Day 3 – Why Pride Marches?
I’m on tour with the London Gay Men’s Chorus in New York,

getting ready for a joint concert with the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus this

Saturday.

We’ve been to the Stonewall National Monument, close to the

Stonewall Inn. This was the site of the Stonewall rebellion in June 1969, a

turning point in America’s fight for LGBT rights.

When I was growing up, the only significant event in the

summer of 1969 was the first landing on the moon. I was eleven years old, and I

remember watching the contrasty, black and white pictures on our ageing

oak-cased television set.

I knew nothing about the police raid on a sanctuary for gay

men in New York’s Greenwich Village. Police raids on gay bars were frequent in

New York at the time, but the bar owners usually received a police tip-off

before the raid.

On the night of 28 June at the Stonewall Inn, there was no

police tip-off.

And the raid did not go as planned.

Instead of meekly lining up against a wall and handing over

their IDs, patrons refused to cooperate. A crowd gathered outside.

It got angry.

The crowd swelled to five or six hundred, vastly outnumbering

the police.

Ten police officers barricaded themselves inside the

Stonewall Inn for safety.

The crowd chanted, “We shall overcome”. They attacked the

police wagons, and it led to several days of riots in Greenwich Village.

It also triggered a change around the world in the approach

to the campaign for gay rights.

One year later, the first gay Pride march in Greenwich

Village, marked the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. There were also

marches in Chicago and Los Angeles.

These days, people often ask, why bother with Pride marches

any more?

Then you see pictures of gay men rounded up in Chechnya and

forced into concentration camps. You see pictures of gay men thrown from the

roofs of multi-storey car parks in Syria.

Or two gay men in West London earlier this year, savagely

beaten as they slept on their train back home.

That’s why we still have Pride marches.