12 JUNE 20-26, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | going to get yelled at or that we’re going to get fi red,” Hanzon says. “Because all of that was part of our experience.” And such experiences are why Pride came about. Police were cracking down on gay bars, arresting patrons for lewd behavior, as any same-sex display of affection was illegal, even holding hands. The Stonewall Uprising, which lasted for fi ve days after Stormé DeLarverie fought back against a police offi cer on June 28, 1969, was a catalyst for the nationwide gay liberation move- ment. Members of the LGBTQ+ community across the country became activists, pledging to forge a future in which discrimination against sexual orientation would be illegal and same-sex relationships and all gender identities could openly exist. The Birth of Pride in Denver “For many years, same-sex relationships were highly policed and illegal. Things like same-sex dancing or other signs of affection could often get you arrested,” says Rex Fuller, CEO of the Center on Colfax, which has fully run Denver’s annual Pride festival since 1990 and whose roots go back to the very fi rst. Colorado was the third state to decrimi- nalize sodomy — in 1971 — “but that really didn’t stop harassment of gay folks in gay spaces,” Fuller notes. “Gay bars were very underground. There were many arrests made for lewd and lascivious behavior.” In response, and inspired by Stonewall, activists Jerry Gerash, Lynn Tamlan, Mary Sassatelli, Terry Mangan and Jane Dundee formed the Gay Coalition of Denver in 1972. On October 23, 1973, it staged a peaceful protest against sexual-orientation discrimi- nation before Denver City Council with an event that’s now known as Denver’s Stone- wall. “About 300 activists all showed up to testify and kept council in session until about one in the morning,” Fuller says. “This led the council to change several laws that started to help curtail that practice, and that was really considered a big victory. There was also a lawsuit involved, in which the Gay Coalition won a judgment that created the fi rst liaison to the gay community from the Denver Police Department.” Four discriminatory laws were repealed after the protest, but the GCD was just get- ting started. On the heels of its success, and seeing other Pride events popping up around the country to commemorate Stonewall, the group organized Denver’s fi rst Pride on June 29, 1974. It was billed as the “Gay-In,” and about fi fty people attended, each receiving bal- loons emblazoned with “Gay Pride,” according to LGBTQ Denver, a new book by one of GCD’s fi rst volunteers, Phil Nash. The next year, the Gay-In crowd reached an estimated 500. Nash’s new book is an excellent and com- prehensive history of the LGBTQ+ commu- nity in the city, and he’ll be selling and signing copies at the Center’s booth at PrideFest. He’s witnessed much of that history, too, having moved to Denver in 1976 with his now-husband. While perusing the LGBTQ publication Out Front, he read about the GCD’s efforts to form a committee called Unity to create a community center, and decided to get involved. He joined the com- mittee as a volunteer in May 1976. By Gay Pride Week that year, Unity com- prised 39 groups, including the still-active Imperial Court of the Rocky Mountain Em- pire, and in September 1976, Unity mem- bers met to form the Center. After raising funds, GCD transformed into the Center in 1977. “I applied for the fi rst paid position at the organiza- tion,” Nash recalls, “and I was hired in May of 1977.” With that, Nash became the fi rst director of the Center, which created coming-out programs and support groups for the LGBTQ+ community, providing more oppor- tunities to meet like- minded people outside of gay bars and clubs. And Pride continued each year. Nash’s first Denver Pride was in 1976, when drag queen and activist Christi Layne got the fi rst parade per- mit for the event. This year, Layne will be the parade’s grand marshal. “The parade lined up in Cheesman Park and, with the permit in hand, marched down to Civic Center Park, where there was a drag show, and I’m sure there was beer,” Nash says. The next year “was kind of a turning point,” Nash recalls. “The Pride celebration got much bigger because just before the celebration was the success of Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign in Dade County, Florida.” The campaign, which overturned an ordinance that protected people from dis- crimination based on sexual orientation, only lit a fi re under the gay rights movement it sought to repress. “That really brought a lot of people out of the closet, because they thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, the threats are real; they can take away our rights,’” Nash adds. “The growth in Pride over the years has alternated between when bad things happen, people come out, and then when happy things happen, people come out,” he explains. That includes 1993, when Amendment 2 passed, and “there was a huge surge in par- ticipation of Pride,” according to Nash. The voter-approved amendment to the Colorado Constitution, which would have obliterated discrimination protections for members of the LGBTQ community, was immediately appealed; in 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional. That year at Pride, there was a multitude of “people coming out to celebrate, because they were so happy that it never went into effect and that it essentially stopped this effort — not just in Colorado, but every other state that was keeping their eye on Colorado to see if it worked,” Nash says. A Dark Decade Pride took on a new meaning in the ‘80s, with the dawning of the AIDS era. It was a dark time. “The fi rst inklings of something amiss, that something was happening that was almost too weird to explain, was in 1981, when the Centers for Disease Control said that they had uncovered a cohort of gay men who had been previously healthy, got sick with a rare kind of disease and died fairly quickly from it,” Nash recalls. Nash was the fi rst person to report on the issue in Colorado, in a Westword story in July 1981, and he helped found, and chaired, the Colorado AIDS Project. “I would compare it to a verifi ed landing of aliens from another planet,” he refl ects. “It was just too weird to think gay men were getting this sudden disease and dying quickly from it.” He compares the community’s reaction to that of COVID — people tried to rationalize it in strange ways. Was it from a bad batch of poppers? Were the religious nut-jobs right, and this was a reckoning? Was it even real? “Those of us who were trying to send out a warning were considered to be alarmists,” Nash remembers. And the fear among the community climbed to new heights as more people died. It was hard to think “that all of a sudden, everything that they had worked for and come out for and built community for in the previous ten years was going to be completely shattered and shut down,” Nash says. As he wrote LGBTQ Denver, Nash re- fl ects that he felt a “sort of survivor’s guilt.” Many people in the photographs died during that time. “There were so many funerals, I couldn’t take off work for all of them,” he says. “The Pride movement was trying to throw off this idea of living in shame,” Fuller says. “It was largely a movement of celebra- tion of who you are. I think that when AIDS became an issue, there was a lot more activ- ism around trying to get funding to research AIDS, trying to address this crisis. And there were a lot of people who had died, who were once leading activists that were no longer there. … It really took a devastating toll.” By the end of the decade, the Pride event “had really started to go into decline,” Fuller says. “It was the twentieth anniversary of Stonewall in 1989, and it was a very small event. There were maybe 100 people there.” The next year, the Center took on orga- nizing Pride in its entirety. “It grew from a parade into a festival, and then a two-day festival,” Fuller says. “And it just kept grow- ing for the last thirty-some years, and now it’s the biggest Pride event in the Rocky Mountain region.” Culture continued from page 10 CHRISTI L AYNE A map for the fi rst Pride parade. The fi rst Pride parade marched from Cheesman Park to Civic Center. continued on page 14 CHRISTI L AYNE
