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- Can you see okay? - Mm-hmm.

Susan Kleckner led the crew.

Is she coming?

- She might be. - Good, I hope she is.

They did a good job of filming it.

Everybody looks so relaxed.

It was a very different parade in those days.

I mean, we were very afraid.

We didn't know what would happen to us

and maybe our mothers

would see us on the evening news.

It was very scary.

We look very brave, but maybe we aren't.

There's still.

But you know, among ourselves,

we felt strong,

but then seeing the faces lined up

against us on the streets, it was different.

This footage of the 1971

Christopher Street Liberation Day parade and Gay In

was shot by the Women's Liberation Cinema,

a group that included Kate Millett, Susan Kleckner,

Robin Mead, Lenore Bode, and others.

They were working together on a documentary

which would premiere later that year called "Three Lives."

What you are looking at is raw footage.

It is a document of the day.

Kate Millett says that the fact that there is something

for us to look at tonight,

something tangible from their efforts shooting that day

is an accident of history.

The images that we are watching tonight unfold in a loop.

They start at the end, the end of the march, that is.

The Gay In

in Central Park and end again at the end,

which is also the beginning.

We will return to Central Park.

There is something of the way

this collection of raw footage moves that resonates

with my experience at this moment of history.

These early moments of gay liberation,

the footage is out of sequence,

only a partial document of an event.

It flirts with the bodies it images

lingering long on some

passing over others with little notice

and leaving countless more

wholly outside the frame of vision.

A younger self.

In the published calendar of events

for what was called the 1971 Gay Pride Week

and Christopher Street Liberation Day, it says,

"Sunday June 27th, Christopher Street Liberation Day.

"Assemble for mass march 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM

"on Christopher Street from 7th Avenue to West Street.

"The march will start at 2:00 PM

"to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park for a gay in.

"Bring signs, musical instruments, balloons

"food to share and love."

In his July 1st, 1971 article for the Village Voice

Arthur Bell writes about the march.

The headline is,

The Year Two: A Marcher's Report Toward a Gay Community.

Bell begins, "Happy Birthday, gay liberation.

"Happy birthday to you.

"The baby is two years old

"and the song is sung by Martha Shelley and Alan Young

"and Judy from New York's Defunct Gay Liberation Front

"under a Christopher Street banner,

"a stone's throw from the old Stonewall Inn

"so long ago and far away.

"Helping along with the celebration

"are about 6,000 birthday guests.

"They've come from Toronto and Washington

"and Hartford and Columbus and Amherst,

"and all five boroughs and flood Christopher Street

"from Sheridan Square, almost to the river.

"Sunday under a cloudless pansexual sky.

"Isn't it beautiful?

"Beautiful, just beautiful.

"Happy birthday.

"Happy birthday.

"Happy birthday."

Sylvia of Star is there, and Marsha with Bebe and Natasha.

Yellow balloons on long strings are printed gay

and tied to wristbands and headbands.

Occasionally one breaks away

and flies up, up over, liberated.

Free and gone.

Jill Johnston is there.

She gives me a bear hug and says,

"Sometimes I wish I were a male homosexual,"

as Pete Fisher and Mark Reuben pass

arm in arm caressing, Kate Millett arrives.

"This is a very beautiful day," she says.

"A very important day."

It's fantastic.

This whole sense of freedom and euphoria.

I feel a sense of common identity with everyone here.

It's a strong feeling and happy and fine.

Media, media everywhere.

Global Village with a crew of four

and the Life and Newsweek reporters

who've been following us around these many weeks

and radio and TV networks and amateur camera buffs

shooting away at the crowd and at each other

out of the closets into the media and into your living room.

America beware.

This is we're, you know,

we're sort of moving on now.

This is our second one, and so on and so forth.

We're getting stronger

but it's still a kind of private

as compared with that big show they have nowadays.

This was so much smaller

and so much more vulnerable.

And people,

they use a lot of their imagination.

It's not so, it's not so forced.

It's kind of naive and innocent.

It feels, you know,

this sort of youthful vigor of the beginning of things.

Now we're moving out.

I think that's Ann Poland.

I'm not sure.

We do try harder.

I mean it has that amateur quality.

The health service.

The Christopher Street Liberation Day committee

made a flyer called Get Involved for Would Be Marchers.

It said, "Of the three movements left in this country,

"women's, Indian, and gay,

"gay lib will be chiefly on display and on trial

"before perhaps millions of watchers this coming Sunday.

"To present the most attractive possible picture to all

"as non-violent demonstrators

"we would be wise to follow a few tried and true principles.

"To wit, respect city laws covering parades.

"If you don't know what these are

"contact the New York Council of Legal Observers

"or pick up a booklet

"from the American Civil Liberties Union

"entitled demonstration guidelines.

"Don't attempt to carry banners or placards supported

"by anything other than cardboard staunches.

"Do not bring wooden poles

"or metal shafts as both are regarded as weapons.

"No umbrella unless there is a deluge.

"Do not wear anything that can be misread as a weapon,

"which means large or sharp pointed rings,

"heavy belt buckles, watches, chains, et cetera.

"Dress as simply as possible without encumbrances.

"Do not carry a knife on your person.

"This is a day when the police department

"will be very vigilant,

"perhaps even hostile and trigger happy.

"So take care of yourself by being meticulously cooperative

"even docile in a pinch.

"Do not leave the march route except to relieve yourself.

"Any orders from the CSLD marshals are to be recorded

"as protective advice and should not be defied.

"Remember that gays are lovers, not fighters.

"Have compassion for that person

"who may be coming out in a public way for the first time.

"Please don't frighten anyone back

"into the pre stonewall closet.

"Everyone present on Sunday is an honored guest

"of the Gay Liberation Movement."

- Now our march is sort of, you know,

a folk event, an ethnic event,

part of the tourism of New York

but then it was a much more fragile event.

Again, from Arthur Bell's Voice article,

"The big parade starts, a marshal shouts,

"keep behind the Christopher Street Liberation sign.

"Somewhere back there.

"A contingent from Perth Amboy

"totes a sheet spray painted and stenciled.

"A dream is a dream.

"Reality is real.

"Open the door to the way we feel.

"I see a gay Jewish revolution banner

"and the gay activist Alliance Lambda

"and all those Lambda shirts.

"As the march progresses up 6th Avenue,

"past foam rubber city past the flower and plant block,

"the upright banners move further behind

"and the three city blocks of marchers

"become nine city blocks.

"By 34th Street, we're up to 15.

"There are no incidents.

"Some sidewalk observers heed the call and join us."

But we had the gaiety that goes with it,

you know, balloons and all the rest of it.

At a 42nd Street construction site,

three hard hats make ha ha gestures.

Even though we're very uncertain

about what we're doing compared with how we ended up.

At 45th Street, an observer remarks,

"I'm getting to feel like a real creep here

"with my husband and baby.

"I'm getting to feel abnormal."

Well, as time went on,

it got stronger and stronger.

There's Sue Johnson.

Near the Statler Hilton,

a group of young women sing, "I enjoy being a dyke,"

"Join us, join us,"

shout the marchers to the bellhops and hotel guests.

"Beyond the moon is Lesbos,"

says a frizzled haired woman to a passerby.

There is something both remarkable

and unremarkable about this footage.

There's something deeply familiar about it

For any of us who may have walked that route before

in any number of pride parades, anti-war demos,

dyke marches or political funerals over the years.

Something even more familiar about it

for any of us who have taken a camera into these events

to try to picture, record, image what occurred.

This took more courage than you can imagine,

to come out on the streets of New York uptown

and all the crowds on the side of the street

staring us down.

It was, see, we're out of the village now and it's getting,

there's a great deal of, oh,

showing off and so on and so forth.

But people are really uncertain

about how this is going to pan out.

What's going to be the results?

I mean, we could be attacked on 40th street or something.

We didn't know what would happen.

And here's of course some of our,

but they're doing okay.

They're taking their hats off to us.

That was a surprise too.

The cameras of the Women's Liberation Cinema

place us where we have been before in a sense,

in the space of the camera that also marches.

And we are thus in the space

of this marching camera's desire to remember

and to image these particular bodies

that take to these particular streets

on this particular day,

and these are not my friends

but people whose work I have read

who I know about through texts or images or stories

and this is not a moment I lived, but one lived by others.

It is true in a sense that courage is hard to picture.

The images show strength,

but how can we see courage

if we can't see in the picture the fear?

How do we perceive the vulnerability

when the signs and the bodies declare themselves

with such ferocity and clarity?

Second class citizenship must go.

Closets are for clothes.

Out of the closet and into the streets,

off the couches and onto the streets.

There is Gay Rhode Island

and Boston Gay and Gay Baltimore and organizations.

Sylvia Saxon Society,

Street Queens Liberation Movement,

lavender Menace, Radical Lesbians.

And then there is power and revolution and liberation.

Gay power, dyke power, gay revolution,

sisterhood is yours, lesbians unite.

Unite and fight.

Gay sisterhood is powerful.

Women's liberation is a lesbian plot.

Come out against war and oppression.

Gay liberation now

and then there is love.

Gay power to gay love.

Love is a many gendered thing.

We will not hide our love away.

Homosexual love is beautiful.

I am a radical lesbian and I am beautiful.

An army of lovers cannot lose.

Bloom where you are planted.

She kissed you once.

Will she kiss you again?

Be sure, join the lesbian revolution.

Bode, our camera person, one of them.

We had to make a cinema

that was just for women or by women

or because of women or because women got together

and did it and so on and so forth.

So it really had our point of view

and we had done it ourselves and so forth.

I mean, by now this is probably,

you know, sort of monstrous and silly,

but at the time it meant a great deal to do that

because we hadn't done it before.

We'd been, you know, acting and so on and so forth

but we hadn't defined it ourselves.

You know, we brought the cameras and see what would happen.

That we got anything that we could save

was quite remarkable.

That it could be shown at an occasion like this is

well, an accident of history.

I have a historical context

in which to understand this event, this day, this march.

I know that the riots at the Stonewall Inn in 1969

catalyzed a group of trans and queer activists

to a deeper radicalism

and hundreds of non activists to action.

It was reported that people

in the crowd outside of Stonewall started yelling gay power

taking up the language of resistance used

in the black power movement.

Weeks after the riots in June,

a group of activists came together as a group,

Gay Liberation Front,

describing themselves as a militant coalition

of radical and revolutionary homosexual men and women

committed to fight the oppression

of the homosexual as a minority group

and to demand the right to self-determination

of our own bodies.

In the name Gay Liberation Front,

the group aligned themselves not only

with active liberation struggles inside the US

but also with the National Liberation Front in Vietnam.

Gay liberation began in the midst of the Vietnam War.

By the time this march happened,

the GLF had already disbanded,

but present at this event were several groups

that had splintered off from the GLF

for various practical and political reasons.

One of these was the radical lesbians

whose 1970 text, "The Woman Identified Woman" begins,

"What is a lesbian?

"A lesbian is the rage of all women

"condensed to the point of explosion."

The three page text ends with the following paragraph,

"It is the primacy of women relating to women

"of women creating a new consciousness

"of and with each other,

"which is at the heart of women's liberation

"and the basis for cultural revolution?

"Together we must find, reinforce

"and validate our authentic selves.

"As we do this, we confirm in each other

"that struggling incipient sense of pride and strength

"the divisive barriers begin to melt.

"We feel this growing solidarity with our sisters.

"We see ourselves as prime,

"find our centers inside of ourselves.

"We find receding the sense of alienation

"of being cut off, of being behind a locked window,

"of being unable to get out.

"What we know is inside.

"We feel a realness,

"feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves

"with that real self, with that consciousness.

"We begin a revolution to end the imposition

"of all coercive identifications

"and to achieve maximum autonomy in human expression.

"What can be deceptive from the distance of history

"from the distance of the document of an event

"such as this is that these placards banners and slogans,

"these declarations of identity, affinity and desire,

"these manifestos on queer expression appear fully resolved

"fixed like their image on the screen.

"Maybe this is where the monstrosity lies,

"in the static claims made

"on these singular and collective bodies

"and the static demands on these slippery

"and fragile articulations.

"Maybe this is also where the vulnerability can be seen

"in and between the real and the proposed.

"In and between demonstrations of power

"and clarity and in and in between

"the profound newness of all of these words

"and all of these images and all of these actions."

There's an interesting quality about the bodies.

I mean, everybody is having a good time

and nobody seems angry or frustrated or,

it's a special day.

Everybody touches each other with goodwill

and humor and friendliness.

And these people, of course,

don't know each other for the most part, a few of them do,

but we're becoming, you know, a tribe at this point.

So we have good feelings towards each other.

In a letter

to the Christopher Street Liberation Day committee

a marcher writes, "Dear CSLD people,

"I am enclosing $35 as a donation to the CSLD committee

"on behalf of myself and Will Rivers

"as profits from the sale of our button.

"How dare you presume I'm heterosexual.

"I would also like to share with you

"some of my feelings about the events of the day.

"I very much enjoyed marching with my brothers and sisters.

"I ran into people I hadn't seen in some time.

"I also met new people.

"We talked, hugged, joked, sang, cheered

"and a lot of other things.

"I had a chance to wander through the march

"and look and talk with people I rarely run into

"in my normal gay rounds.

"It was a joy seeing all those beautiful people."

And another writes a more pointed message

to the treasurer of the committee.

"Dear brother Rex, I had a delightful time in New York,

"learned just how well gay liberation had worked there

"and had a lot of surprises

"and I guess you were

"the most delightful surprise of them all.

"I'm delighted that you are so enthusiastic

"that you just yelled and yelled and then lost your voice.

"That's the ecstasy of being gay.

"Thanks for the ring you gave me

"but I feel that it might have been given to me

"in a moment of high emotion,

"and if that's true

"and you can't live without it, let me know.

"On the other hand, I wear it and I am proud of it.

"Can you be kind to kiss John Paul for me?

"Peace, love, joy.

"Signed, Maurice."

Love and sexual desire

are a part of many political movements

and there's nothing so unusual about the implication

these marchers demonstrate

between sexual desire and political desire.

But looking at this footage now

makes me understand more clearly

that this nascent tribe of liberationists,

gay liberationists,

was also constructing new sets of relations

between love, sex, and politics.

Because the expression of love,

sexual desire, gender, queer sexuality,

was under constraint.

Love, sexual desire,

the expression of gender and queer sexuality

was the tool of our resistance.

Fucking was not ancillary to our politics

not a libidinal excess to the liberation work.

It was integral to it.

Living this queer love was a strategy

toward overthrowing the violent oppression

of heteronormativity.

That is why these bodies taking to the streets in 1971

were so particularly threatening and vulnerable.

When I first saw the slogan dyke power on a placard

at the 1993 March on Washington

I never thought about its historical beginning

nor did I think about that

when I saw it again on a banner in '95

or being passed out as a sticker in '97

or written on a sign

held by this cute 20 something transman in 2004.

I didn't think about it in terms of the power of black power

or liberation movements.

I saw it as pride, and in that it seemed useful for the day,

but not much longer.

Black power seemed to have teeth.

Gay power seemed a kind of posing.

But now as I look at these images

of this vulnerable becoming tribe

that wasn't quite sure if it would make it to the end

of the event to Central Park,

I realize how wisely they exerted their precise power

to fuck and to love

to chant about loving and fucking

to dress one's best, to look beautiful

to strut and twirl and shake and kick,

to seduce the camera,

seduce the public, seduce the homophobe.

And I found myself coming back

to a text that my friend Every Ocean Hughes wrote

as part of a dialogue about love, aesthetics, and politics.

She says, "Love is a strategy, medium sight and seen.

"Love is an act.

"Love is not a quantifiable element,

"able to be parsed between politics and poetics

"for it constantly transforms

"the definition of those very terms.

"Before I speak economy and resistance I must be explicit.

"Queer love, queer love exemplifies itself

"by its lack of singular object relations

"and an insistence on unstable and mutable boundaries.

"My insistence on queer love is because

"the unspoken alternative would be heteronormative love."

Distinguishing this discourse of love

as one that implicitly speaks queer love.

We do not take for granted modes of reproduction,

exchange values, or teleological engagements.

We allow simultaneous investments, contradictions,

excess relief and excess.

The theater of queer love

employs politics, poetics and aesthetics in equal measure.

Queering love transforms the vocabulary

with which we address our object

and the ensuing acts need not be translated.

Finally, the park.

We made it.

Queer love is not economical

and that is political.

Love as a medium is part of an economy of resistance.

Ecstatic resistance, I would say,

provoking questions of memory and tactics.

All the way uptown.

We didn't get destroyed or demolished

or arrested or jumped or anything.

I wonder if there's something for us

in this demonstration of gay power to gay love.

This demonstration of coinciding with oneself

coinciding with various projections of oneself,

projections of the self we desire,

or maybe the self we desire to be

amongst others on these special days.

Just this feeling

of open space was very reassuring.

And as I see these bodies moving through

and taking over the streets

that I still move on and through.

I wonder if we can reuse this model of power and love

not to return to that moment

but to reengage our own queer and queered positions

as we sit in the space of a very different political moment

with a very different idea of queerness

in the midst of a very different war.

I think we had the feeling

that we filled the park.