liberation Front meeting had been held in New York. The rest is history. Commenting on the significance of Stonewall just afterwards someone described it as, the "hairpin drop" heard around the world.
(Reproduced by kind permission of Him magazine)
1970.
Gay liberation in Scotland took off in 1970. Ian Dunn, a founder member of the Scottish Minorities Group, was there...
The Scottish Minorities Group was born on the 9 May 1969 when 25 people, with a mite more than one or two gay women (oh! yes, never lesbians ... then) met at the Glasgow University Chaplaincy, aiming for law reform, counselling, opening centres and social integration. Integration!
Why on earth did we select the word minorities? Well frankly there were enough people present who were scared to use the word homosexual. Gay was just becoming popular but still meant "frivolously fun-loving, in a bright, shallow way", so that wasn't an option. And in any case we saw ourselves as a minority; it was the tenor of the times and minority rights were all the rage in intellectual circles.
Our title turned out to be very popular and it slowly dawned on some of us that (plural) minorities was an accurate description of the folk joining SMG. Especially I mention the TVs and TSs who greatly regretted the later name change. But we contained other minorities, including a very small number, who, victims of right wing backlash 10 years later, were to cause endless pain and lost sleep for us "normal" gays: I'm referring to the paedophiles.
The first year was incredible, but 1970 was a real drag. After the euphoria of getting started we lacked the language to inspire a mass membership. It was in December of 1970, after Gay Liberation in London had ignited the beacons, when we decided to hold our first meeting.
We never looked back.
January 1971 saw the launch of SMG News which has been in continuous production ever since, though now called Gay Scotland Magazine. It is the oldest, les-gay-bi publication in the whole of Great Britain and Ireland. It may be going through lean times but it has not died and I expect it will live to see good years again.
The newsletter built the membership and our discos and dancing did the rest. God! did we dance?
Starting in 1974 we bought up the building in Broughton Street that after 15 years operation is accepted as part of the Edinburgh scene.
The Glasgow Gay Centre opened in Sauchiehall Street in 1976 and in 1978 the SMG changed its name to the Scottish Homosexual Rights group.
1971.
Peter Burton - Consultant Editor and Books Editor for Gay Times - celebrates the British gay press, 28 years old this year.
A little over 28 years ago I joined the fledgling British gay press. John Stamford had advertised in the "underground newspaper" - International Times- for contributions for a publication for gay men he was shortly to launch. I submitted a factional article which was accepted and appeared in International Male Advertiser (Number 2, May 1969), which became Spartacus. The first edition of the Spartacus International Gay Guideappeared the following year - and has been published more or less annually ever since.
Shortly after the appearance of John Stamford's monthly, I saw another advertisement inIT - for a magazine called Jeremy. Far more a mainstream publication, Jeremywas archetypally 1960s, dabbling in fashionable bisexuality rather than up-front gayness. I joined as theatre columnist and ended up as editor.
Little did I imagine then that the major proportion of my working life would be spent working within the gay press; I probably wasn't even foresighted enough to imagine the press surviving, let alone growing steadily stronger for three decades.
Those of us who were in at the beginnings of the gay press in this country found ourselves learning what might be termed a new journalistic language. For the first time in our careers we were able to communicate directly with an audience who shared our sexual orientation. It was a liberating experience and we grew as the gay press grew. It is a process of growth that has never stopped.
I see from my diary that I first encountered Denis Lemon to discuss the as yet unpublished Gay News in June 1972. That was the beginning of a fruitful and productive relationship that carried me through the next 10 heady years.
From the vantage point of 1969, Gay News was unimaginable - a fortnightly newspaper for gay men and lesbians, widely available, taken seriously by the mainstream media; from the vantage point of the late 90s, Gay News was inevitable.
Over those 28 years I have been involved with gay magazines and newspapers which have foundered and which have flourished. I have been fortunate enough to turn my way of life into a profession - and though my level of commitment to the gay press has sometimes diminished, it has never wavered.
Today the British gay press boasts a healthy range of titles - local (ScotsGay, for example), national (Gay Times), free (The Pink Paper), fashionable (Attitude), intellectual (European Gay Review) amongst them.
Though the political wind has changed from those euphoric days of the 60s; the gay press in Britain has never been stronger or more vital. Though we may suffer reverses of fortune, we will survive.
1972.
In mid 1972, the following announcement appeared in Gay News:
"The London Gay Liberation Front is planning a week-long series of events as part of this year's celebration of Gay Pride. Theme of the activities will be both an assertion of Gay Pride and two concrete demands: repealing of all anti-gay laws and full civil rights for gay people."
The week's events included:
- A dance in Fulham Town Hall on Friday 23 June
- various events, including leafleting of London's "gay areas" (Saturday 24)
- gay days in Battersea and Waterlow parks (Sunday 25)
- a disco (Monday 26)
- street events, including a GLF vigil outside the American embassy (Tuesday 27)
- a West London gay disco at the White Lion, Putney (Wednesday 28)
- a repeat of Tuesday's activities, minus the vigil (Thursday 29)
- another gay pride dance at Fulham Town Hall (Friday 30)
- and a "Gay Pride Carnival" from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park (Saturday 1 July).
The week finished with an evening disco at the Northern Polytechnic, Holloway Road, and on Sunday 2 July, a gay day on Primrose Hill!
***
About 800 people attended the first Gay Pride March, but more fun was had by the 30 or so leafletters on the previous Saturday who engaged in running fights with the customers of the Colherne and the Boltons pubs. "What is Colherne - Good! What is the Boltons - Crap!" was the cry as the drinkers refused to leave the bar.
***
In June 1972, the first issue of Gay Newsappeared. Its 12 pages included a "Warning to Possible Repliers to the above Personal Advertisers. There is a rumour going round that all the issues ads were put in by the Gay News collective. They apparently wanted to show you that ads can be fun as well as interesting." Among the ads was one for the Grand Drag Ball with the theme of Pygmalion at the Porchester Hall, and drag dinner and dance at the Hilton Hotel - price £6.60.
1973.
May: Oxford Gay Pride Week. Eric Presland does a leather-bondage-rubber skit, but it wasn't all fun and frolicking. WH Smiths was picketed for refusing to stock Gay News and university "officials" (bouncers) stopped a boat load of libbers from boarding an island known as Parsons Pleasure. The island was a meeting place for the university's closeted dons.
"The week was lacking in dynamics - it cried out for more street activity and a stronger assault on straight conceptions and gays in hiding" wrote a Gay News reporter.
***
"More a whimper than a bang" said Gay News about the London Pride March - "The turnout was so small (an estimated 300) that one wonders if London even noticed."
On the eve of the march the police raided the Father Redcap pub in London - for "disorderly conduct " - "Men dancing in close contact, groping each other with hands in trouser pockets", said a policeman.
1974.
London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard went into operation at 6pm on 4 March 1974. Tom Howarth, a switchboard volunteer, listens in:
When it opened, the switchboard expected to get a handful of calls and was very pleased and surprised to get 45. Within 5 years it had taken over 300,000 calls, moved into larger premises and extended the service both by number of lines and by going round the clock. It is a unique service and it is owned by us.
It compels you to run the organisation - if you don't arrange for the phones to be fixed, or buy the loo paper, or raise the money then it doesn't happen. There is no wonderful super person who arrives at 9am and goes at 5pm, having typed, filed and organised. There is no magic wand. You have to do it, you have to go cap in hand to the overstretched lesbian and gay communities and beg and cajole the money out of them and there's nothing left over for someone to be paid with.
Of course we could compromise and go to the big funders, but at what cost? We value our independence! We don't want to be told we can't take certain calls, or that we're not being impartial enough; since when have straights ever been impartial when it came to us? We don't want to have the plugs pulled when the political colour changes at the Town Hall. We don't like having bosses.
We don't have bosses at Switchboard, not real bosses. We have lots of people with big mouths, but no-one gets away with much and people who pretend to be boss are only boss by consensus. If they get too uppity we can ignore them, or vote them out. We're a sort of non-hierarchical collective that's mated with hard-tory mediocracy, ie you work hard you get a lot of brownie points, but as soon as you stop you're the same as anyone else. Is this making sense?
But what about the callers? Most switchboard volunteers do it for the callers. They're not sure what they're doing, but whatever it is, the callers get the benefit. The callers haven't changed over 15 years. Some of them are the same callers.
They first phoned when they were coming out, somewhere beyond Watford Gap. Then maybe they phoned because they had been kicked out, or they left home, or had been caught cottaging. Then a lot of them moved to London and needed somewhere to stay, to meet people, to find a job, they phoned switchboard because their lover was not being faithful, or their parents, or maybe their parents phoned because they were scared of Aids. They were going abroad and wanted info on bars and beaches, or they were stuck at home with a mortgage and were looking for a plumber. And then their lover died and in the dark times they phoned, because suicide seemed the only option and they wanted to talk the pain away. Now.
Why do I do it? Because this is real life, and all the campaigns and all the changes in the law don't mean nothing unless we care for our own.
***
Gay Pride 1974
"Not in a royal park - it's disgusting", said 40 year old housewife Wendy Lynham commenting on the revellers.
Only 300 took part on the 5th anniversary of Stonewall. The event, a quiet march followed by a picnic in Hyde Park, was organised at short notice by the South London Gay Liberation Group.
1975.
In its first year of operation, Gay Switchboard takes 22,829 callers. The switchboard opens for 24-hour operation in May, 1975.
In New York, between 40-60,000 people march in the 1-mile-long Gay Pride March.
In London, the only Pride celebration is a gay picnic in Hyde Park on 22 June, organised by the South London GLF. "Starting at 2pm, picnickers are asked to gather at the park, at the eastern end of the Serpentine. Take along your own food and musical instruments (but no radios!)" - 300 attempted to fill the park.
On 23 November, 2-3,000 people marched from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square to demand a new Sexual Offences Act.
With Issue 76 in July 1975, Gay News makes its debut in WH Smith, but only on bookstalls in London's mainline stations.
10,000 people see Gay Sweatshop's series of plays at the Almost Free Theatre.
Nigel Goodwin, a member of the Festival of Light's prestigious Council of Reference, was fined £45 at Wells St Magistrates Court for committing an act of gross indecency in a public place with French chef Jacques Morel. The two men were arrested in a police raid on the Kensington Kingsauna Club in December 1974. The court heard that two police officers, Sergeants Bertram and Facey (known to his colleagues as "Bubbles"), had kept an authorised observation on the premises, dressed in towels.....
Nigel Goodwin said it was a case of mistaken identify. The light in the passage outside the cubicles was, "Very dim and red-coloured. The curtains were very thick of a non-aesthetic type." (Gay News)
1976.
John Curry (26) wins the Olympic Gold amid rumblings among the press over whether his dancing is "manly or virile" enough.
June 1976. After David Seligman of Gay Switchboard is beaten unconscious on Hampstead Heath he warns, "Don't go to the heath, it's dangerous."
June 1976. Gay News headline, "Coleherne Gays Near Riot" - Fighting broke out between customers and police after three arrests were made. Commenting on London's Stonewall, Gay News wrote, "On June 28 gays had issued a clear statement that they'd had enough. And that was liberation for them. The politics had started earlier: the law reformers versus the revolutionaries, the manifestos, the letters to Congress. But Stonewall took a personal sense of liberation to people."
***
Only 200 joined the Pride march to Hyde Park.
1977.
Gay Pride Week opens with a march to Hyde Park on 25 June: 1,000 stagger along the route. One taxi driver, held-up by the procession, remarked: "What do I think of it? I think they're all poofs - I dunno."
In the USA, 250,000 join the march in San Francisco, 25,000 in New York, 5,000 in Hollywood, 5,000 in Boston, 2,000 in Seattle, with many more in Miami, Chicago, Kansas City, Atlanta and San Diego.
"On Tuesday 8 March, the Tom Robinson Band joins Linda and Eileen from the Elephant & Castle pub, and The Boys Plus, recently featured in the Union Tavern's all-male panto Cinderella, in a Silver Jubilee Drag Ball in aid of the Gay News Fighting Fund at the Porchester Hall, Queensway. Dress: Drag or Informal." (Gay News)
Events throughout the country are held in February and March to raise money for the fighting fund.
Three new Gay Rights Bills are presented to parliament during 1977. Those extending the "freedoms" of the 67 Act to Northern Ireland and Scotland pass. However, an attempt to lower the age of consent to 16 is stillborn. No sex please you're under 21 - and you're a faggot!
September 1977: Women walk out of CHE and set up the National Organisation for Gay Women.
1978.
Pride attracts 240,000 in San Francisco and 50,000 in New York, while in London the route is altered to go from Sloane Square, via Chelsea and Earls Court, to a picnic at Shepherds Bush Green. 900 marched and 1,200 picnicked. The police didn't want the route because of traffic problems.
Mary Whitehouse's instigated Gay News Blasphemy trial starts, and in February Tom Robinson releases the song of the century, Glad to be Gay.
The Anti-Nazi League advertises in Gay News with photos of gays in concentration camps in fascist Germany. The logo is "Never Again" .
Gay News is fined £1,000 and its editor, Denis Lemon, a further £500 for printing a poem - part of the blasphemous poem reads, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods, they kill us for their sport"
Feb 11: 5,000 march in London demanding gay rights. "How far back does it go?" asked one impatient taxi driver. A police constable shrugged his shoulders in a sympathetic gesture. The 5,000 assembled in Trafalgar Square singing "Picnic time for heteros".
April: a dozen lesbians hold a sit in, in the office of Daily Express editor, Derek Jameson, demanding columnist Jean Rook apologises to MP Maureen Colquhon for attacks on her.
May: the ANL Rock Against Racism Carnival, with a massive gay contingent, marches through the East End to Victoria.
***
Lily Savage scales a 20 foot wall, braves search lights and BR toilets. And all because the lady loves .......Pride.
The very sight of a balloon-covered lorry, empty Colt 45 cans and Carnation corn plasters sends my mind hurtling back to my first Gay Pride march.
The year was 1978, and I was just an innocent child, a mere neophyte, and a pupil at one of the Wirral's Premier Girls Schools, St Risley's. One day during a domestic science lesson, I was idly flicking through the personals at the back of my Melody Maker when I came across an ad with the date and details of Gay Pride.
I could feel my consciousness raising underneath my plaits and decided then and there to run away to London. After pouring a bottle of poppers into the batter mix the headmistress was beating, thus rendering that good woman of the cloth temporarily paralysed (and smiling), I fled from the Social Services Home For People With Embarrassing Little Peccadilloes to release my highly disturbing sister, Vera. Scaling the 20ft wall was no problem to a budding Avenger girl (in fact, in later years I was offered the part of Purdey until Joanna Lumley stuck her big oar in). The wall was, as they say in the trade, "a piece of piss", as was releasing our Vera from the hen house and making our subsequent escape despite the search-lights and killer whippets.
Stopping off at home first to collect suitable London outfits, two-tone loons and a Village People blouson jacket for me, and sensible seersucker for Vera, but both of us armed with the obligatory shawls, clogs and bowls of dripping we made our way to Lime Street Station, settled down nicely in a toilet on the 10.15am Liverpool to Euston and composed our ragged nerves by drinking two bottles of Dr Collis Brown and smoking a BR sausage.
What actually happened the rest of that day is well, sort of a blur. I vaguely remember an incident in a Threshers off-licence, and I can just recall our Vera singing "2, 4, 6, 8 is your husband really straight?" on the back of a lorry. The lorry subsequently turned out to be a council refuse vehicle doing it's rounds somewhere in Purley. Our Vera was bound over to keep the Peace for 6 months.
In fact the only thing I can really recall, apart from having a good time, is waking up in a Dickensian Garret over a pub called "Ye Olde Vauxhalle Taverne" with an evil landlord twirling his whiskers. The rest of this tale you all know. Anyway I'd probably have failed domestic science "O" level.
Handy hints to ensure you have a pleasant day:
1. Make sure you take comfortable flat shoes. Nothing above a four inch heel.
2. Take an umbrella. It may rain or it could be very hot and you might be bald. It's also handy in a fracas.
3. Don't be a student from some obscure Poly and pelt drag queens with leaflets proclaiming that they should be burnt at the stake. Remember Drag Queens started the Stonewall Riots and some had a hand in the Toxteth ones too.
4. Don't get drunk, fall in love on the march declare undying love and end up on a coach to Aberdeen when you live and work in Kensal Rise.
5. Have a good day.
--An extract from Lily Savage's biography "The Diary of a Sex Kitten" by Shirley Conran.
1979.
In 1979, Bang was 5 years old and Heaven had recently opened. Rupert Smith was a scene queen:
As I descended the narrow, ill-lit stairway my nostrils were assailed by a curious smell, a combination of sweat and cheap scent and something more, the smell of desperation and loneliness. Dim light from a single dirty red bulb cast eerie shadows off the cracking greenish paint work. Sick with fear and yet spurred on by a strange need, I entered the club. Suddenly all eyes were upon me, hungry eyes, coldly appraising a new face. Here and there were unmistakable dabs of kohl, touches of mascara, attempts to recapture a look of youthful innocence that had no place in this sinister environment. Taking a seat at the bar, I nervously asked the elderly barman for a beer, but before I could pay, a fat manicured and heavily bejewelled hand clasped mine and in an insinuating, syrupy voice breathed into my ear "Oh no, my dear, let me pay for this" - I knew that I was already lost....
If ever such places ever really existed, I have failed to find them in 10 years of fairly bizarre fantasies about the gay scene - "the twilight world of the homosexual", "a swirling cesspit" - I redouble my efforts, but still can find nothing to compare with such lurid imaginings. Instead, on certain memorable nights, I have been more than half convinced that the London gay scene is proof (if proof were needed) that you don't need to die to go to heaven.
And Heaven was the first place I headed to when I came to London. A tirelessly political friend, campaigning around the time of the 1979 election, had spent an evening haranguing those sections of the gay community who frittered their energies away on drinking, dancing, snorting poppers and getting laid in bars and clubs: "scene queens" he called them, sniffing derisively.
I determined there and then to become a scene queen immediately, and although blessed with neither an independent income nor the sort of looks that inspire voluntary salivation, have been working on it ever since. Of course, I had impossible ideals. I wanted to find a place where I could take anyone I wanted, man or woman, straight or gay, where I could dance to songs that I knew and where I could find company without resorting to too much drinking. That shangri-la may not exist, but it's been a lot of fun looking.
And there have been some very near approaches. The Fridge, in both its venues, has come close; Heaven's trashier nights have come even closer. It's still possible to walk into the Pyramid and think that you're in a science fiction movie. The Lift was closer still. But perhaps the best of all were the much lamented Sunday afternoon tea dances in Stallions, where people of every age, race and sex could get down on the floor and do the rowing dance.
Clubs and pubs continue to open and close with bewildering rapidity, but as I move into my second decade of scene queenery, I can see little sign of the depression that is supposed to be driving us back underground. There are more mixed lesbian and gay places now, and the old idea of the gay men's ghetto is fast disappearing. You can still meet nice gentlemen who are willing to buy you half a shandy. Rumour has it that safe-sex backrooms are opening in New York. What the hell - it is the fin de siecle after all. I intend fully to embrace the Naughty Nineties with one eye on my wallet and the other madly scanning the bar, and shall dance, drink and misbehave until I drop.
***
22 May: 4,000 lesbians and gays riot in San Francisco as Dan White, the killer of Harvey Milk, gets a sentence of three years.
30 June: 8,000 join the Gay Pride march from the Embankment to Hyde Park to hear Tom Robinson sing. Thank you Tom.
1980.
21 June: 3,000 people join the Gay Pride march. While a petition is being presented to No. 10 bearing the 14,000 names of those demanding gay rights, four people are arrested in Parliament Square, one of them, Frank Egan, for wearing a kitchen vegetable cutter in his hat as part of his drag. The march continues to the University of London Union in Malet Street, where, in such anger, a decision is made to continue to Bow Street Police Station where the four people are being held. The police barricade Malet St and more arrests are made as a group breaks through the police cordon. Eventually, the police allow a march of 1,500 people to go to Bow Street. The 10 arrested are all released without charge. One of them, Julian Howes, showed journalists his torn costume on his release: "Do I look as if I'm dressed for an evening on the barricades?"
"It is an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco" - Oscar Wilde.
With those words Armistead Maupin started the Tales of the City series, the first of which was published in Britain in 1980.
Male homosexuality decriminalised in Scotland by a Robin Cook amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill.
Heaven, the first all-week gay mega-club, opens.
First black lesbian and gay groups founded.
1981.
"The night the Mounties didn't get their man" - Dan Healey of Body Politic remembers a cold but proud night in Toronto:
Whenever I think of Pride I immediately turn to that cold night in 1981 when Toronto's lesbian and gay movement - a "ragged radical fringe", was catapulted into a struggle from which it emerged a competent, angry and proud community.
During the night of 5 February four gay bathhouses were raided by the police. Men were bundled off into police vans by the dozen, 309 were eventually charged with being "found-ins" under the bawdy house laws.
The next evening the good citizens of Toronto were stunned to discover that 5,000 lesbians and gay men were rioting in the heart of their peaceable city. In the Toronto Sun they called it a "gay rampage".
It was perhaps our Stonewall but nonetheless it was still a quintessentially Canadian riot. No burning cars, no Molotov cocktails, though someone did manage to break two streetcar windows but they escaped arrest.
We simply overran the city's main street, noisily and angrily denouncing the police. Marching from the heart of the gay ghetto we set upon the police station which had masterminded the raids, the infamous 52 Division.
There we harangued the police who surrounded the station. With chants of "Fuck you, 52". The cops stood stiff-backed like Mounties, unflinching as we spat in their faces and hurled abuse.
I remember one academic friend of mine being so uncharacteristically unpleasant that I wondered if he had taken leave of his senses.
We didn't stop at the cop shop. For many years gay anger had focused on the homophobic Tory government that had run Toronto and the rest of the province of Ontario since 1943.
They had dragged our newspaper, the Body Politic through the courts in a blatantly political trial over obscenity. They fired gay civil servants and used our tax dollars to fight claims for justice in the courts.
They encouraged the police to enforce a homophobic agenda, as and when they could get away with it. In short, the federal Liberal Party had decriminalised gay sex and the provincial Tories were hell bent on recriminalising us.
We left 52 division and headed for the Ontario legislature building. A grotesque Normal-revival pile that stands in the centre of a common known as Queens' Park.
That evening, it truly became a Queen's Park, as we raced across the snow to reach the doors before the police arrived.
It was hardly the storming of the Winter Palace - not one plate of glass was shattered. But I do remember watching lesbian and gay friends flinging themselves against the massive oak doors.
The memory of that icy charge, with my lover at my side and our friends around us remains one of my strongest personal sources of Pride.
And the aftermath? It took anoñther four years for the Tories to fall. The new following coalition enacted in the Ontario Human Rights Code protection for lesbians and gays.
But the success of the lobby could not have been successful without the influx of ordinary, angry lesbians and gays in defence of the found-ins.
The courts were clogged with brave men who refused to admit wrongdoing and the vast majority were acquitted. In the face of adversity homosexuals took charge of their lot and sought to change it. The Tories had given us a sense of common purpose.
***
European Court of Human Rights finds in favour of Northern Irish gays.
Ken Livingstone, new leader of the GLC, promises support to gays and Greater London Council gives first gay grant to London Gay Switchboad. Last national lesbian conference in London breaks up in arguments.
Capital Gay, first free gay paper, founded by ex-Gay News staff. Distributed initially only in London (it later goes to Brighton) it becomes the first British paper to mention HIV.
1982.
Male homosexuality decriminalised in Northern Ireland. Switchboard hold first UK information meeting on a strange new disease, AIDS.
The Terrence Higgins Trust is launched and named after first British man to die with AIDS.
Julian Meldrum starts first regular column on AIDS in Capital Gay.
***
In July 1982, Terrence Higgins was one of the first gay men to die of AIDS in Britain. Janet Green finds strength working for the Trust:
In 1985 I was a volunteer on Lesbian Line - it was the year that AIDS became a big media story. I was angry and appalled by the hype and homophobia. When I saw one of the first jobs advertised at the Terrence Higgins Trust, I decided to apply, although what I knew about AIDS could have been written on the back of a postage stamp.
The post advertised was Director of Clinical Services. I had absolutely no idea what this meant. The interview panel weren't too clear either; it turned out that the title was an American import.
In 1985 only three other women were involved at't know I had. (You try being quiet and shy as the only woman in a group of 10 men!).
When I was first offered the job I had done a quick straw poll amongst my dyke friends - I wanted to know what their reaction would be. Only one woman asked me why I wanted to work with men.
A good question; perhaps I'd never been a separatist lesbian, but I had been heavily involved in feminist politics. But the times they were a changing. It wasn't difficult to predict that the backlash from the AIDS crisis would affect lesbians and gay men. I felt that the only way to fight homophobia was by working together. That's the political side.
On a personal level I was moved by so many young people ill and dying, and wanted to try to do something about that.
The woman who criticised my choice of job was tippexed out of my address book. Other friends were, and are, wonderfully supportive.
Our offices, in a grotty converted warehouse, consisted of two rooms, about 12' x 8' each. Once we counted 17 people in one of them. My new job consisted of liaison, helping the volunteers in a variety of ways, public speaking, replying to letters, pouring oil on troubled waters, writing texts for leaflets and washing the cups. Busy ain't the word.
My cats complained. After a five year stint I left Lesbian Line. I didn't have the time or energy to have a lover.
Four years later I'm still at THT. Now we have many women (lesbian and heterosexual) involved as paid and voluntary workers. My job is still varied, never dull and continually demanding. I wash less cups now that we use environmentally unfriendly polystyrene.
I learnt the hard way that I couldn't continue to work a 60-hour week, after getting perilously near to burn-out in 1987. Now I make sure that I get time for myself outside of the Trust. Well, at least the cats are talking to me again.
Sometimes I hate this work. I miss the friends and colleagues who have died. Sometimes the sadness almost overwhelms, and I have to retreat into professional mode with barriers and boundaries in place to protect me.
Yet I feel privileged to be working for an organisation that I can believe in and feel committed to. It's given me a great deal: good friends, confidence, new skills, affection. And the opportunity to put something back into the lesbian and gay community.
***
Pride itself, for the only time so far, was held out of London - in Huddersfield to be precise. 2,500 travelled, after a last minute switch of place, in protest against a police raid on a club in the Yorkshire town. Back in the big city, the GLC sets up its Lesbians' and Gay Men's Working Party.
600 women marched on the streets of London in the first ever Lesbian "Celebration" - from Victoria to ULU.
But few notice the references to a "rare and dangerous disease" beginning to appear among gays.
1983.
Peter Tatchell defeated in Labour by-election in Bermondsey after vicious anti-gay campaign by tabloids and local Liberals. Simon Hughes elected.
Gay News collapses; sales have plummeted with availability of freesheets.
Questions asked in Parliament about "pretty police" entrapment.
BBC's Panoramabroadcast first TV documentary on AIDS. Horizon follows up with "Killer in the Village".
In Bermondsey, the press launched a campaign against the Labour candidate in a by-election. One tabloid went as far as touching up photos of Peter Tatchell to give the impression that he was wearing make-up. The Right rediscovered the power of homophobia to influence elections and the political agenda - and has not stopped spouting it since.
"AIDS Total Reaches Unlucky 13" read a headline in Capital Gay after the thirteenth person dies.
***
But Pride was celebrated today on a day of "glorious sunshine"; 2,000 people, several thousand pink balloons and the Pink Singers joined the march from Hyde Park to Malet Street.
Maggie, who lives with Norman, Nigel, Geoffrey and Cecil, goes to the local library and takes home an interesting book called Jenny lives with Eric and Martin. Maggie gets all upset and Cecil wishes that all that advice about condoms had started this year rather than next.
1984.
Chris Smith, MP for Islington South, is the first Member of Parliament to come out as gay.
The Terrence Higgins Trust holds the first national AIDS conference.
GALOP, first gay policing project, founded.
London bookshop Gay's the Word is raided by Customs & Excise and spends the next two years, and several thousands of our hard earnt pounds, in trying to argue that writings by Truman Capote and Oscar Wilde, plus a host of Yank soft porn, should not fall victim to the prejudiced VAT men (and women?).
***
June: Books for burning, but only 2,000 turn up to join the Pride march.
Bronski Beat releases The Age of Consent. Never forget what Jimmy told you, "Never feel guilty, never give in".
The Gay Bereavement Project, a support group for gays or lesbians, gets its first mention on television - in a party political broadcast attacking the GLC for "wasting ratepayers' money".
***
Bi: bent, straight or just another sexuality? In 1984, Kate Fearnley of the Edinburgh Bisexual Group came out for a second time.
In 1984 I stopped leading a double life. No, I don't mean I came out as a lesbian - that I did in 1979. In 1984 I came out as a bisexual. The London Bisexual Group, a bisexuality workshop at a lesbian and gay conference I'd helped organise, and a few weeks later the first National Bisexual Conference.
For the first time I discovered that there were other bisexuals. That some of them like me also identified as lesbian or gay and that some of them lived in Edinburgh!
So I stopped being a lesbian with a rather weird private life and became an out bisexual. The Edinburgh Bisexual Group sprang into slightly shaky existence at the end of the year and is now a highly active group which runs the only bisexual phoneline in the UK, plus a pen pal scheme and (so far) two national conferences.
It hasn't been easy, for me or for the group. Negative images of bisexuality abound. The straight world treats us much the same as lesbian and gay men, and the lesbian and gay world assume that our sexuality, unlike everyone else's, is a matter of choice, so that we can disappear into suburban heterosexuality at a moment's notice when the going gets tough. (Much in the same way that the churches expect homosexuals to stay celibate I suppose?)
A particularly annoying and self-fulfilling image is that bisexuals are all hedonistic, non-political people who take the freedoms fought for by others and give nothing back. In fact we have the same need to change how the world views sexuality.
There is now a growing network of bisexual groups around Britain and internationally, and bisexuals are becoming active in lesbian and gay campaigns as bisexuals instead of as honorary or assumed lesbians or gay men. Unity is strength. If we can avoid the temptation of infighting about whose sexuality is "pure" enough to qualify them to join campaigning organisations, lesbian, gay and bisexual liberation will go far!
1985.
The GLC publishes Changing The World, charter of gay rights.
April: With GLC support, the London Lesbian and Gay Centre opens - amid controversy within and without the gay and lesbian communities..
South Wales miners join Pride march in thanks for gay support of their strike.
Body Positive - the first HIV self help group - founded in London.
Black Lesbian and Gay Centre founded.
Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart opens in New York. The title comes from a poem by W H Auden:
Is true of the normal heart,
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone
***
June: Pride hits the 10,000 mark and Lesbian Strength over 1,000.
August: The Hippodrome nightclub in London sacks Donovan Patterson when it discovers he is body positive.
October: An announcement is made that blood donations will be tested for HIV infection. "Risk groups" are asked not to give blood - in several areas the number of donors drops by 40% and more. It is not known how many IV drug users and haemophiliacs are blood donors.
1986.
AIDS debated in the Commons. Major national campaign launched.
Haringey Lesbian and Gay Unit writes to all school heads urging them to promote positive images of homosexuality to their pupils; all hell breaks loose.
26 May: 2,000 stand in Trafalgar Square in the first candlelight vigil for those who have died of Aids.
21 June: 2,500 take part in Lesbian Strength, marching from Speakers Corner to Farringdon.
***
5 July: 7,500 join the Gay Pride March from Hyde Park, where it rained.
1987.
Government delivers leaflet on AIDS, with London Lesbian & Gay Switchboard phone number, to every household in country. Phones break down.
Clause 28 of Local Government Bill introduced in Commons.
Last National Lesbian & Gay Conference collapses under factional in-fighting.
James Anderton, Chief Constable of Manchester, condemns gays as "in a cesspit of their own making".
The Pink Paper is founded.
***
13 June: 3,000 join Lesbian Strength. It rained.
27 June: 11,000 join the Gay Pride March from Hyde Park to Jubilee Gardens, where they only drank 25,000 cans of beer.
1988.
Section 28, preventing the wilful "promotion" of homosexuality by local authorities, passes into law with help from Local Government minister Michael Howard; it has never been tested in court. 10,000 protest in London; 15,000 in Manchester.
Lesbians abseil in the Lords and somewhat invade the Six Clock News live broadcast; Norwegian foreign minister protests to British foreign minister; protests in Amsterdam and New York.
First National Conference for Lesbians and Gay Men with Disabilities.
1988 was the year the law finally recognised lesbians. Pity it was a law trying to do us down. Never mind, we also made ourselves rather visible - in the House of Lords and in the news too. The Strength march attracted 1,000 - but on the way to the march everywhere you could see dykes holding hands, kissing or just being dead out. The weather was hot and tempers fairly flared at the end. Let's hope it wasn't the last celebration of our strength.
May: On the night before Clause 28 becomes Section 28, for the first time in living memory it is worth watching the BBC television news.
***
June: Pride gets Prouder. 30,000 march from Hyde Park to Jubilee Gardens for the last time - the gardens no longer being available for hire as County Hall, home of local government in London for several decades, is to be sold for conversion into a luxury hotel.
More years to follow!
Source.
From: https://web.archive.org/web/19990427231447/http://www.pride.org.uk/97histor.htm
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