Website—Published Work: The First Queer March on Washington

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The First Queer March on Washington:

A veteran community organizer commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary

By Eric Rofes

The first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights and Liberation. That event drew 100,000 people to the streets of the District of Columbia on October 14, 1979, at a moment in our community’s history vastly different from the one we occupy today. As I thumb through my scrapbook and archives of organizing materials from that effort, and as I listen to the record and the videotapes produced capturing the ’79 march, a range of memories and conflicted feelings rush through me. Clearly, the world has changed in our lifetimes.

In 1979, I was a 24 year old schoolteacher and member of Boston’s radical Gay Community News collective. That winter, a group of collective members rented a car and drove through the New England snows to what would become an historic event at the Quaker Meeting House in Philadelphia. Converging that weekend were over 200 grassroots activists from throughout the nation who came together to debate whether or not to launch the massive organizing effort we knew it would take to bring our rank-and-file to Washington.

I am surprised how much I recall about that weekend. The frigid winter air became electric as out gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender activists met counterparts from other locales (yes, bi and trans organizers were there from the start). Women’s music met disco clones; revolutionary socialists linked arms with the nascent gay leadership of the Democratic Party; smug San Franciscans sat side-by-side with smug New Yorkers. While voices were present aiming to interrupt the energy flow towards marching, it was clear from the outset that the chamber was filled with men and women eager to ratify a call to march. The 60s were still alive for many of us, and marches on our nation’s capital retained tremendous symbolic power: to hit the radar screen as a national movement demanded a pilgrimage to Washington.

Our work that weekend was torn by the divisions of the day: tensions between lesbians and gay men, racism and calls for specific outreach to communities of color, attempts by Left sectarian groups to dominate organizing efforts. Yet we united around visionary ideals of a world without homophobia, sexism, and racism, and a movement which valued economic justice, youth liberation, and sexual and reproductive freedom. The tepid national gay groups sent mostly stealth emissaries to the event, hoping that the rag-tag refugees from the 60s who embarrassed them so, would become enmeshed in internal bickering over narrow political points and grind to a halt the drive to march before it got out of the gate.

Their hopes were dashed by a vote which endorsed the march and that weekend a call went out from Philadelphia to queers around the United States to use whatever means necessary to bring the masses to Washington. I threw myself into the effort, chairing the national policy committee and serving as one of the lead media organizers. A follow-up meeting that summer in Houston and one in Washington, D.C. cemented our determination to work through the highly-charged politics of the time (debates about trans inclusion became ugly) to bring off the march of our dreams. It was a heady time but an exhausting time, those years before faxes, phone conferencing, and e-mail. We licked thousands of envelopes, plastered posters on the sides of buildings, and found ourselves facing personal phone bills for hundreds of dollars.

Our challenge was formidable: we knew we needed to turn out a large number of queers but no one had done this before. While some of the coastal and urban communities already were home to networks and formal organizations, we had to work overtime to identify and catalyze gay people in many states. I remember the frustration we encountered thumbing through early gay guides, trying to identify activists in Arkansas, Alabama, North Dakota and Montana and the delight at our New York City headquarters when a call came in informing us that Alaska was sending a delegation to the Houston meeting.

During this pre-HRC era, none of the big bucks organizers who would soon be funding AIDS organizations came through with a cent for the 1979 march. Most of them had disdain for gay liberation even as they benefited from it and erected pleasure enclaves in beach communities. Instead we organized endless fundraisers, hawked buttons and t-shirts on the street, and begged bar owners to toss a few dollars our way. We entered the weekend of October 14 with no cash reserves and, when the company we’d hired to provide us with a stage alongside the Washington Monument surprised us by demanding a $1000 deposit, we turned to a straight progressive funder in Boston who got out of bed late at night (he was sleeping with one of my female housemates) to wire us the cash.

The morning of the march was cold and sunny and shortly after we arrived at the mall to chalk off assembly areas for the various contingents, busses filled with marchers began arriving. District police soon freaked out at the sight of men in leather and threatened to arrest anyone wearing handcuffs. Crisis was averted when one of our key organizers from Detroit took up her bullhorn and found a way to cajole burly leather men into slipping their cuffs into the pockets of their motorcycle jackets.

The march itself rushed by in a blur as thousands upon thousands poured into the streets waving banners identifying their hometowns. These were the years before celebrities opened their arms to gay communities and Cher, Barbra Streisand, and Elizabeth Taylor were nowhere to be found; only Lily Tomlin sent one of her cautiously worded letters which was read from the stage. Our own community-based stars headlined the stage including writers Allen Ginsberg and Kate Millet, musicians Holly Near, Meg Christian, and Tom Robinson, and comic Robin Tyler. As the fundraising pitch was made, we march organizers grabbed big plastic Hefty bags and walked through the masses as people filled them with money. We stashed them in a nearby trailer which served as our on-site headquarters and, as the rally wound down, gathered them up and dashed to Washington’s Women’s Bank where we counted money into the wee hours of the next day.

The 1979 march stands as the single pre-AIDS mass event which attempted to unify lesbian and gay organizers whose work overwhelmingly had been based in local communities into a coordinated national force. Hence the organizing tells a great deal about the directions our movement had taken in the brief decade following Stonewall and serves as a snapshot of so-called “gay power” at the moment before AIDS struck. I am consistently surprised by the writings of revisionist journalists who describe the pre-AIDS gay community as powerful, well-organized, and well-funded. Clinging to the idealism of social movements of the 1960s, we were unaware of the one-two punch that was about to strike. A year after the march Reagan was elected president, beginning almost two decades of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich regime that opposed our movement at almost every turn. At the same time, the plague era began and soon took the lives of some of the best organizers of the 1979 march.

We could not have mobilized as we did against the rising tide of Reagan’s Religious Right and the scourge of AIDS, without the 1979 march. Critical alliances forged through that organizing process between women and men, the networks developed in communities of color, the political organizations founded in its aftermath, became literal lifelines to which we clung as we were swept into a cyclone more horrific than any of us had imagined. The fact that twenty-five years after our first March on Washington, some of us remain to recall its ambitions and continue the grunt work of organizing towards a more equitable world, is a tribute to the ideals proclaimed at the Quaker Meeting House in Philadelphia that snowy winter weekend.

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Eric Rofes is a professor at Humboldt State University in Northern California and a long-time activist. He has published twelve books including DRY BONES BREATHE: GAY MEN CREATING POST-AIDS IDENTITIES AND CULTURES (Haworth, 1998) and is currently working on a social history of gay men's cultures of the 1970s. He can be reached at eerofes @ aol.com.