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A group called Gay People of Austin (made up mostly of students) staged the Gay Picnic and Cultural Celebration at Shoal Creek Park in 1974, followed by a party at the student union ballroom, which attracted an estimated 300 people. By 1974, the city was also home to the Austin Lesbian Organization. More Austin organizers and groups followed, sometimes fracturing efforts. Austin had been a live-and-let-live part of the world.” We didn’t have to worry about it much because there was not that kind of crackdown here like there was Los Angeles and San Francisco. Austin was called the ‘Palm Springs of the movement.’ They were always chiding us for not radicalizing. “We’d never seen anything like what rolled out of New York and San Francisco. “The drag queens stole the show,” Paddie said. Previously in 1971, the group had put together a national gay rights conference, supported by local churches and political groups that included representatives from California and New York, home to a more radicalized sensibility, who were horrified by the laid-back vibe in Austin.
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“He said meetings offer the only way homosexuals can meet people as people for conversation or friendship without feelings of fear and repression society directs toward ‘gays.’”Īfter a federal district court acknowledged its constitutional right to on-campus status in 1974, what was then called Austin Gay Liberation was recognized at UT. “Parker said the atmosphere in Gay Lib meetings is not as sexual as it is in gay bars,” reported the American-Statesman. Yet Gay Liberation leaders Joyce Smith and Neal Parker said that their group, which claimed some 200 followers, had encouraged people who needed counseling to pursue it (but not conversion therapy as it's currently understood). The American Psychiatric Association did not remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses until 1973, and health experts on campus claimed that the activist group would discourage students who questioned their sexuality from seeking help. According to one article, Ed Price, UT's assistant dean of students, said that the group’s purposes were “inimical” to educational purposes of the university, and therefore he would not register it as a campus organization. 3, 1970, the American-Statesman was publishing reports about the debates between Gay Liberation organizers and UT leaders. Sometime in the fall, they kicked us off campus.”īy Dec. Then in the summer of '69, Stonewall happened, and in 1970, we met at Sutton Hall at the University of Texas. “From that grew a sort of co-op or commune. “Gay Liberation really started in 1969 with a group of friends in an old house at 105 Neches St.,” longtime Austinite and author Dennis Paddie told Grace McEvoy in a 2012 videotaped interview available on the Austin History Center’s YouTube page. In a city accustomed to political organizing and protest rallies, a group called the Gay Liberation Front, seen by some of its founders as a constituent of the larger anti-war, pro-civil rights movements, started gathering on the University of Texas campus less than a year after Stonewall.
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As early as February 1970, the Austin underground newspaper the Rag called for “Pink Power!” In April 1970, the first publicly promoted meeting of gay Austinites drew 25 brave souls.
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Yet Austin’s relatively small LGBTQ community was quick to organize. Many media outlets across the country did not at first report on what happened at Stonewall. The uprising changed the power dynamics in the struggle for LGBTQ rights, which, despite some prominent protests in Washington, D.C., and militant actions in Los Angeles and San Francisco, for the most part had been confined to quiet pushes for incremental changes.ĭuring those two nights 50 years ago, a modern movement was born. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera among the vanguard, continued on and off for two nights. The street riots, with transgender women of color like Marsha P. In the early hours of a torrid June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a scruffy LGBTQ bar in Greenwich Village.Īlthough such raids were routine in New York City and across the country, this time the bar’s clients and onlookers fought back.