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For many years, Tretter ran an exhibit on gay history at the festival. He said only a handful of people who were involved in that first march are still around. His collection of books, documents and memorabilia is now housed at the University of Minnesota. He also became an authority and archivist of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender history. Tretter, 69, would go on for many years to be among the organizers of the Twin Cities Pride festival. There were only a few lines about the march, in the Minnesota Daily, the University of Minnesota student newspaper, he said. They had made their point and stayed out of jail, although the media largely ignored the event. But he said the reaction after it was over was largely “joy and happiness.” “I think some people were hoping we’d get arrested,” Tretter said of that first march. “Here’s another bunch of kids protesting something, you don’t know what.” “Protest marches were much more common back in the 1970s,” he said. Tretter also said the event probably didn’t raise more eyebrows because it was just another protest. A few months after the Stonewall Riots that started 28 June 1969, The Stonewall Inn closed.
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“Either from Lebanon or Greece,” he said. clubs at the time, police raids were common. Tretter said references to lesbians were misinterpreted as referring to people from Lebanon. People didn’t know what gay power or gay pride meant,” Tretter said. “Most people didn’t have any idea of what we were saying or why,” he said. But the public response that first year was mainly puzzlement, according to Tretter. Tretter remembers that only about 10 people made it all the way to Fourth Street and back at the inaugural version of what would become one of the largest LGBT celebrations in the country. “We didn’t have the know-how to get permits.” “We had to march on the sidewalk,” he said. There were chants and homemade signs, but the marchers stayed out of the street, Tretter said. So following a picnic lunch in Loring Park, a small band of protesters marched down Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.“We wanted to do something here,” Tretter said. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called "The Essential List". In honour of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, BBC's The Travel Show returns to The Stonewall Inn to meet Mark Segal, who was just 18 years old when police confronted him inside the bar and had no idea that the world would still be feeling the effects of that steamy summer night 50 years later.įor more on this and other stories, watch The BBC Travel Show – every weekend on the BBC News Channel and BBC World News. Instead of accompanying officers to the police station, Marsha Johnson, an African-American trans woman, fired the first shot – literally: she picked up a shot glass, threw it through a mirror and sparked a multi-day riot that birthed the modern gay rights movement and the inaugural pride parade in 1970.Īs people around the world take to the streets to revel in pride marches this June and July, it's easy to forget that these early public demonstrations weren't parties, they were defiant feats of resistance.
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So, when police burst through the doors just after 01:00 and demanded to see 200 patrons' identifications and physically verify their gender, one drag queen wasn't having it. The Stonewall Inn didn't have a liquor license, running water or fire escapes, but in an era when being gay was viewed as a crime, this scruffy Greenwich Village pub was one of the few sanctuaries where members of New York's LGBTQ community could openly express themselves without fear of harassment. Fifty years ago, in the early-morning hours of 28 June 1969, a police raid at a Mafia-run dive bar in New York City changed the course of history.