Atlanta is often touted as "the city too busy to hate." Indeed in the early 1960s metro Atlanta peacefully integrated, unlike cities like Birmingham, Alabama, known as "Bombingham" for violent reprisals against establishing equality for all people.
As the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Atlanta is called the cradle of the civil rights movement, and the adopted home of legends such as the late Reverend Joseph Lowery, Andrew Young, and our current United States House Representative John Lewis. Women such as Coretta Scott King and Turner Broadcasting's Xernona Clayton also played pivotal roles in our nation's long march to freedom.
Unique among Southern cities, Atlanta was lead by a coalition of black and white progressives, shepherded by Atlanta's Mayor Ivan Allen and by Georgia's Governor Jimmy Carter, who of course went on to become President Carter in 1976, to name just a few folks.
For LGBTQ people, freedom was and is a long time coming.
Before the Stonewall Inn riots in June 1969 in New York City, the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution ran smear pieces about "driving the perverts out of Piedmont Park", and the two papers advocated police programs against gay men.
In this hothouse climate, Fulton County Solicitor General Hinson McAuliffe (a deacon in the Baptist church, no less) spearheaded an August 5th, 1969 raid on the Ansley Mall Mini Cinema showing of Andy Warhol's homoerotic comedy "Lonesome Cowboys." Our own Abby Drue, the CEO of the Ben Marion Institute for Social Justice, was entrapped in that raid and recalls the police interrogating her "Does your husband know where you are?" Well our dear Abby didn't answer that question.
The good news is that shortly after the Gestapo tactic raid, a standing room only meeting at Emory Village's New Morning Cafe lead to the founding of the Georgia Gay Liberation Front, as GLF groups sprang up across the country. My late friend and mentor Berl Boykin told me that Atlanta native the late Bill Smith insisted on calling it the Georgia GLF to cover the entire state, and legally incorporated the GGLF, not something normally done in the late 60s.
Like Atlanta at large, the GGLF was an alliance of folks, like native Atlantan the late Lendon Sadler, a man of color who grew up on Auburn Avenue and was a major force in Pride. Women such as the radical activist Vicki Gabriner and bisexual Judy Lambert championed Pride, and Judy was co-chair of Atlanta Pride with Bill Smith, while her husband Phil was an avid participant in the GGLF.. Thus bisexual folks were front and center even back in the day.
Although we didn't have the language for it in 1969, Atlanta native the late Paul Dolan became our first non-binary and gender non-conforming poster child in his alter ego as Severin, performing what he called "cosmic drag" in an evening gown and a bushy black moustache (said to have inspired Fred Schneider and the B-52s in Athens). In 1994 Severin was depicted in the 25th anniversary Pride exhibit in the Seagrams Building in New York City, although he was billed as an "unknown protestor."
According to Phil Lambert and retired University of West Georgia professor Ara Dostourian, the GGLF mounted a rally in Piedmont Park for the first anniversary of Stonewall the end of June in 1970. When I asked Berl Boykin why they didn't have a march, he said they were afraid only a handful of people would show up. Even in 1970 there was a terror of being out and openly gay, especially in the Deep South and the Bible belt.
Nevertheless the GGLF persevered for Atlanta's first Pride march in 1971, and Berl swore "there were 125 people, I know, I counted them twice!" Sadly our "city too busy to hate" refused a permit for the march, and the 125 had to march on the sidewalks and stop for every traffic light. Even our natural allies like the Georgia chapter of the ACLU bailed, telling Berl no, we won't help you get a permit, because "you are not a minority."
Happily ever after, the late Charlie St. John, Georgia's first openly gay political appointee, and others obtained a permit for the 1972 Pride march, the first march in the streets. There were about 500 people in the march and the rally in Piedmont Park.
I know because I was there.
Dave Hayward is one of the core collective that produced the 1972 Atlanta Pride, and has the dubious honor of being thrown out of two gay bars for promoting the 1972 Pride. He has helped produce every Pride since, and with Berl Boykin founded Touching Up Our Roots, Georgia's LGBTQ Story Project, in 2002.
Party on Pride.