June of 2020 marked the 50th anniversary of the Christopher Street Liberation Day march, the earliest version of what we now call the Pride parade. What you may not know is that the year before, the first Pride was a riot.
All the way up until the 1960s, New York City, like the rest of America, criminalized the LGBTQ+ community. It was illegal for the community to “gather,” as this counted as “disorderly.”
As a result, the community went underground, so to speak. Gay bars like the historic Stonewall Inn cropped up around Greenwich Village and other parts of New York. Here, the community was free to be themselves―for the most part. [Read more…] about The First Pride Was a Riot: Stonewall and the LGBTQIA+ Movement