Home » Reflections on the NYC Pride March – by Angela Stephanie Haddow

Reflections on the NYC Pride March – by Angela Stephanie Haddow

The Editor | Jul 8, 2019

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By Guest Contributor Angela Stephanie Haddow

It was the summer of 1969 and Neil Armstrong had just exited the Lunar Module and became the first human to walk on the Moon. He uttered these famous words crackling through his microphone, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” This was just 18 days after an early morning police raid on the mafia-owned bar, the Stonewall Inn, that would result in days of rioting by fed-up and angry gays, lesbians and transgenders and would launch the LGBTQ movement around the world. It was one single protest and one giant leap forward for human rights.

The Stonewall Inn in 1969.

It was 1:20 in the morning of June 28^th, 1969, when the police banged on the double doors of the Stonewall Inn announcing the raid. Earlier, four undercover police men and women, from the NYPD’s Public Morals Squad, entered the bar as patrons and documented evidence for the raid. Once inside, they lined the employees and patrons up as usual but when the police began asking for IDs and ordering women to be examined in the bathrooms to determine their biological gender, the people began to refuse. Some tried to escape but the police blocked their exit. Pushing and clubbing ensued and the confrontation spilled out onto the street. A few hours later the police found themselves outnumbered by hundreds of angry youths who were fighting them and resisting arrest. The movement had begun! Julia Hardy once said, “If you don’t challenge things, all you have done is passed it on to the next woman to deal with.”

The very next year, the first Gay Freedom and Liberation marches took place in NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. These were not celebratory Pride parades but protest marches. There wasn’t a lot to celebrate then. It wasn’t until 2013 that “transgender” was removed from the DSM-5 as a mental disorder and reclassified as a dysphoria and not until 2015 that the word “transgender” was first spoken by a U.S. president while in office.

Now, a half a century after the riots, I walk around NYC and every mom and pop store and corporation in the City is displaying Pride banners and slogans attesting to the fact that their products and services support the LGBTQ movement. Back in 1969, their owners and CEO’s would have been calling us queers and faggots. But it’s good for business not to be politically incorrect – whatever the motive behind it. Now there is even a Pride banner flying over the door of the Borough Hall near me and the mayor and his wife will be marching with us!

The Pride event in New York City.

The March was on June 30^th, a beautiful Sunday afternoon with a much-welcomed breeze. It is still called a march and not a parade since it is both a celebration and a protest as full equality has not been attained despite enormous progress since that weekend at the Stonewall.

I signed up online to march with the National Center for Transgender Equality group. We are gathered on the Northwest corner of Madison Square Park and already the sidewalks are teeming with people. Then the police shift the barricades and let us onto Fifth Avenue where we will begin our march with the Stonewall float just behind us. I turn around to look; the float queen looks gorgeous in her costume gown!

I’m wearing a new yellow floral-print dress with green matching bracelets and a long necklace. I have on dangling earrings and nude-colored pumps. I take out a small mirror from my handbag and check my make-up. My heart is beating faster than normal. I feel like I’m going to walk out on a giant stage as my femme self for this first time. I take off my heels for the march and put on flats that I carried in my handbag. The energy level is pulsating and rising all around us. Finally, we begin to move around 12:15. I step out behind our blue banner as it is lifted and begins its way down Fifth Avenue. It reads, “We will not be Erased!”

There is a heavy police presence all around us, but they are polite and courteous. Some even appear to be enjoying the event. I look at the uniforms on either side of us and think that just 50 years ago they would be forcefully pushing us transgender women into police wagons to be booked on charges of masquerading and indecent exposure. How humiliating that must have been to have the police check your underwear on the street and then arrest for who you are! But how the culture has changed! Earlier in the month, NYPD police commissioner James O’Neill offered an apology for the police actions at Stonewall some 50 years earlier. He said, “The actions taken by the N.Y.P.D. were wrong—plain and simple.”

As we pass 23^rd Street, we are now in the heart of Chelsea – another neighborhood friendly to the LBGT community. I think about a quote from a medical doctor, whose name I can’t recall, “Biology loves diversity, society does not!” But today, hundreds of thousands of society members are cheering both our and their diversity.

I’ve walked along these streets many times before but not with thousands of people on either side of me cheering us on. I’m usually just trying to go unnoticed and hope to pass when I go out en femme, but today, I’m flaunting my femininity to the crowd and their cameras. I revel in walking with my dress filling with the breeze and flowing around my legs. Everything this afternoon is an affirmation that it’s okay to be Angela, a transgender woman!

As we march past 14^th Street, I think of Lee Brewster’s Mardi Gras Boutique. How he would have been so elated with where transgender community is today. From coal miner’s son in West Virginia to drag queen in NYC to giving testimony to Congress – he was a pioneer in changing the laws in this country.

As we near 8^th Street, I think of the older girls I see marching or watching from the sidelines, and wonder if any of them had ever been arrested years back when going out dressed as a woman was illegal. Do they still harbor fears from that ignorant era? Are they feeling the same liberation that I’m feeling now?

Then, to my right, there it is. . .the Stonewall Inn. Our Mecca, our symbol of the revolution for the fight for freedom. I remember a quote from John F. Kennedy, “The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.” I blow a kiss to the brick building with emotions welling up inside of me.

I had planned to end my march in the Village but the collective adrenalin carries me on. We turn and march back uptown on Seventh Avenue. I recall the movie, The Danish Girl, about a transgender woman who underwent the first gender reassignment surgery in 1931. Then I mind-travel forward to 2017, just two years ago, when Denmark became the first country to remove “transgender” completely from its psychiatric codes.

Past 14^th Street, I look up and see hundreds of onlookers on fire escapes and balconies waving pride flags from their perches. A young transgender boy is marching next to me. He has a butch haircut and a baseball cap on backwards. I think of Brandon Teena and the deranged violence that this community has endured, often tacitly approved by the church and state. But it ends here and with every Pride march around the world.

At 22^nd Street, volunteers are holding up signs for us, “One Block to the End,” I am glad that it is over for me. My feet are tired and my water bottle is empty but I feel so empowered and legitimatized as Angela. And behind us are hours and hours and tens of thousands more to continue the march today. They will never erase us!