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“That was the epicenter of the gay world,” he says of the early years of Pride. But, over the decades, Pride parades have evolved in a way that goes beyond the number of participants - and, having photographed five decades worth of them, Stellar has seen that evolution firsthand. In a year when large gatherings are prevented by the coronavirus and many Pride events have been cancelled or postponed, over 500 Pride and LGBTQIA+ community organizations from 91 countries will participate in Global Pride on June 27. in 1970, a year after the uprising at the Stonewall Inn that many consider to be the catalyst for the modern LGBTQ liberation movement. That unstoppable spirit is now marking its 50th anniversary: the first Pride parades took place in the U.S. When people would taunt us, cars would drive by and spit at us, yell at us constantly, Marsha would be there, looking outrageous and glorious in her own aesthetic, and she would say ‘pay them no mind.’ That’s what the ‘P’ is for, is ‘pay them no mind, don’t let them stop us.’” “There were marchers too - very brave souls with signs, like Marsha P. I went to marches every year after that in New York, until I left NY the day after Pride Day, 1983.“It started as a small social thing,” Stellar, now 75, recalls. It was all very dramatic, and between the march, the rally, and the emotions, I was exhausted by the time I got home. At some point, Bette Midler arrived on the stage and started belting out a song, which seemed to shift the tone. I didn’t quite know what to make of it all – at the time, they both seemed right, but then they seemed to be yelling at each other. And I remember Sylvia Rivera getting up and in an intensely emotional way, defending herself and other drag queens and explaining what their lives were like. I’m not sure about the order in which this happened, but I remember Jean O’Leary, a lesbian feminist activist, speaking very strongly and angrily about drag queens and transvestites and how they were mocking women. The rally was mind-boggling and I was completely unprepared for the uproar that exploded on the stage in Washington Square Park. I remember the thrill of marching in the street down Broadway, through the theater district, and there being crowds, and then the crowds of onlookers shrinking as we got further downtown. I remember linking arms for part of the way. The faces I remember from that day, though I know there were more, were Richard Gustafson, Seymour Kleinberg, David Roggensack, and Jonathan Ned Katz, all of whom were active in the GAU. Of the march, mostly I remember a feeling of excitement – getting to Columbus Circle and looking for my group of friends/comrades. Instead it started at Columbus Circle on the edge of Central Park and marched down Broadway to the Village, where we eventually assembled for a rally in Washington Square Park. That year, for the first and perhaps only time, the march didn’t start in Greenwich Village and head north to Central Park.
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As a group, we decided that we’d participate as a contingent in that year’s March. Three years later, in 1973, I was still with the same boyfriend, but I was also involved in a relatively new group, the Gay Academic Union, that had started meeting early in the year, and was very dynamic and exciting. So, I dropped the idea, and didn’t go to what turned out to be the first NYC Pride March. The idea of, in the words of one of them, “fags marching in the streets” made them laugh wildly they just couldn’t imagine it. I mentioned this to my new boyfriend and two of his friends, who were all about 10 or so years older than me and had been gay in New York since the late 1950s. I knew about the Stonewall riots the year before, and I had heard that a march and demonstration were going to be held at the end of June, going from Christopher Street to Central Park. I had just graduated from college in June 1970 and was living in Manhattan.