The First Pride Parade: Christopher Street Liberation Day, 1970

On Sunday, June 28, 1970, a few thousand people gathered on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village and started walking. They walked 51 blocks. Police said they could march only on the sidewalk. They took the street anyway. Some marchers held hands for the first time in public. By the time they reached Central Park, the line stretched for fifteen blocks behind them. That day was called Christopher Street Liberation Day, and it was the first Pride parade.

Why a March in the First Place

The plan came together five months after Stonewall. In November 1969, gay rights organizers from across the East Coast met in Philadelphia at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations. Craig Rodwell, who ran the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in Greenwich Village, brought a resolution. He wrote it with his partner Fred Sargeant, fellow activists Ellen Broidy and Linda Rhodes.

The resolution did two things at once. It killed off the Annual Reminder, a polite picket the older homophile movement had held every July 4 at Independence Hall since 1965. And it called for something bigger. A national demonstration, on the last Sunday of June, in cities across the country. No dress code. No agreement with police. A march, not a picket.

The Reminder pickets had asked for tolerance in suits and dresses. The new march would not be asking. The shift was deliberate. Stonewall had changed what people thought was possible, and the organizers wanted the movement to catch up.

Brenda Howard and the Logistics Nobody Talks About

Parades do not happen because people show up. They happen because someone pulls permits, books a sound system, prints flyers, and stays up the night before making sure the route is real. In New York that someone was Brenda Howard.

Howard was a bisexual activist with the Gay Liberation Front, and later the Gay Activists Alliance. She coordinated the first anniversary rally in Washington Square Park, and she organized the planning committee that became the Christopher Street Liberation Day Umbrella Committee. She also pushed for the idea that one day was not enough. Pride should be a week. Then a month. That is why we have Pride Month at all.

Howard died in 2005. She is buried under a headstone that lists her as the Mother of Pride. Most people who march in June have never heard her name.

The March Itself

Sunday, June 28, 1970. Hot and clear. The starting point was outside the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, the bar that had been raided exactly one year earlier. Most of the original Stonewall protesters were in the crowd. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera marched. So did Craig Rodwell, who had argued for the date. So did members of every gay liberation group then in existence, plus thousands of people who had never been to a meeting in their lives.

Police told organizers the march had to stay on the sidewalk. The first block, it tried. Then the front of the line stepped off the curb and into Sixth Avenue and kept walking. There was no plan to fight officers. There was no plan to be polite either. The crowd just took the avenue.

The route ran 51 blocks, from West Fourth Street up Sixth Avenue, all the way to Central Park. People watched from windows. Some applauded. Some yelled slurs. Some came out of bodegas and joined the back of the line. By the time the front of the march reached Central Park South, the back was still down on Eighth Street.

At Sheep Meadow, the marchers held what they called a Gay-In. People sat on blankets, kissed without looking around, ate sandwiches, listened to short speeches. It was a picnic, technically. It was also, for thousands of people, the first hour of their lives spent visibly queer in public space without hiding.

One of the chants from the day, recorded in Fred Sargeant's account in The Village Voice the following week, went: "Two, four, six, eight, gay is just as good as straight." A lot of people remember the line. Fewer remember that for the people chanting it, saying it out loud was a legal risk. Same-sex contact was still a crime in most states.

The Other Cities Marching That Same Weekend

The November resolution had asked every gay organization in the country to act on the same date. Three cities answered.

In Los Angeles, Reverend Troy Perry, Morris Kight, and Bob Humphries pulled the harder feat. They demanded a parade permit from Los Angeles police. They got it, after threatening litigation, and held what is widely cited as the first permitted Pride parade in U.S. history. About 1,000 people walked Hollywood Boulevard from McCadden Place to Highland Avenue. Floats included a man in a cage with a sign that read "In 21 states it is a crime to be a homosexual."

In Chicago, the march happened the day before, Saturday, June 27. About 200 people walked from Bughouse Square down to the Civic Center. It was small. It was also the first time most of those marchers had walked anywhere as a visible group.

San Francisco held a smaller "Gay-In" at Golden Gate Park's Speedway Meadow that same weekend. The big San Francisco Pride did not start until 1972.

The Slogans That Started It

The 1970 march did not have a rainbow flag. Gilbert Baker would not sew the first one until 1978. What it had instead were words, painted on cardboard or sewn into bedsheets and held over heads. A few of them are still in circulation.

Out of the Closets, Into the Streets. The defining banner of the day. It said the quiet part loud: visibility was the strategy.

Gay is Good. Coined in 1968 by Frank Kameny, the astronomer who lost his federal job for being gay and spent the next decade fighting it. Borrowed from the Black is Beautiful movement, on purpose.

Say It Loud, Gay is Proud. A direct echo of James Brown's "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud," released two years earlier.

Gay Power. An adaptation of Black Power, also borrowed openly. The 1970 marchers were drawing the connection on purpose, and a number of them had been involved in civil rights and anti-war organizing for years.

Why It Was Called Liberation Day, Not Pride

The word Pride did not show up on the original march banner. The 1970 event was Christopher Street Liberation Day. Liberation was the active word. It came out of the same political vocabulary as women's liberation and Black liberation. It implied the work was not yet done.

Pride came later. By the mid-1970s, organizers in different cities started calling their events Pride marches or Pride parades, partly because pride was a less politically loaded word and easier for newcomers to attach to. Pride became the brand. Liberation never quite went away, but it slid into the background.

The shift mattered. A liberation march asks what is still wrong. A pride parade celebrates what has been won. Both are legitimate. Both miss something the other captures.

Featured Flag LGBTQ+ Pride Flag The classic six-stripe rainbow flag Gilbert Baker designed eight years after the first march. By the late 1970s it became the symbol the 1970 marchers had not yet had. 3x5 ft, polyester, double-stitched. Get the Rainbow Flag

From One March to Hundreds of Cities

The reach of the 1970 march was small in numbers and huge in influence. Within a year, more cities held marches. By 1972, Boston, San Francisco, Atlanta, Detroit, Buffalo, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and Miami all had Pride events. By 1979, the first national March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights drew an estimated 100,000 people. The 1993 March drew somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million.

Today, the New York Pride March routinely draws over two million spectators. The route still passes the Stonewall Inn. The march still goes by the same blocks the 1970 marchers walked. The reason June is Pride Month, and the reason the last Sunday of June is the date of the biggest U.S. Pride parade, is the November 1969 ERCHO resolution Craig Rodwell helped write. None of it was inevitable. People decided it.

Common Mix-Ups About the First Pride Parade

Mix-Up #1: The first march had rainbow flags.

It did not. The rainbow flag was first sewn by Gilbert Baker in San Francisco in 1978, eight years after the first march. The 1970 banners were handmade. The most common visible symbol was the Greek lambda, adopted by the Gay Activists Alliance.

Mix-Up #2: New York's was the first permitted parade.

Los Angeles was. The NYC march did not have a permit. Reverend Troy Perry, Morris Kight, and Bob Humphries fought the LAPD for a permit and won. That is why some historians give Los Angeles, not New York, the title of first official Pride parade.

Mix-Up #3: It was called the Pride Parade in 1970.

It was called Christopher Street Liberation Day. Pride did not become the standard name until later in the 1970s. The shift from liberation to pride happened gradually as the movement grew.

Mix-Up #4: It was a celebration.

It was a protest. People marched because most U.S. states still criminalized gay sex, the American Psychiatric Association still listed homosexuality as a mental disorder, and being out at work could end a career overnight. The mood was joyful and defiant. It was not a party.

How to Honor Christopher Street Liberation Day

1	Read Fred Sargeant's first-person account. Sargeant helped organize the march and his memoir piece in The Village Voice (republished in 2010 for the 40th anniversary) is the closest thing we have to a primary source. Twenty minutes of reading. Better than any documentary.
2	Visit Stonewall National Monument. It is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ+ history. Christopher Park sits across the street from the original bar. Free, open year-round. New York City. The plaza was the staging area for the 1970 march.
3	Show up to a Pride march, not just a Pride party. Marches are still political. They are the part where you walk a route, hold a sign, and stand next to people you do not know. The party comes after. Both matter. Pick the march if you have to choose one.
4	Learn one organizer's name who was not Marsha or Sylvia. Brenda Howard. Craig Rodwell. Ellen Broidy. Linda Rhodes. Reverend Troy Perry. Morris Kight. Frank Kameny. Barbara Gittings. Pride was built by dozens of people, not two icons.
5	Fly a flag at home in late June. The original marchers did not have one. You do. Hanging a flag on a porch on the last Sunday of June marks the same calendar moment they marked. It is a small thing. It also is not nothing.

Modern Standard Progress Pride Flag Daniel Quasar's 2018 redesign adds the trans flag stripes and a black and brown chevron for queer people of color. It is the flag that carries the spirit the 1970 marchers were already pointing at: liberation for everyone, not just the people in the front of the line. Get the Progress Pride Flag

Frequently Asked Questions

When was the first Pride parade?

Sunday, June 28, 1970. It was called Christopher Street Liberation Day and it took place in New York City, exactly one year after the Stonewall riots. Smaller marches happened the same weekend in Los Angeles and Chicago.

Who organized the first Pride parade?

The Christopher Street Liberation Day Umbrella Committee. The November 1969 resolution that called for the march was written by Craig Rodwell, Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy, and Linda Rhodes. Bisexual activist Brenda Howard ran the rally logistics and is now known as the Mother of Pride.

Why is Pride in June?

Because the Stonewall riots happened in late June 1969, and the first march was scheduled for the last Sunday of June 1970 to mark the anniversary. Every Pride Month since traces back to that calendar choice.

How many people marched in the first Pride parade?

Estimates vary. Roughly 2,000 people started the march at Christopher Street. By the time the front of the line reached Central Park, somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 had joined, with the line stretching about fifteen blocks. Press coverage at the time underestimated the crowd. Later research revised the numbers up.

Was the first Pride parade in New York or Los Angeles?

Both held marches the same weekend. New York's was bigger and is more often cited as the first. Los Angeles held the first permitted Pride parade after Reverend Troy Perry, Morris Kight, and Bob Humphries fought LAPD for a permit and won. The honest answer is that both have a claim, and they happened roughly the same weekend.

Did the first Pride parade have a rainbow flag?

No. The rainbow flag was designed by Gilbert Baker in San Francisco in 1978, eight years after the first march. The 1970 marchers carried handmade banners, picket signs, and the Greek letter lambda, adopted by the Gay Activists Alliance as a symbol that year.

What was the route of the first New York Pride parade?

It started at Christopher Street and Waverly Place, just outside the Stonewall Inn. It then went 51 blocks north up Sixth Avenue, ending at Sheep Meadow in Central Park, where marchers held a "Gay-In" picnic. Today's New York City Pride March still passes the same blocks.

If you want more on the history that led up to and followed Christopher Street Liberation Day, read our pieces on why Pride Month is in June and what really happened at Stonewall, the activists who lit the spark in Marsha P. Johnson's story and Sylvia Rivera's, the symbol that came eight years later in the history of the rainbow flag, and the modern descendants of that 1970 march in our complete Pride Month 2026 guide.

Want the wider story of how the U.S. government persecuted LGBTQ+ Americans during this era? Read about the Lavender Scare. For the pre-Stonewall organizing that laid the groundwork, read our profile of Frank Kameny.

For the full life story, read Harvey Milk's biography from his Long Island childhood through his murder at City Hall.

Heading to your first parade this June? Our guide to your first Pride parade and what to expect covers what to bring, what to wear, route strategy, and the first-timer mistakes to skip.

Carry the Tradition Mark the Day with a Flag of Your Own The first marchers did not have a flag. We do. Whether you fly the rainbow, the Progress Pride flag, or the one that names you exactly, the gesture connects you to a 51-block walk that started outside a bar in 1970. Shop Pride Flags Read More From Pride Belongs

Related: Pride Month exists thanks to a bisexual organizer named Brenda Howard. Read our full profile of the Mother of Pride.

Stormé DeLarverie's arrest outside Stonewall the same night is the moment many witnesses say lit the fuse. Read her full story here.