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Loud, proud and first
Three veterans of Chicago's first gay pride parade dish on what that day was like.
Vernita Gray, 60
“I was a gay libber, baby! It wasn’t a parade; it was a demonstration. I had that Angela Davis ’fro. Henry Weimhoff [a U. of C. student] had a bullhorn; people had flags. It was a beautiful day, sunny. People were in a great party mood. For the most part, onlookers were shocked and were, like, ‘What? Who are these—gay? Gay? What the hell?’ There was definitely an African-American and a Hispanic presence. At that time, if you knew somebody who was out, it was, like, yes! You didn’t care what their color was.”
“If I had African-American friends who I knew were gay and lesbian who were closeted, they really didn’t want to hang out with me because I was so out. So those of us who were out, it made for a very intense camaraderie. The real thing was our gay thing.
“You’ll laugh, but gay culture a lot was in people’s homes, like in Henry’s home and my home. We would hang out at each other’s houses because there was a certain amount of harassment at the bars. If you were a schoolteacher and you were found to be in a gay bar, you would be arrested and lose your job. The Center on Halsted is north, but at that time a lot of gay activity was in Hyde Park. Henry lived at 54th and Harper, and if we weren’t partying at his house, we’d be partying at mine, which was at 56th and Drexel.
“Henry passed with the first wave of HIV and AIDS. I just adored him. I come out on Pride Sunday, and my eyes will just fill up with tears because we could never have thought it would be this. And for the gay men who’ve gone on before me, I hate that they can’t see what our parade has become. I mean, now we have more politicians in our parade than we had marchers in the first Pride parade! [Laughs]”
William Kelley, 66
“The official format was the march on Michigan Avenue to the Water Tower. Some people decided they would march to the Loop. I didn’t go past Water Tower; I wasn’t sure how the police would respond. This was only two years after the Democratic National Convention and the police violence at that time. Chicago police were not known for treating gay Chicagoans fairly or for respecting freedom of speech. There were no organized protesters because nobody took us seriously.”
“Although my parents, who lived in Missouri, were aware I was gay, they didn’t know anything about my public activism. I’d been publicly out since I got involved in Mattachine Midwest in 1965. Mattachine Midwest never had more than between 100 and 150 members, and many of them used pseudonyms.
“The 1970 march wasn’t entirely the first public manifestation in the Chicago streets on behalf of gay concerns. Mattachine Midwest had organized a picket a few years earlier in front of the Sun-Times to protest their refusal of advertising with the word gay in it. That picket was very minor. This certainly was a much larger, better-organized event. I’ve been to every single Pride march since.”
Gary Chichester, 62
“We started at Washington Park, which was called Bughouse Square—a free-speech area, so we didn’t need a permit. We marched down Michigan Avenue to City Hall and then Daley Plaza for a love-in and kiss-in. We had about 200 people, sort of hippies: ragtag, flowing shirts, paisleys, bell bottoms, headbands, beads. I came from a Republican background, so it took me a little while to get into that look.”
“I was 22 at the time. I came out even younger than that, when I was still in high school. During the year before the march, there was a TV show on channel 7, a talk show with Dr. David Reuben from Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. His chapter on homosexuality contained really ignorant things, and this was the best-selling book at the time. ABC invited a bunch of gay liberationists down there, hoping there probably would be a confrontation of some kind. One of them created a demonstration on camera, and the next day my family [Laughs] saw me on TV.
“The bars were very mafioso during that period. Gay people could not dance together. You could be arrested. Finally, the Gay Liberation Front picketed one of the gay bars, the Normandy down on Rush Street and Chicago. We were picketing, and the vice commander from that district said, “I don’t care what you have to do. Just get them off the street.” [Laughs] And that’s how dancing became part of the social scene for gay people in Chicago. There was another bar on the corner of Clark and Division. If you even held hands, you were asked to leave.”
