Jun 05, 2009  |  By: Joey DiGuglielmo  | COMMENTS     

The widely held notion that 1969’s Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village were the start of the modern gay rights movement is inaccurate, local activists say, as they were meeting and picketing years before.

“When people say, as you so often hear, that the gay movement started with Stonewall, if I have a chance under the circumstances in which it’s said, I invariably correct them very insistently,” says Frank Kameny, 84, a legendary gay activist widely recognized as one of the great leaders of the homophile movement, as it was then known. “And point out that the movement was just sort of 20 years old already and there was a groundwork.”

Lilli Vincenz (Blade file photo by Doug Hinckle)

Kameny and others who were involved in the early years agree, though, that Stonewall’s influence can’t be overstated, though its significance wasn’t immediately apparent.

Kameny, Lilli Vincenz, Paul Kuntzler, the late Barbara Gittings, the late Jack Nichols and others had been involved in East Coast gay activism for years. An April 1965 picket at the White House by the Kameny-and-Nichols-founded Mattachine Society of Washington was the first of its kind, but it involved a small group, dressed — at Kameny’s insistence — in shirts and ties for the men and dresses and skirts for the women.

“Things culturally were very, very different then,” Kameny says, describing the scene of an early picket at the Civil Service Commission to protest the inability of gays to get security clearances. “In 1965, men’s shirts were white. Period. There were no other kinds. Dress was very conservative. It changed over the next half decade, changed very significantly … but in terms of those days, if we’re gonna picket to be employed, we have to look employable by their standards.”

A handful of gay groups existed on the East Coast and met regularly as the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO). Those involved say it was a different world.

“Most gay people at that time were not interested in any kind of civil rights activity,” Vincenz, 71, says. “So we were seen as kind of Don Quixotes chasing windmills. I felt they could at least give us some money, but they didn’t do that either. They were worried about their careers and they thought it was a lost cause. They couldn’t imagine it. So I was seen as a crusader and so we were a small group.”

Kameny says it soon became obvious from ECHO gatherings that D.C.’s Mattachine Society was a trendsetter, taking on the Civil Service Commission, the qualification of homosexuality as an illness by the American Psychiatric Association, security clearances, the military gay ban and more.

“All those things, we were doing, nobody else was doing to any meaningful extent anywhere,” Kameny says. “We had ECHO meetings in October of each year in ’63, ’64 and ’65 and monthly meetings here in Washington, Philadelphia and New York over that period and the Washington Mattachine was doing things and reporting to everyone else what we were doing. Philadelphia had two women … the New York Mattachine had monthly meetings but they were just meetings, they weren’t accomplishing anything particularly. The things that were being done were being done by us here.”

Kuntzler met Kameny one night at the Chicken Hut, a gay D.C. bar, in late February of ’62, and found a kindred spirit. He remembers the sign he made to carry in the first White House protest.

“Jack [Nichols] saw my poster and wanted it, so I let him carry it,” Kuntzler, 67, says with a chuckle. “He ended up in the front of a photo carrying my sign.”
“That was the first time we had any visibility,” Vincenz, who’ll be honored as a Pride “superhero” with Kameny at this year’s Capital Pride parade, says. “Confidential magazine picked us up and they put our pictures everywhere … We’d never had any visibility before that actually.”

One of ECHO’s signature yearly events was an Independence Day protest each year at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The one held in 1969, though, which turned out to be ECHO’s last, was markedly different. Stonewall had happened less than a week before and changed the game forever.

None of the Mattachine activists were involved in the Stonewall riots. Because it was a spontaneous event that quickly gathered steam during a then-par-for-the-course police raid on the gay bar, the only people involved were those who happened to be at Stonewall Inn, a seedy, Mafia-owned dive that ...