RESOLVED, that lesbians have the right to be
recognized and referred to as a discrete and
independent category; that is, as lesbians rather
than ‘LGBT’ or ‘LGB’ or ‘gay’ as a catchall;
The Lesbian Bill of Rights
“Gay Pride” is what it was called first, although it included lesbians. The first gay pride march in 1970 was meant to commemorate the first anniversary of Stonewall. It was meant to be a march rather than a parade. Marchers didn’t know what to expect. Maybe there would be violence. Despite Stonewall’s success in gaining the sympathies of New Yorkers and the attention of the world, there had been a long history, and a long habit, of lesbians and gay men being physically attacked whenever they went out in public looking shamelessly (or “flamboyantly”) lesbian or gay.
Participating in this first march felt courageous. Marchers of both sexes, in pairs or in small groups of friends, and dressed for the most part like other young New Yorkers were dressed in June, assembled in the narrow streets of Greenwich Village near the Stonewall Inn. It wasn’t frightening there, we were assembling in the friendliest possible neighborhood anywhere. Village residents smiled and waved and cheered us. Some spontaneously joined us. What was worrying was how our march might be received once we left the Village and marched uptown toward Central Park.1
As it turned out, the effects of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion on city culture had been significant. In this commemorative march a year later there was no physical violence that I recall. There was an occasional mocking or angry verbal outburst. One woman said to the group of lesbians I was walking with, “You’ll never be a man, Honey, you’re not fooling anybody.” A lesbian near me immediately answered “Why would I want to be a man? Men are gross! My lover only loves women! Does anybody here want to be a man?” We all laughed with delight in our solidarity, high on our own ability to retort, finally, to a disrespectful stranger on the street in the middle of the day in midtown Manhattan. Our would-be tormentor stopped talking and stepped back into the crowd. It felt as though lesbians had just stepped out of the shadows, collectively and irrevocably. I understood at that moment that not only was our cause just, but that our momentum was irresistible and that our moment was now.
The organizers of the march, including some lesbians, took stock after that first march. Over the next several years there were changes. The most significant change for lesbians was that lesbian groups got the option to march separate from men, each lesbian group with its own banner. And some lesbians demanded to march at the front, in order not to be rendered invisible by the greater number of men and by the other cultural forces that tend to make lesbians invisible.
It wasn’t just that the men were more numerous and taller. They were also louder, and some were more nearly naked. While in the lesbian groups there were a lot of jeans and men’s blue work shirts worn by serious women handing out political leaflets, it seemed that gay men had begun to get flashier, or to take their flashiness into the streets. Gay men’s bars became sponsors. They provided floats, amplified dance music, and men in bikinis dancing on the floats. Sometimes there would be a drag queen on a float instead of wiggling young men on a float. Sometimes instead of a bikini there would be leather chaps with suggestively placed zippers. In contrast, lesbians tended to look low key and androgynous, and tended to be mistaken for men. It was apparent that lesbians needed to march together if they were to have any chance of being recognized as lesbians. Some lesbians organized the separate and more politically serious Dyke March, held annually the day before the New York City Gay (and lesbian) Pride March. It never drew as big a crowd as the Pride March.
By the mid 1980s, the march had become not only a corporate event, but a government event. The mayor and other politicos would lead the march, followed by a row of NYPD on police motorcycles, followed by lesbians on motorcycles (aka “dykes on bikes” who insisted on riding in front of the gay men on motorcycles to avoid erasure by assumption of maleness; shout out to Sirens Women’s Motorcycle Club NYC for their effective advocacy), followed by floats carrying drag queens and leather men, Stonewall heroes and survivors, a pair of Grand Marshalls, marching bands, the Gay Men’s Chorus, a lesbian softball league, parents of lesbians and gay men, and unaffiliated marchers. And the route changed to begin on Fifth Avenue and march “home” downtown to the Village. Once your parade makes it to Fifth Avenue, you know you’ve arrived.
But the tension between gay men and lesbians, present from the beginning, never disappeared; if anything, it increased. Here are some differences between the gay male agenda and the lesbian feminist agenda that became clearer over the course of the 1970s:
- Gay men were aiming to become fully enfranchised patriarchs, while lesbian women’s liberationists were aiming to destroy patriarchy. This meant that gay men wanted to have homosexuality decriminalized, and they wanted the right to marry and be custodial parents. And they also wanted the right to engage in sexual excesses in public, like straight men. Decriminalization was the only aim shared by radical feminist lesbians.
- Gay men were emotionally attached to drag; it was, and remains, central to gay male culture. Lesbian women’s liberationists understood drag to be a mockery of the femininity that women were encouraged or forced to perform.
- Until the AIDS crisis became apparent around 1980, gay male culture promoted many sexual encounters with many strangers, including orgies – in most gay bars and clubs, on the Christopher Street pier, on Christopher Street itself. This could be seen as an extension of the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. It became part of lesbian culture too, but not nearly to the same degree, possibly in part because there weren’t enough lesbians or enough lesbian venues in the City, reflecting lesbians’ diminished access to money, travel, and ability to support a plethora of commercial lesbian-only venues.
- Gay men promoted sadomasochism and the associated leather fetishism. Lesbians became bitterly divided on this issue, leading to what has been termed the “sex wars,” which eventually exhausted the Women’s Liberation Movement. It seemed to radical feminist lesbians that some lesbians were imitating gay male culture, including its sneering denigration of lesbians, all women, and “vanilla” sexual practices grounded in affection and intimacy.
The WDI USA Lesbian Caucus has written previously about how patriarchy treats lesbians – either by pretending that lesbians don’t exist or, if erasure fails, by punishing lesbians. One erasure technique is conflating lesbians with gay men. Lesbians are widely assumed to be a shorter, less colorful, less affluent, less amusing subset of the “gay” culture that we are assumed and encouraged to share.
By the second decade of the 21st century, the uncomfortable alliance between lesbians and gay men was made untenable by the forced marriage of LGB with TQIA+. Lesbian and gay pride marches have become rebranded as “Pride” celebrations of male sexual aggression as well as male fetishes. The lesbian motorcycle clubs have been forced to admit men who claim to be lesbians. Lesbians have been reframed as TERFs and driven out of Pride marches everywhere. As a result, public good will has been lost. Not only is Pride everywhere losing the near universal support of corporations and politicians; it is losing the support of private citizens who don’t want their kids or themselves exposed to kinky sex in public.
Having been kicked off the rainbow, lesbians are probably intended to cooperate in our own erasure (again). But maybe we should never have hopped onto the rainbow. It was never a natural coalition. It gave lesbians nominal decriminalization as homosexuals, only to quickly recriminalize us as TERFs. It gave us the dubious right to participate in the patriarchal institution of marriage, with the state as a third partner in our love relationships. It gave us the right to be custodial mothers, provided we’re open to our kids being either traditionally gendered or “transed.”
Lesbians can’t benefit from the rights that gay men have won to be full brothers in patriarchy. This is because patriarchy requires the unpaid labor of women, including all lesbians. Patriarchy depends on women as the personal servant class to the master class of men, including gay men. Lesbians need a Women’s Liberation Movement and Lesbian Pride. After all, the Stonewall rebellion was started by a lesbian; Stonewall is lesbians’ to commemorate. We are not gay men, we are not a subset of gay men, we are not bisexual, and we are not “Queer.” There is an ongoing patriarchal push to subsume lesbians into some other group, and we think it’s time for lesbians to separate, cultivate our lesbian communities, grow the number of lesbians, and push back. To be clear, lesbians are not a monolith, and we need to be careful to include lesbians of all races and ethnicities, of all abilities, of all economic classes, of all ages, and so forth. But if we make alliances with non lesbians, they should be primarily with women’s liberationists, and not with men of any sexual orientation, because the problem is patriarchy; it’s never the solution.
Fortunately, we still have the labrys flag, and we still have the only analysis of universal male domination that makes any sense. Happy Lesbian Pride!
The WDI USA Lesbian Caucus
Lauren Levey, coordinator
KC Bianco
Mary Ellen Kelleher
Katherine Kinney
- This description of the first New York City Gay Pride March in 1970 is based on the first-hand account of Lesbian Caucus member Lauren Levey, who participated in that event. ↩︎
