Item No: #307245 "You Are Invited to Gay Liberation's First Birthday Celebration"
"You Are Invited to Gay Liberation's First Birthday Celebration"

An Invitation to the First Gay Pride March in 1970

"You Are Invited to Gay Liberation's First Birthday Celebration"

Notes: "The first Gay Pride march, in 1970, was about tens of thousands coming out of the closet. It was announced on simple white cardstock with deliberate gay panache." *

This small card, 5-1/2 by 4-1/4 inches, announces Christopher Street Liberation Day planned for the first anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which was also called the Christopher Street uprising after the street where the Stonewall Inn was located. Even less than a year after Stonewall, gay activists realized something had changed and they were already marking the anniversary as the first birthday of the gay liberation movement.

The protestors marched up Sixth Avenue to Central Park for a "gay-in" at Sheep Meadow. Several thousand people participated in the march, which set off a world-wide series of "gay pride" marches that have continued every year since. This first Christopher Street Liberation Day March, marking the anniversary of spontaneous resistance to police raids on gay and lesbian bars in Greenich Village, launched Gay Pride, the most visible element of the most successful civil rights movement of the last fifty years.

The University of Connecticut has a similar invitation in the Foster Gunnison, Jr. papers, but it has "N.Y.C." in a sans serif font where this example reads "New York City" in Roman italics.

* Source: Dansky, Steven F. "The Look of Gay Liberation" in The Gay & Lesbian Reivew Worldwide, vol. 16, no. 2, Mar/Apr 2009.

Edition + Condition: A near fine copy, cut slightly off of square, tanned on the back (verso) with some offsetting from another copy of this invitation.

Publication: New York: [Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee], 1970.

Item No: #307245

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