I was married at the time of Stonewall, but I remember watching the coverage on the national TV news and thinking I should have been there. She could not bring herself to march in Pride Parades. She remembered that night only with horror and fear.
She was uncomfortable with what she saw as the flippant use by the gay community of Stonewall as a rallying point. I used to own a book about the riots which contained a picture of her (yes, women were involved in the riots).
For it I had a T-shirt that proclaimed in black letters nearly covering the front, “Nobody knows I’m gay!” In 1992 I had a T-shirt with the logo of the Boston Aids Hospice as I marched with the other volunteers from the Hospice (it closed in 1997, after I had moved to Dallas).Ī member of the AA group I most often attended in 1991 had been present at the Stonewall Riots in 1969. My first Gay Pride Parade was the 20th in Boston-1990. Yesterday I wore an old lavender T-shirt, shapeless and faded―like me―from the Boston Gay Pride Parade in 1991. I chose Gunn’s poetry because I found his book at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and it was the first collection I owned by a poet I knew was gay. I wrote the music as part of the work for my MA degree in music composition at what was then California State University at Los Angeles. Somewhere in a box or pile or a file or a stack is a musical creation of mine (or not―it most likely met the same fate as most of my compositions), a small song cycle, a setting of three poems by Thom Gunn from his 1966 collection, Positives.