Page "LGBT social movements" Paragraph 36

One of the values of the movement was gay pride.

Within weeks of the Stonewall Riots, Craig Rodwell, proprietor of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in lower Manhattan, was working to commemorate them by replacing the Annual Reminder, which had been held annually in at Independence Hall in Philadelphia since 1965, with a celebration of the Stonewall Riots.

In September 1969, Rodwell and local lesbian allies led by Ellen Broidy, attended an Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations ( ERCHO ) meeting in Philadelphia and got it to vote to replace the Fourth of July Annual Reminder at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, which ERCHO had been sponsoring since 1965, with a first commemoration of the Stonewall Riots.

Rodwell and the committee he assembled to organize this event spent the next nine months assembling the first end-of-June commemoration of the Stonewall Riots.

Other liberation groups that had been formed during the previous year —- consecutively, the Gay Liberation Front, Queens, the Gay Activists Alliance, Radicalesbians, and Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries ( STAR )—- asked for an opportunity to hold officially recommended commemorative events of their own.

Rodwell and his committee accommodated them by organizing the first Gay Pride Week.

The secretary of their planning committee circulated copies of their meeting minutes to movement leaders in cities throughout the country.

Los Angeles held a big parade on the first Gay Pride Day.

Smaller demonstrations were held in San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston.