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It's her efforts that helped gay activists lay the foundation for weeklong celebrations of gay pride leading up to the climactic Gay Pride Parade. Sunday marks the 51st anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which began the gay rights movement. As Queerty notes, "Howard's voice remained one of the loudest, most exuberant and productive of the time.
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#WHO INVENTED THE GAY PRIDE FLAG SERIES#
Grassroots activist and founder of the New York Area Bisexual Network Brenda Howard, who is sometimes known as the "Mother of Pride," coordinated a week-long series of events around Pride Day, including a dance. Sargeant recalls that it took “nearly a year of 1960s-style back-and-forth consciousness-raising” and “months of planning and internal controversy.” Over a dozen LGBTQ+ rights groups were involved in the planning, including lesbian feminist group the Lavender Menace, formed in response to mainstream feminism's exclusion of lesbians Gay Liberation Front, formed post-Stonewall lesbian civil rights organization Daughters of Bilitis trans rights organization Queens Liberation Front and various student groups. This year alone, the iconic, six-stripe pattern has been seen in children. Stroll across any number of cities throughout June, and you’ll find the near-ubiquitous presence of the rainbow pride flag, which has come to represent the LGBTQ community worldwide. Their first Annual Reminder was held in 1965, and was intended to "remind the American people that a substantial number of American citizens were denied the rights of 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,'" according to Philadelphia LGBTQ+ rights organization Philly Pride. The rainbow pride flag was the creation of San Francisco queer artist Gilbert Baker. Craig Rodwell (who happened Fred Sargeant's partner) was the Mattachine Society member who originally came up with the idea for The Annual Reminder.
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We were supposed to be unthreatening.” The event was put on by a gay men's rights group called the Mattachine Society, which was one of the earliest LGBTQ+ rights groups in the United States (it formed in 1950). The flag made its debut at the 1978 Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day March, and was also used by the 1979 Pride Parade after California's first publicly gay political was murdered. Required dress on men was jackets and ties for women, only dresses. It was usually “a small, polite group of gays and lesbians outside Liberty Hall," Sargeant describes. This event was a somber, and tightly orchestrated affair. At the time, the largest LGBTQ+ rights rally was a yearly silent vigil called “The Annual Reminder” held in Philadelphia.