Anita Bryant, a former beauty pageant winner hired to promote Florida orange juice, was the figurehead leader of a crusade to overturn an anti-discrimination ordinance in Dade County, Fla. This was an important year to be in the streets. In 1977 it was a few members of Workers World Party who initiated Cleveland’s first Gay Pride March - yes, a march, not a “parade.” The movement began in the streets as multiply-oppressed gender outlaws fought the cops for several days and nights in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. Pride march in downtown Cleveland, June 1977Įven the names of early civil rights organizations, such as Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and Gay Liberation Front - a nod to the National Liberation Front of Vietnam - bear this out.
