Special
Introduction
Exclusive
for Morris Kight Blog
Post-Stonewall gay liberation was an
exciting time. The activists who made it happen were unique visionaries, some
would call them illusionists, as it was an outrageous idea that they could change
long-held status quos for gays and lesbians. It required many strong egos, eccentrics
and hard-working activists, to shift the equilibrium of civil liberties for
homosexuals. This biography is not been written to glorify Morris Kight, and
yet at times it might simply because the facts speak for themselves. Whatever
the disputes, and there are many, despite how many people his out-of-control self-importance
alienated Morris Kight was definitely in the delivery room, if not on the table,
for the birth of gay liberation. In this telling of this important history, Kight
is central.
This particular slice of the Kight
and early gay liberation story is from 1973, a pivotal year in the endurance
and indelibility of the annual gay pride celebration. The first Gay Pride
Parade in 1970, Christopher Street West, was able to happen after a belabored
battle between LAPD and gay leaders. An eleventh hour California Supreme Court decision
ordered the police commissioner to issue a parade permit citing the “constitutional
guarantee of freedom of
expression.” The victory was sweet and yet it wasn't the only threat to a gay parade. From the beginning, parade organizers
and participants knew there were risks of violence. Kight received death
threats right up to the morning of the parade. Unlike what we see today, the
first gay parade was very quiet. The marchers convened on McCadden Place in
Hollywood, marched north and turned east onto Hollywood Boulevard. As they turned the corner, they had no
idea what was waiting for them. Spectators lined both sides of the boulevard
and everyone who was there had a very different reason for being there. LAPD was
prepared for a riot with overhead helicopters.
Instead, the parade helped to kick open
the proverbial closet doors on America and out sprung a new force to be
recognized. Two parades later, the cohesive quiet of the first parade had
turned into a cacophony of different values and perspectives—within the nascent
gay community.
Excerpt from:
The Kight Affect
The Authorized Biography of a Gay Liberationist
The Authorized Biography of a Gay Liberationist
© All rights reserved, not for reprinting without permission
Gay Pride 1973
The success of
the first Gay Pride parade in 1970 in Los Angeles spawned a new culture in
America and Gay Pride was slowly taking off across the country. In Los
Angeles, each parade was more outlandish than the previous, pushing all
mainstream lines of what was considered to be appropriate public behavior. By
1971, sponsors of the parade were already complaining about the content and
threatened to pull financial support.
By
1972, Kight was already, at times, claiming full credit for conceiving the idea
for and founding the parade. As a member of the Christopher Street-West
Planning Committee, he outlined the purpose of the parade and upcoming
festivities and had all sixteen members of the committee sign the document and
distribute it to the community.
“What
exactly is Gay Pride? It is no secret
that our community is quite diversified when it comes to politics, religion,
lifestyle, etc. Thus, Gay Pride will mean many things to many people. But out
of our great diversity and creativity, we are putting together an event which
belongs to ALL gay people. In doing so, we are learning more about each other
and generating an awareness of what pride and unity means to all of us as gay
brothers and sisters.”
The nudity and
“colorful” banners and signage in the 1972 parade pushed all lines of what many
in the gay circles thought was in “good taste.” The giant Vaseline jar from the
original parade was joined by a float made out of wire and paper-mâché, shaped
to look like a long Chinese dragon with a penis head. Called “The Cockapillar,”
it ejaculated white fluid as it weaved down Hollywood Boulevard. Some
homosexuals expressed concern about the image they were portraying to
“straight” society, as they wanted to be respectable. The more radical parade
participants didn’t relate to “respectable” and argued that subduing the parade
content wouldn’t necessarily garner them more respect. They felt justified that
they were countering oppression by being as flamboyant as they pleased.
It
did no good. In 1973, gay bathhouse owners formed a coalition and lobbied complaints
about the vulgarity of the parade. The consensus was that it left the gay
community open to harsh criticism from the neighborhood and the media. Censorship
was discussed and Morris Kight, to some people’s dismay, did not oppose it. He
claimed that he was “annoyed with critics of the parade within the gay
community.” Everyone in the community
and on the parade planning committee was at odds with each other and Kight was
no exception.
Kight’s
ideology as a pacifist did not make him passive. He fought hard for
reconciliation but there was no end to the in-fighting despite his and many others
best efforts toward a resolution. There
was no progress toward even having a committee agreement, much less a
celebration in the streets. The constant debating and scattered leadership not
only threatened the continuation of the Gay Pride parade, it also weakened the
organizational strength of the broader gay movement as everyone was focused on
this single issue—parade content. Kight grew weary of the internal conflicts
within the movement and blamed the problems on the “blunting of the parade’s
political focus.” Eventually, he became impatient, threw his arms up in the
air, feigning boredom with petty differences and dismissing any possibility of
a cohesive effort. He was ready to move on to the next great challenge on the
road to gay liberation. He was deciding if he would dismiss Christopher Street
West all together and put aside the idea of any future parades. He could easily
walk away from this particular activity—as he had done a dozen times before
when he tired of something— because he didn’t feel that any one event
completely represented the entire movement. He was frustrated by all the people
spinning their wheels trying to solve this one problem. As early as 1971 Kight
wrote to Foster Gunnison:
“Christopher
Street-West— In retrospect I realize it was a great show. I am sorry that major
media decided to black us out. But millions were informed of it in various
ways, and the time and money spent was right on. We did the whole [’71 parade] with
$1100 and had money left. So I am pleased. As for 1972 I do not know. I will
not run it again. I am tired of it now, and feel that fresh blood is necessary
to keep it going. Enough, I created it, and coordinated it two years. Many
worked, much good came of it.”
Jim
Kepner’s notes in When Did Gays Start:
“I served on Christopher Street West committee for the first seven years,
helping incorporate the group after Morris Kight (not for print) sabotaged it
in its third year.”
The
1973 Los Angeles parade was indeed cancelled and not due to Kight’s sabotage.
Kight
and Barbara Gittings were invited to come to New York City for the last weekend
of June in 1973, to serve as the co-Grand Marshalls of New York’s Gay Pride
Parade. The cancellation of the Los Angeles parade freed Kight to go. He was to
spend the weekend being feted as the personal guest of honor of many of the
east coast gay royalty: Dick Leitsch, Morty Manford, Vito Russo, Bruce Voeller
and others.
On
June 23, 1973—after the New York Gay Pride Parade was completed, author,
activist, film historian Vito Russo introduced Kight as the second keynote
speaker at the Gay Pride rally in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village,
referring to Morris as:
“The
man who founded the GLF of Los Angeles, the president of the board of directors
of the Gay Community Services in Los Angeles, and was in the peace movement
before most of us were born. He is the silver thread, as he calls it, from
southern Los Angeles to New York City, and he comes bringing us love. As [author]
John Francis Hunter calls him—the dean of the Gay Liberation Movement, Morris
Kight.”
Kight
stood to address what had to be the largest crowd of homosexuals he had ever
faced—close to 50,000. He adjusted his cadence for the New York audience. His
tempo was a bit more hurried than usual and his enunciation was less patrician—more
proletarian.
“Brothers
and sisters, I bring you greetings of love…
There was in this demonstration a picket sign which I think is classic,
one of the best I have ever seen in my life. ‘Don’t pretend to be somebody else.
Be yourself.’”
He then
dutifully publicly thanked his hosts and sent regards from prominent west coast
activists.
“If I did all
the things in New York that I was assigned to do, I would have to stay a year.
I’ll come back. Dick Michaels, the publisher of the Advocate, asked me
especially to bring you his warm personal greetings. The sisters who run the Lesbian
Tide Collective asked me to do the same thing. Just before I left Los Angeles,
the last person that I saw other than my closest coworkers at the Gay Community
Services Center, was Reverend Troy Perry, who asked me to bring you his
greetings. A great many other people said, ‘look up old so and so, or so and
so, I used to know him real well.’ I don’t have time to do that. So, if
somebody in Southern California says, ‘Did Morris say hello?’ Please say, ‘Yes, he looked me up and said
hello.’ OK? All right.
Once
he finished all the back-slapping, he got to the crux of his speech and hit every
consonant hard while dragging every vowel.
“Now,
let’s talk. . .
“At
this time every year throughout America, there are held graduation exercises. And
they always talk about promises. They are going to promise you a lot of things—the
universe, dominion, progress, domination over women, over blacks, over
Chicanos, over us, over children—domination, domination. And I call it the
great bullshit revelation of June each year.
“So
that’s not what we are talking about. We are talking about not dominating. We are talking about sharing and loving and caring.
So we have a promise that we should make one another. Other minorities have had
those that promise them things. [African-American abolitionist
and women's rights activist] Sojourner Truth said to black women, ‘That
white man over there says that women must be lifted into a carriage.’”
Kight quickly shifted gears, turned
on his southern drawl and created an energetic rhetoric.
“‘Nobody
ever lifted me into a carriage, and ain’t I a woman?’ Marcus Garvey said, ‘Liberty and justice for
all…Well, they must be talking about white folks because us black folks never
had no liberty and justice.’”
His speech resumed its original
inflection and came around to make the correlation between abolitionists and
gay liberations.
“Unfortunately,
nobody promised us anything, except misery and destruction and genocide. We
have been promised a life of death and destruction and despair. Until this
generation, in which we have joined together to promise one another that should
never happen again.
“In
that context, we must remember Dachau, Belzec, Pilsen, Auschwitz, Buchenwald,
in which a million of our brothers and sisters were scooped up off the streets
of Europe and taken to that place and there submitted to the ultimate solution
to gayness—incinerated, and turned into soap.”
He paused to place an emphasis on the next line: “Never
again [a-gan]. Never again
[a-gan]
will we allow this to happen.”
He
paused.
“In
memory of two hundred of our brothers and sisters burned to death at Salem, not
because they were witches but because they were part of us.
“In
memory of that one million incinerated at Buchenwald. In memory of each and
every one of these, we say ‘No more genocide.’
“Never
again will you be allowed to take our children from us. You will not be allowed
to take our dignity. You will not be allowed to take our lives. You will not be
allowed to deny us a home, a job. And we demand that you give us the room that
we want. Not to be part of your
society. I do not wish to work at the White House because I don’t want to be a
thief. I don’t want to work at the Pentagon because I don’t want to be a
murderer.”
The
crowd ate it up, and he shouted over their cheers.
“I
don’t want to work at the National Institute for Mental Health because I don’t
want to treat dissidents and gays as if they were sick.
“I
want to make a world in which we say, ‘No more can you do that.’ The mental health industry must get off our
backs. The Church must reform itself. The nuclear family must give way. All of
this society must give us room, room, room. And you have taken it for
yourselves.
“And
thus, as long as there is a breath of life in Barbara Gittings and me, any one
of you, we will not allow it.
“So,
let’s do what Barbara says. Let’s practice an exercise in love. Touch. Feel. Talk
to somebody. Kiss somebody. Caress somebody. Enfold somebody into your love. Pass
the enormous amount of electric energy that you have in you to someone else. Pass
it. Pass it. Share it. Don’t give it away to strangers. Give it to your own
people. Give it to gay people. That energy should be passing through us, all of
us collectively. All over this land we’re moving, we’re marching, we’re
changing.
“Brothers
and sisters, I bring you nothing in the world but total, mad love.”
Kight
gave the New Yorkers a double-scoop of pure, irresistible hippie love on top of
gay pride. Vito Russo articulated the crowd’s reaction when he shouted, “Thank
you, Morris. We love you.”
After
the parade and the rally, on a binge of all-nighters, Kight was the guest of
honor at a dinner hosted by a group of long-time pacifists, board of directors
types, the parade committee, and a number of other gay and lesbian leaders at a
lesbian hangout in the Village called Mona’s Roost. He was having the time of
his life and soaked up every watt of the spotlight while holding court. He was
around people he could converse with, rather than have to argue with. The New
York activists seemed so much more mature, in Kight’s eyes, than their west
coast counterparts. There was no fighting, no backbiting—at least not around a visiting
VIP. And Kight enjoyed the VIP treatment.
Kight
later described his New York trip to Paul Cain (1994):
“It
had been such a high-energy day. Of course, it had been the largest
demonstration ever. Everything had been absolutely correct. It was thrilling. It
was the perfect day. And so we ate and drank. And we drank a lot. And along
about two o’clock, Igal Roodenko—a gay man, pacifist, now dead of old age from
a heart attack—Igal said to me, ‘We need to get out of here. We need to get you
out of here.’”
They
left the party together, and Kight found himself heading with Igal up to 72nd
Street, “to the most strange apartment I’ve ever been in my lifetime. It was
three stories tall. And elegant, the most elegant I’d ever been in. It had a
two-story bed. A bed that was built up with a rack of books and a rack for fish
tanks, and then a sleeping pad here and a sleeping pad there, and so on, and so
forth. I went up all through this bed.
“And
then the host said, ‘Now, because you’re a nice gay man, I want to introduce
you to my secret place.’ And so we went
down to the Hudson River, to the Boat Basin—a Greek-Roman revival building,
perfectly round, Greek columns outside, and a fountain inside. And he knew a
secret way to get in, and so we went in. At three o’clock in the morning, we
were in this place, with the fountain splattering, smoking grass, and being
terribly gay and fantasizing. And then we went back to his apartment about five
o’clock in the morning. I said, ‘I’ve just got to get some rest. I’ve just got
to get home to Morty [Manford].’ And so
I went into the Tube and went back to the Village.”
Kight
made his way to the apartment where he had been staying during his trip, and Manford
greeted him, saying:
“Oh,
thank heavens you’re here! The phone has
rung all night! They’re searching for
you. People at the Center and your friends have been calling to say there’s
been a fire in New Orleans. We don’t know if it’s a gay bar or not, but it
sounds gay to us.”
A
popular second-story gay hangout called the Upstairs Lounge, in the French
Quarter of New Orleans, was destroyed by a sudden blaze during peak business
when the place was packed. Arson was immediately suspected. Most of the
fatalities happened because the fire had come from the one and only door that
led to a stairway to the ground floor and people were trapped by fire bars on
the windows of the second-story bar. The few survivors did so by squeezing
through the fire bars and jumping onto the sidewalk.
Manford
suggested that Kight re-route himself to go through New Orleans on his way back
to Los Angeles. Kight invited Manford to join him, and before they had really
decided what to do, they were both at the airport, boarding a flight to New
Orleans.
Kight: “I notified the press that I was coming. When
I got to Atlanta, the press was at the airport and I said it was a national day
of mourning and they interviewed me, and so on. And then I went on to New
Orleans and Troy [Perry] was there, along with some other people.”
There
is no record of any media waiting at the airport to greet them. They did hold a
press conference at the local Marriott Hotel and Kight, identified as
“president of the Gay Community Services Center and reputed founder of the Gay
Liberation Front,” was quoted in the Times-Picayune, describing the Upstairs
Lounge fire as:
“The
worst single tragedy to befall the gay community since Nazi Germany." Even
though an investigating detective told the press, “There are hints of a
firebombing,” when pushed by a reporter as to whether the fire was arson, Kight
carefully deferred judgment: “We feel it is incumbent on us to depend on the
New Orleans police to decide that.’”
Major
players in the country’s gay activism immediately convened in New Orleans and each
activist brought a different muscle to the effort. Resources being what they
were, Reverend Perry remembered, “We all slept in the same room and there were
four of us… things that you shouldn’t have to do. . . Here again, Morris was
right. He said, ‘Troy, you have more power than you know. If you tell people to
send us money, they will pay for these hotel rooms.’ So I got on the phone. Once I got the pledge
of the money, I immediately went down and got another room and we stayed at the
Marriott, a brand new hotel.”
Up
to that point in American history, the blaze at the Upstairs Lounge was the
largest bar fire ever, and it made national news for exactly twenty-four hours.
Reverend Perry remembers: “The Police Department called a press conference and
said they found out it was a gay bar. They said, ‘It was only thieves and
queers, and they don’t carry ID.’ Once they found out it was a gay bar, we
didn’t exist.”
Kight: “Twenty-nine people had burned to death. And we had to counsel
their families, all whom were finding out for the first time that [their loved
ones] were gay… Lots of people were in hospitals. We had to visit them.”
Perry:
“Two of my church members died in the fire, including my pastor’s assistant,
Mitch Mitchell, burned to death.”
As
reported in the local news in 1973, the fire was out in eighteen minutes with
“bodies jammed like logs against the front windows.” By the next day, the final count was
thirty-two dead and numerous serious injuries. Charred bodies were stacked in
the city morgue, many unclaimed. Kight:
“We stayed for a week, burying the dead.”
Perry:
“I called Clay Shaw to get permission, if I needed it, to hold a memorial
service if I could not find a church. Morris and Morty Manford came in – and
then I brought in two other clergy, [including] one who worked for Social
Security, so we’d know how to deal with the bodies.”
In
the meantime, Perry explained, “Morris again was working his way with the media.
We were all interviewed. We all knew how to talk. They got more than they knew
what to do with. We attacked the Police Department right off the bat.”
Kight:
“The police were making the most terrible statements. The Fire Marshall was
making homophobic statements, such as, ‘We will never know who they were
because gay people don’t carry identification.’ And we were holding a quick
press conference to correct them.”
National
coverage ended one day after the fire, and local coverage quickly went from carrying
the full story to a cursory mention on the evening news, and then moved into
blatant malice. The print and TV news
repeatedly showed one particularly gruesome photograph, taken from outside the
building, of fire victims melted into the fire bars with limbs hanging out. The
gay activists made repeated phone calls to the local newspapers, TV, and radio
stations to complain that the news was “reporting” distasteful gags and
pejorative statements from anti-gay locals rather than reporting news of the
tragedy.
Reverend
Perry: “We kept talking about what we
were going to do. Morris mostly wanted to demonstrate. We all held a press
conference and said, ‘Those were human beings.’
The bodies were so burned the FBI had to use skulls [for
identification.] The bodies were completely cremated, and everything was burned
up, including their ID’s. Their rings were melted into the floor. These were
people with real names, with families. Well, the police tried to backpedal, but
it was too late—it was amazing how we turned them around.”
Kight: “The Fire Marshall of New Orleans Parish
called me and said, ‘We saw your press conference, and you’re absolutely right.
We did say terrible things. We will meet with you anywhere you want. You set
the location, and we will meet with you to adjust our differences.’ [And we said,] ‘Fine, let’s meet.’ And we
adjusted it.”
Some
of the New Orleans press criticized the out-of-towners as carpetbaggers, coming
in to take over. From the Marriott press conference, the Times-Picayune
reported: “They [‘the homosexual movement leaders’] all stressed that they are
not in New Orleans to attempt to solve the tragedy, but to help those who need
it.”
Kight:
“One of them came and said, [in a Southern accent] ‘Mistah Kight, we must meet
with you. You must meet with the people from this city. You’re out there,
holding press conferences to say all these radical things. We’re unused to
radicalism. You have to bear in mind that many of the people who burned to
death in the fire are sons and daughters of distinguished old Southern
families.’”
Kight
recognized those southern ways and he perceived the locals as being financially
unhelpful and internally impoverished.
Kight: “I fantasized about creating a National New
Orleans Memorial Fund to raise money and contribute it to a Trust . . . and of
all the money raised for the National New Orleans Memorial Fund, none came from New Orleans. None. They
didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t want to deal with it. We were an
embarrassment to them.”
There
was a fund opened at Security Pacific Bank for the purpose of providing
assistance to the survivors. It didn’t
raise much capital for the year that it existed—there was enough to send
assistance to a few people. Kight
resented the locals for meddling in his good deeds.
“I
am convinced that we were absolutely correct and right. And moreover, we used
mountains of tact in dealing with those who were not supportive of us.”
In
2003 the City of New Orleans commemorated the tragedy and victims. Troy Perry
was invited to participate, “Morris would’ve been very proud. I went back thirty
years after the fire, and the city has now dedicated a plaque in the street
with all the names of the people who burned in the fire.”
Investigators
ultimately determined that the fire which killed thirty-two people was started with lighter fluid on
the steps that led to the entrance on the second floor. Three
victims, all white males, remain unidentified to this day.
Reverend
Perry: “It affected us all – it affected
Morris Kight in that he knew we were in a real struggle and fight now. People
could murder [gay] people and get away with it, and that is exactly what
happened. Thirty-two people had been murdered; somebody had thrown retardant up
that staircase and set it on fire – that’s what happened.”
The only suspect—and the only person who was
arrested in relation to the attack—was a customer of the Upstairs Lounge who
had been thrown out of the bar earlier in the night for unruly behavior. On his way out of the bar, Rogder Dale Nunez,
was overheard threatening to “burn you all out.” He was never convicted of the
crime, but he did confess on at least four occasions while drunk and said that
he didn't realize the damage he would cause.
Nunez, full of remorse, killed himself a year later.
Reverend
Perry had difficulty finding a Christian Church that would allow the
out-of-town guests the use of a church for a memorial service for the victims
of the fire. Perry remembered saying at
the time: “Let’s wash the Christians’ hands on this.” They finally found that the local Methodist
Church was supportive, agreeing to let them have a service in their cathedral.
As
Reverend Perry, Morty Manford, John Gill, and Paul Britton prepared for the service,
“Morris flew back to LA, for he felt like he had to get back home.”
Kight
had no use for religious ceremony and made no apology for not participating in
a church ritual. He cried in New Orleans and going back to Los Angeles, he
continued to grieve in his own way. He ruminated, let the situation settle in, and
asked himself some pertinent questions to figure out the best way to help his
community recover from the tragedy.
In
a private condolence letter to Reverend J. E. Paul
Breton, on the loss of his pastor’s assistant from MCC in Washington DC who died in the fire, Kight was
especially sentimental: “New Orleans was a unique experience for me. I shared
some of it with Morty when we talked a long time on the phone and became very
emotional. It has affected my life. Idea to dust off and present to you. I am
only awaiting that to dust off… [sic] for the highly evolved there is no death,
but only spirit everlasting. And [recently deceased MCC pastor Bill Larson] was
all that.”
The
New Orleans fire was a genuine turning point in Kight’s life and activism. In
1994, he explained it with his usual lemons-to-lemonade responsiveness: “It was
a shattering experience. We were unbelievably inspired. We were unbelievably
brave. We were pushed beyond ourselves.”
Before
he left Los Angeles to go to New York, Kight had been indifferent about a gay parade
and about the necessity for an organization dedicated to making a parade. He was
prepared to abandon the idea of an annual gay celebration all together and
refocus his attention on something new. If no one else wanted to quarterback
the event, he was just as pleased to see it fade away. He liked to create new
things for gays to flock to and be gay and widen the avenue for gay liberation.
He was a peripatetic activist; he’d flit from crisis to crisis. He liked to identify
a need, cite a solution, make some phone calls and organize something; he’d
then create jargon, write a few press releases and once he saw it taking off
and was assured that competent people were in place to see it through, he’d move
on. He’d leave it for others to carry through or not. He’d say, “Let’s move on”
to the next challenge or instigation. He was still a bit impetuous, immature in
his focus, but his efforts were always to keep things moving and to keep “gay”
in the public consciousness.
Kight
changed in New Orleans. On the flight back to Los Angeles, for the first time,
Kight longed for tradition, he wanted a bit of a routine. He wanted stability. He
appreciated what ritual brought to a community and he wanted that for his community.
He acknowledged the gay community that did not exist in 1958 and he looked
deeper into the purpose of this community. He wanted to inculcate a celebration
of gay into the mainstream consciousness. He craved the feeling that he had on
June 28, 1970 when he and a couple hundred other gay and lesbian brothers and
sisters broke all tradition and walked down Hollywood Boulevard as out as a clean
sheet flapping in the wild wind. He remembered how exhilarating and truly
liberating that felt. He vowed not to
let the gay pride fade away and promised to never miss another hometown
Gay Pride parade. It mattered not what the content of the parade was—just as
long as it was gay, big and colorful. It needed to be a regular event that happened
every year, just like Christmas and Halloween and the Fourth of July. Gay Pride
was to become its own institution.
He
also never again talked about uprooting and moving to San Francisco or any
other place because by that time, Los Angeles had become as much of a home as
he’d ever had.
The
following year, Christopher Street West had a new steering committee, and Pat
Rocco became the first official president. Rocco, Rob Cole, and David Glascock
went through the parade permit process and again met the objections of Police
Chief Ed Davis, who criticized the “unsavory” content of the 1972 parade. They
prevailed in 1974 and have never missed another year since.
By
1975, it was clear—the commemoration of Stonewall had superseded the actual
event at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 in historical importance and political
impact. In 1976, the gay pride celebration became a week-long festival, closer
to the Mardi Gras atmosphere that Kight had originally envisioned, culminating
with a Gay Pride Parade. In 1976, Pat Rocco set up a circus tent, brought in
circus animals, including elephants (and fleas no doubt), and gave his old
friend Kight the Ringmaster a baton and microphone. In 1977, Kight served as
the first official Grand Marshal of the parade, a role filled by Harvey Milk in
1978.
In
the aftermath of the fire, as the media embers died out, details of the
disaster still continued to spread through the unobvious gay communities across
the country, mostly by word of mouth and underground presses. The long-term
response to the New Orleans fire was a swell of new Gay Pride events around the
nation and eventually worldwide
Kight
never did miss another hometown Gay Pride Parade.
-Mary Ann Cherry
© All rights reserved, not for reprinting without permission
