The Very Front of the First March
It's Sunday evening, June 28, 2026, 19:29, and this Web page is finished. I've added some graphics and Pickles of the North's piece about two very different birthdays for two very different international figures. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Okay, this was our annual Christopher Street Liberation Day program. R. Paul talked about the first march in 1970, and about some things before and after it. That constituted most of the program, so I don't expect a lot more to be added to this page, but it might be worth coming back for another look. Hey, how many Web pages about a gay liberation event include a map of the rail lines of the Republic of Viet Nam?
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday July 8, 2026, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
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Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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This was our annual Christopher Street Liberation Day Show. I used to say that I'm one of the few gay or bisexual men my age who doesn't say that he was at the Stonewall Inn in those fateful wee hours of June 28th, 1969. But I think there are a lot fewer old farts claiming to have been at the Stonewall who weren't. My excuse for not having been at the Stonewall in the wee hours of that morning is that I was what I calculate to have been about 8,880 miles away at the Ho Nai Railhead in the Republic of Viet Nam. A larger map of the rail system of the Republic of Viet Nam in 1960 is available here.
But if I had been in New York that weekend I probably would not have been there anyway. I was not what's called a bar person.
I didn't have money when I was young and although the drinking age in New York was 18 at the time I was just not into hanging out in bars. I also couldn't have afforded to hang around in such places. I had spent the entire Summer of love
in 1967, just wandering around looking at everything and wishing I could meet some other young guy whom I'd like and could have sex with. I remember wandering through the crowds at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park while it was chock full of young people getting together. They seemed to be all heterosexual. I didn't see any gay couples in those crowds. Later in life one lesbian said that what I did was a sort of I Am A Camera
routine where I looked but did not interact.
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Ironically, it was in the Republic of Viet Nam that I developed gay friends and had an actual sex life with other G.I.s.
I'd first had sex another boy when I was about 9½ years old. He was interested in feeling me up and I didn't mind that. He and I had some sort of fumbling sex off and on for the next nine years or so. It was mostly off because we were both in Catholic school and things were restrictive. I was always having to deal with the fact that sex of any sort outside of marriage was a mortal sin and homosexual sex was a huge mortal sin. I was once threatened with bodily harm by a priest to whom I had just gone to confession. Another time when they'd brought the entire class to church to go to confession en masse I had been held in the confessional for quite a while and I'd been given a relatively huge penance for a 12 year old. It actually helped my image among my classmates that I had been given such a huge penance. I was asked, What did you do, rob a bank?
I didn't tell them.
So there I was in the Viet Nam war meeting and having sex with other gay men, and some straight guys, and I have to wonder if I'd have done as well if I'd not been drafted. Prior to then my sex life had mostly involved my right hand. I have not been much pursued for my beauty in my lifetime, although when I was young a lot of people liked the shape of my ass, and it felt as good as it looked.
At one point one of my friends showed a couple of us a newspaper from Australia that he's gotten from someone else who'd been there on R&R and it had a story about the Stonewall riots. The name Stonewall didn't register, only that there had been some sort of gay related riot. I said that when I got back to the world that I was going to get involved with something like that.
I'd read books about homosexuality at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library starting when I was maybe 11 years old. I knew where that book was in the library and I slipped it off the shelves when I could. It was written by a very closeted and self-hating gay man who used the pseudonym Richard Corey. But it talked about things that I'd been experiencing and while I didn't really understand much about what I was going through I knew it was something I'd better not reveal to people in general.
When I did get back to the world I still didn't know how to connect to other gay men. So I resumed my strategy of going to movie houses on 42nd St. and seeing if something could happen. Now and again a little something did happen.
And then I discovered gay newspapers on a newsstand on 42nd St. Right by the central branch of the New York Public Library. So I got up the courage to buy one, I could actually afford it, and I read about gay activism. I read about the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance. In library books I'd read about the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, which had both been a part of the homophile movement, but what I was reading about in November and December of 1969, was something that was being called the gay liberation movement. It sure did strike a chord. I wanted to fight for gay rights, as we called it then. Looking at the gay newspapers, and keeping my parents from seeing them, I felt that the Gay Activists Alliance, GAA, was probably more like something that I could relate to. The Gay Liberation Front, GLF, looked rather flaky and all over the place.
So on March 26, 1970, I went to my first GAA meeting. I liked what I saw, in more ways than one. But I was still doing my Man With A Camera act.
GAA was very excited about the upcoming Christopher Street liberation Day March. I actually didn't know what this Remember the Stonewall!
reference was yet.
So I got involved with demonstrations and zaps.
In the lead-up to Christopher Street Liberation Day GAA had a dance at NYU on June 22nd. It was the first event of its kind. We also had a zap and demo planned for June 24th, when we would have a sit-in at the New York State Republican Headquarters to demand that Governor Nelson Rockefeller support equal rights for gay people.
The people sitting in were bolstered by a bunch of us, maybe 10 or so, picketing outside on the sidewalk. The picketing, along with some leaflets letting people know what we were doing, informed people about the sit-in. The Republicans did not want to give us any publicity so they did nothing about the gay activists who were sitting in at their eighth floor office. We'd thought the entire action would last maybe half an hour. We'd thought that the people in the office would quickly call the police and our people would be arrested and taken away. But the Republicans decided to do nothing. I don't think they got much done in the office that day but they held to their refusal to call the cops. The result was that the picket line lasted for about eight hours!
I think that Sylvia Rivera may have been there. I know that a huge transvestite named Natasha was there because she slugged some jerk who'd tried to attack her while we were picketing. We shouted, loudly, all the time on the sidewalk and we were informed by a GAA member that they could really hear us on the eighth floor and the Republicans may have been more bothered by our chanting and shouting than they were by the people sitting in. That action actually changed my voice permanently. The Republicans eventually did call the cops because it was the end of the work day and the people sitting in would not leave. GAA got a bit of a reputation that day.
Sunday June 28th, was the day of the march. There was no permit. We were all determined to do the march with or without a permit. Craig Rodwell, who owned the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Christopher St. was the Chair of the Christopher Street Liberation Day Umbrella Committee. The police had been adamant that they were not going to issue a permit for a bunch of queers to march through the city streets celebrating what had been a humiliating event for the police department. And then, very early on the morning of June 28th, people began to gather on Christopher Street where the march was supposed to start. It was more than a handful of people. The police suddenly showed up at Craig Rodwell's apartment and handed him a permit for us to march up 6th Ave., aka the Avenue of the Americas.
As we assembled, a rumor went through the crowd that the police were going to attack us on the excuse that there would be drag queens in the march and cross dressing was illegal in New York at that time. This concerned some people a great deal. As a result the Gay Activists Alliance contingent was right by the front of the march, in back of the members of the committee that had put it together. We tended to be ready for a fight. But by the start time of the march, noon, the crowd stretched back from 6th Ave. to far down Christopher Street. But a lot of the crowd wasn't actually in the street.
The march commenced and the police did not attack. At that crowds started coming off the sidewalks and into the march proper. Thousands of us marched up 6th Ave. to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. The committee had not planned anything past that but some Gay Activists Alliance members had set up a Gay-In and we had all sorts of activities there, including a kissing contest that the Guinness Book of Records would not recognize because it was between two or three sets of men. Still, they broke the Guinness record for continuous kissing.
We talked on the air about the Gay Liberation Front party afterwards and the orgy in the back room.
Those were heady times.
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Pickles here with a word about two birthday celebrations that happened on June 13, and June 14.
First, a king's, Charles III, who gets two birthdays, his actual birthday, where he spent time promoting civic organizations, in this instance helping to provide aid to British families that are food insecure, and his official birthday, where there is a big national celebration called Trouping the Colour, which is the regimental colour, or flag. They've been doing this for the past 260 years. It involves 1,400 military members, 200 horses and 400 musicians marching down the Mall from Buckingham Palace to the Horse Guard's Parade, where the royal couple inspect the troops who then do marching maneuvers to music. The people in the stands are involved in civic organizations from across the UK.
Then everyone goes back to Buckingham Palace, including all the people that have lined the Mall, and there is a flyover by the Royal Air Force.
The next day, over in the USA, it was the birthday of a man who would be king, which was celebrated as if it were a national holiday by broadcasting on TV and online the take over of the White House by mixed martial arts cage fighting on the White House lawn. Circuses without the bread. Full of graft, it was a bloody bloated spectacle for big MAGA donors and chosen members of the military inside the gates and the peon MAGA supporters who got to watch it away from their betters on outdoor screens. The claim was that the fight, which involved at least one participant who was shortly due in court on a sexual assault allegation, was held in honor of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Also maybe flag day.
Flag Day is not a national holiday, but it is a day when whoever is president makes a proclamation, urging people, usually, to remember when the flag was first adopted by the Second Continental Congress in 1777. The idea behind it is democracy. Joe Biden's 2024, declaration talked about the never ending striving for a more perfect union. Democracy ain't democratic unless it's universal, right? Unfortunately, the part of his declaration about America having the greatest comeback story, at least in terms of solidly preserving that democracy, proved to be short lived.
Speaking of the current president, his 2026, proclamation for Flag Day is full of boasting, mixing church with state, and claims of what a defense of the flag his anti-immigration policy is: We also authorized the revocation of visas, residency, and naturalization for foreign nationals who desecrate the banner under which millions of American patriots have fought and died.
Wow!
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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