HOW WE ALL seem to love anniversaries! Think about the masses of folks who show up each year for Pride Marches in June, for St. Patrick’s Day parades, for Mexican Independence Day celebrations. Anniversaries provide moments for civic reflection. Last May, newspapers were filled with stories assessing the meaning of Brown v. Board of Education on its 50th anniversary. Audiences sat in university lecture halls, community meeting spaces, and church sanctuaries to think about the struggle for racial justice. Commemorations like this can propel change in the present, as individuals draw lessons from the victories and struggles of the past. So it’s good that we are taking time today to recall the 1979 March on Washington on its twenty-fifth anniversary.
However, the more I’ve thought about what I wanted to say, the more I’ve found myself skeptical that the march is anything more than a footnote in history. This is perhaps a heretical comment to make as we celebrate the March’s 25th anniversary, but maybe I can illustrate my doubts by comparing the 1979 event with two other famous marches.
In August 1963, 250,000 people from every part of the country assembled in Washington for an event so important that we often simply refer to it as “the March on Washington.” The march was a major story in every news outlet of consequence in the United States. Large national organizations with membership in the hundreds of thousands—indeed, in the millions—backed the venture. In the months before the march, local demonstrations erupted in hundreds upon hundreds of communities around the country. President Kennedy sent national civil rights legislation to Congress. Agitation for racial equality was at such a high level that it took only seven weeks for organizers to pull such a large crowd to Washington. In other words, continuing agitation for black freedom, a national infrastructure of organizations, and a realizable national goal together made it a strategic time to march on Washington.
In November 1969, over 400,000 Americans gathered in Washington to protest the Vietnam War. Just a month before, antiwar activists had organized coordinated events in cities and towns from coast to coast; more than a million individuals participated. The war was a front-page story every day. Antiwar agitation was roiling Congress. The key slogan of the march—“bring the troops home”—was something that could be implemented only by the President. Thus, as in 1963, lots of people were already in motion, there was a focused demand very much related to the government in Washington, and the eyes of the country were on the issue.
Now look at the 1979 March. No national gay and lesbian organizations of any consequence existed. No significant national goal of the gay and lesbian movement was advanced that had any chance of being achieved. There wasn’t much in the way of gay demonstrations in the months preceding the march. The mainstream news media paid almost no attention to the event or to GLBT issues generally. Finally, despite the movement’s claim that “we are everywhere,” the crowd barely approached 100,000, significantly smaller than the standards for an impressive national mobilization.
Judged by the standards of history, the 1979 March was not a success. But can it tell us anything about that era? Why is it worth thinking about? Why wasn’t the gay and lesbian movement, ten years after Stonewall, more visible on the national stage?
THE 1970’s was a vitally important decade in gay and lesbian history, and the changes that occurred were monumental. But these changes were also unevenly distributed, so their benefits were not experienced equally by everyone across the country.
Change in the 1970’s can be measured in a number of ways. In 1969, on the eve of Stonewall, there were perhaps fifty organizations in the U.S. that identified themselves as gay or lesbian. By the end of the 1970’s there were thousands. Some were overtly activist organizations, some religious, some cultural, some social or recreational. These organizations were most densely concentrated in urban centers. A thriving print culture had arisen, consisting of newspapers, journals, and magazines. These were especially important in projecting outward into this emergent visible community a language of pride and a stance of militancy, something not found in mainstream media reportage. In many larger cities and radicalized university towns, this militancy had succeeded in containing police harassment. Law enforcement practices had changed enough in the decade so that, combined with the new openness and militancy, a greatly expanded and more secure commercial gay world existed.
What kind of activism provoked these changes, and what kind of activism did these changes sustain? In a nutshell, the answer is “local.” Police practices were a local matter. The passage of civil rights statutes that included sexual orientation, an innovation of the 1970’s, only happened at the local municipal and county level of government. Even the few achievements that seemed national in scope, like the end of the federal ban on civil service employment of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, materialized through the work of local D.C. activists.
Effective activism required coming out of the closet. The imperative to come out was probably the central message associated with the Stonewall generation. Just about everything the movement achieved in these years depended on the work of individuals who had discarded the protective secrecy of the closet. Although it seemed to activists in the 1970’s that our numbers were legion, this was true only in comparison to the pre-Stonewall era. The overwhelming majority of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered folks remained in the closet. And a closeted majority doesn’t translate into a powerful political movement with a national presence.
Even the few gay-oriented stories that reached a national audience confirmed how local the movement was. In 1975, Sergeant Leonard Matlovich appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Matlovich’s high-profile coming out happened at a time when, because of the Vietnam War, the military’s authority was at a low point and it was vulnerable to outside pressure. This was an ideal moment to launch a campaign against the military’s exclusion policy. But who would have coordinated such a campaign? What organizations and activist networks would have participated? What media contacts would have been utilized? None of these things materialized. Instead of spawning a national mobilization, the Matlovich story faded away.
Two years later, another queer story made headlines. In Dade County, Florida, a fierce political battle erupted over a gay rights ordinance. Anita Bryant, a former Miss America and a spokeswoman for the citrus industry, emerged as the public face of the antigay forces. The national media seized on the drama of the confrontation. But the event that provoked it all was quintessentially local, and Dade County spawned other local repeal campaigns.
So why was there a 1979 March on Washington? What could it possibly have achieved? Can it teach us anything now?
I went to Washington for the event and was one of those who marched that Sunday. Having been to some huge antiwar demonstrations, I was disappointed by the relatively small size of the crowd. I can barely remember either the march or the rally afterward. But I do have three vivid memories from that long weekend:
1. On Friday, friends and I wandered around Washington as tourists. Wherever we went, we found packs of lesbians and gay men swarming through the city. The heart of the District of Columbia seemed transformed into an enormous version of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. The sense of occupying the nation’s capital was thrilling. 2. Several of us who were pioneering in the research and writing of queer history used the weekend in Washington as an opportunity to convene activists involved in local community-based gay and lesbian history projects. These projects had popped up in several cities and were generating a lot of interest. It was the first time that many of us met one another. Ideas flew around the room faster than I could write them down, and the whole event was exhilarating. 3. On Saturday night (but maybe I am mistaken as to when this happened), there was a pre-march outdoor entertainment on the Mall. A gay marching band from Los Angeles performed, the first time I had ever encountered such a phenomenon. One of its members was decked out in full regalia, twirling batons in both hands, flinging them seemingly higher than the top of the Washington Monument, and having the time of his life. Everyone went wild with delight. These events suggest for me the shape of the March’s limited importance. Many groups with common interests used the convergence in Washington as an opportunity to meet, learn from each other, and strengthen our ties to one another. Exuberance characterized our weekend together, and we came away with a heightened sense of possibility. All weekend long, we performed our respective versions of queer pride, and we saw graphically the geographic breadth of our local activism. The March helped us imagine a movement that might someday be national, but that by no stretch of the imagination yet existed. In 1987, a crowd that dwarfed anything in Washington’s history proved that a nationwide GLBT constituency had come into being. Many of the organizers of this massive march had been involved in the 1979 event. Did the 1979 march plant the seeds of what flowered eight years later? Not really. The 1987 March was sandwiched between the display of the Names Project quilt on the Mall and an unprecedented mass civil disobedience action outside the Supreme Court building. These two events tell us what had crystallized a national movement: the immense tragedy of the AIDS epidemic and the rage provoked by the Supreme Court’s Bowers v. Hardwick decision in 1986 upholding sodomy laws. If the 1979 March has anything to tell us, it is that the process of building a national movement with any kind of power is long and frustratingly slow. It comes when grievances that are connected to the national government, mobilizations that are related to achievable goals, and organizations that have a broad and motivated constituency converge. It doesn’t arise by wishing it into existence with a call to march on Washington. John D’Emilio is the author, most recently, of Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. He is a professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
