In June 1970, when I was a teenager walking in Chicago’s first gay pride march, the only destination I had in mind was the Civic Center downtown. That was where 200 people would gather under the wary gaze of a few bemused cops to listen to speeches commemorating the previous year’s riots outside the Stonewall Inn, the gay bar in New York where a routine police raid sparked the birth of modern “gay liberation.” I had no idea where this movement was heading. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that 25 years later there’d be a Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual History Month, honored with a proclamation by a mayor named Daley and an exhibition at the Chicago Historical Society.
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Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual History Month was the brainchild of Rodney Wilson, a Saint Louis high school history teacher. He chose October because school would be in session and “he wanted it to have an academic component,” says Kevin Boyer, Gerber/Hart’s president. This year’s celebration won the endorsement of the National Education Association–and a predictable backlash from Concerned Women of America, an ultraconservative Christian group headed by Beverly LaHaye, who termed the association’s “unofficial observance of homosexuality” a “direct assault on innocent, unsuspecting children.”
Of particular interest are accounts of old issues still debated today: gays in the military (a lifesize reproduction of Vietnam veteran Leonard Matlovich’s tombstone, which carries the epitaph: “When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men–and a discharge for loving one”); the ordination of homosexual clergy; media images (Archie Bunker gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a drag queen years before Roseanne’s lesbian kiss); lesbian mothers’ custody battles; ideological, racial, and class divisions within the movement; and the campaigns for and against gay-inclusive civil-rights laws. Also represented are early examples of media outing. (Remember Oliver Sipple, the ex-Marine who saved President Ford from would-be assassin Sara Jane Moore? He was disowned by his family after his gay friends revealed his homosexuality to the press.)
The Long Road to Freedom is on display through November 5 at the Chicago Historical Society, 1601 N. Clark. A Gerber/Hart benefit viewing of the show, featuring an appearance by Chastity Bono (the lesbian daughter of Sonny and Cher), takes place from 6 to 9, Friday, October 20; the cost is $40 to $100.
