Fifty years of LGBT struggle remembered at Independence Hall

With the ink still wet on the Supreme Court's 5-4 pro-marriage-equality ruling, figures from the LGBT movement joined thousands of others at Independence Hall on Saturday for the National LGBT 50th anniversary ceremony.

Fifty years ago, in the same location, a polite protest by 40 gay men and women sparked the movement with its demands for equal rights for gay people. That demonstration is seen by many as the birth of the modern gay-rights movement.

"For the gay community, this is identical in meaning to the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom," anniversary chairman and co-emcee Malcolm Lazin said before the celebration.

"And it comes at a remarkable time and intersection of events."

Lazin said the Philadelphia demonstration and others that followed "set the groundwork for the Stonewall riot in 1969 and the growth of a national movement with annual Gay Pride demonstrations."

James Obergefell, lead plaintiff in the marriage-equality case, was on the speakers' platform in front of Independence Hall on Saturday to bask in the glow of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision and put it in historic context.

While same-sex marriage is now legal everywhere, "employers in 29 states can still fire a person" who answers to gay, lesbian, bi- or transsexual, said Selisse Berry, chief executive officer of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, based in San Francisco.

Across the United States, there are now 500 "out" elected officials, said Aisha Moodie-Mills, president of the Victory Fund and Institute, "but that's just a start." She said pro-LGBT legislation most often kick-starts when advocates are in office.

Gene Robinson, the country's first openly gay Episcopal bishop, celebrated the "young evangelicals . . . and 60 percent of Roman Catholics" who he said now support marriage equality. He then scolded old-line clerics who he said hide their prejudices in the guise of religious doctrine.

Even co-emcee Wanda Sykes, the out-and-proud comedian who Lazin acknowledged "was the person you've all come to see," mixed some vinegar with her wit.

Sykes confessed she came out on CNN almost by accident while "just running my mouth," and said "now people can hate me on three fronts - as a woman, African American, and lesbian."

She also joked that as a married person she will now miss going to a place like Texas where her vows were not recognized and she could liberally party with the girls.

Recognized were Judy and Dennis Shepard, who took up the cause after their 21-year-old son, Matthew, fell victim to a gay hate murder near Laramie, Wyo., in 1998.

One prominent guest was Walter Naegle, life partner to the late Bayard Rustin, a civil rights pioneer and right-hand man to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in organizing the 1963 march on Washington.

While first arrested in 1953 for gay conduct, the West Chester-born Rustin reportedly did not embrace the cause of sexual discrimination as his own until the 1980s, at Naegle's urging.

Clearly, the movement has come a long way, said two eyewitnesses to both the first and the 50th July 4 LGBT gatherings at Independence Hall. Speakers said the site had been selected mostly for the resonance of the Liberty Bell in previous emancipation movements.

Just 40 protesters participated in the first 1965 gathering here, the men wearing business suits, the women in dresses, high heels, and hose "to make a good impression, look employable," recalled Paul Kuntzler, then a 25-year-old participant.

"Most, like me, had come up from Washington, D.C., a few from New York, because we couldn't get Philadelphia locals willing to show their faces," he said.

They marched in silence carrying signs - as protesters symbolically did again this July 4 - inscribed with messages such as "Justice" and "Employment based upon Ability" and "Homosexuals are American citizens too."

Across the street that day in 1965, behind barricades and watchful police, stood Marj McCann, a closeted 25-year-old lesbian. She had been encouraged to attend the demonstration by Philadelphia-based co-organizer Barbara Gittings, now considered the "mother of the LGBT civil rights movement."

"There was hardly anyone there to watch, let alone to make trouble," said McCann, who attended Saturday with her 19-year-old granddaughter Caitlin Smith.

"But I was afraid to participate, for fear of having my picture taken. It would have been too upsetting to family, friends. Nobody knew. I could have lost my job [working for a typesetter]."

"Back in those days, being gay was considered a mental disorder."

It was not until 1973, after repeated protests led by Gittings and the LGBT movement's "founding father," Frank Kameny, that the American Psychiatric Association changed its diagnosis. "We were cured en masse by the psychiatrists," Kameny would declare.

Kameny also coined the phrase "Gay is good," said Kuntzler, and laid "the groundwork for the government's eventual policy reversal on hiring gays and lesbians." Despite his Harvard Ph.D., Kameny had been fired in 1957 by the Army Map Service for being openly and aggressively gay. He took the case to the Supreme Court. The court would not hear it then, he said.

"Today, to be gay is like to be Italian or Hispanic. It's just another constituency, another voting bloc," Kuntzler said. "In the media, everyone has discovered us. Now they've moved on to the whole issue of transgender. Still, the Supreme Court ruling will have a monumental impact, especially on the young people around the country who are struggling with their sexual orientation. The decision lends moral legitimacy to their lifestyle."

Saturday's commemoration "started with tears of the past" (a light rain) "but ended in the sunshine of the present," Lazin concluded as the clouds parted.

The lesson from this weekend was that there is "still much to be done. We shouldn't rest on our laurels," said David Warner, a former Philadelphia writer and editor, who returned from Florida with his partner, Larry Biddle, for four days of LGBT panels, parties, exhibits, and an interfaith service.

The celebrations draw to a close Sunday with a street fair in the Center City "Gayborhood," just east of Broad Street, decorated with rainbow flags.