Florida gay pride parade riot
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We asked for and were denied, then fought for and won, the Astro Arena, whereupon 2,400 gay people attended, listened to motions and took votes. “So on my way back to my car, I conceptualized Houston Town Meeting I, which is what we did for Pride Week 1978. Now, the American Revolution was planned in taverns,” chuckles Hill, “but our bars were dark, they were loud, they were crowded they were designed for cruising, not organizing.” But we didn’t have institutions to sustain us we had bars. We had become an actual community of people with common goals and aspirations.
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“On my way back to my car,” he recalls, “I passed couples that had been together for decades but would never, never, never show affection, who were arm in arm.” And he knew that now was the time to push for still more movement forward. Leaving the protest that June night in 1977, Hill knew a massive shift in consciousness had taken place. And all of that changed in 24 hours because of Anita Bryant. It was such an enormously significant event, because up until that point, the words ‘gay community’ meant the part of town where the gay bars were. Meanwhile, Houston’s gay community flourished-certainly not the intended effect of Bryant’s passionate campaign against anti-discrimination ordinances and gay adoptions, but a welcome one. Just make damn sure you don’t drink anything that says Florida orange juice!”īy 1980, Bryant had been fired as the spokesperson for Florida Orange Juice following a protracted national boycott, and Save Our Children had perished along with her career.
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The unexpectedly massive event drew national attention, especially when Hill, on a live ABC radio broadcast, urged LGBT allies to boycott Bryant’s OJ backers: “Texas makes great orange juice Arizona’s got good orange juice California may have the best orange juice, but Texans don’t say that. “And I said, if we get 500 people that’s more than anyone else has ever gotten,” Hill recalls, adding: “Houston’s not a demonstration town.” With less than a month to plan it, no one imagined they’d get a turnout any larger than the 400 people who’d marched in the previous year’s Pride Parade. Since that time, the former Miss Oklahoma had become the face of the Florida Orange Juice and the Save Our Children campaigns, the latter of which was founded to protect youth from corrupting influences-Bryant boasted she would “lead such a crusade to stop as this country has not seen before.” When Hill found out she’d been invited to Houston to perform at the annual Texas State Bar Association convention, he and Van Ooteghem took their chance to fight back.Īt a meeting held in Van Ooteghem’s living room, a few dozen activists planned a small protest to be held outside the Hyatt Regency hotel on the night of Bryant’s performance inside. Of her four Top 40 hits in the mid-century, the highest chart-topper was “Paper Roses,” which reached No. “I was thinking, In the streets! Storm the Bastille!”īy 1977, Bryant was better known for her anti-gay activism than her singing. “They thought that the gay-rights movement was having cocktail pity parties where everybody drinks and gets drunk and feels sorry for themselves because of their lot in life,” chuckles Hill. In the mid-1970s, despite traction made elsewhere in the nation, Houston’s gay community was divided into factions, including the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activists Alliance, and the Gay Political Coalition, among others-if they were organized at all. The captivating Hill, now 76 and still residing in Montrose, retains the same towering height and booming yet mellifluous Texas drawl that made him into a natural leader for Houston’s LGBT movement four decades ago. Hill is one of the last men left from those heady days-which suddenly once again feel familiar-when civil rights and anti-war protests drew thousands of hopeful Americans, eager to enact change from the streets. “And all of that changed in 24 hours because of Anita Bryant.” “It was such an enormously significant event, because up until that point, the words ‘gay community’ meant the part of town where the gay bars were,” explains Ray Hill.