Summary Overview

After the Gay Rights movement geared up in the late 1960s, members began calling for a national event to consolidate the more localized movements growing up throughout the nation and especially on the two coasts. Planning for a march on Washington saw various starts and stops throughout the 1970s. Finally, the assassination of Harvey Milk, who was a strong proponent of a national march, galvanized the community. The specifics of the march were planned at national conferences in Philadelphia and Houston earlier in 1979. Joe Smenyak drafted the demands that would eventually make up this document; the delegates of the conference in Philadelphia adjusted and ratified these demands. With its official platform finalized, about 100,000 people participated in the march on October 14, 1979. Calls for inclusion of advocacy for transgender individuals were rebuffed at the preliminary conferences, and there is, therefore, no mention of transgenders or transgenderism in the five demands. The organizers did, however, strive for gender equality and minority representation, which marked a positive step forward in these early days of the Gay Rights movement. The march is credited with bringing this movement to the national stage.

Defining Moment

Demonstrations following police raids at the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles 1967 and Stonewall Inn in New York 1969 commenced the modern American Gay Rights movement. As the movement grew quickly across the country, calls began for a march on Washington modeled after the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Many pointed to this prior march on behalf of Civil Rights as largely responsible for the passing of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 and posited that a similar march on behalf of Gay Rights could see similar results.

A string of National Conferences attempted to plan a march; however, the first attempts failed. In November 1973, Jeff Graubart organized the National Gay Mobilizing Committee in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois to plan for a March on Washington. However, many local groups resisted calls for a march, and plans were put on hold. These plans were not taken up in a serious way until five years later. A conference in Minneapolis was planned for November 1978; however, this conference never even met as internal conflicts let to the dissolution of the steering committee in October of that same year. Many individuals and groups feared backlash that such a march could bring upon their communities. Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California’s history and a prominent voice for the community, was one of those convinced that a march would benefit the movement, and he headed up the planning after the failure of the Minneapolis steering committee. When Milk was assassinated on November 27, 1978, other members of the movement took up the cause to ensure that Milk’s dream of a national march on behalf of Gay Rights came to fruition.

Groups from San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia planned a conference in Philadelphia in early 1979, inviting one male and one female member from known gay and lesbian groups across the nation. This conference saw success where previous ones had failed. Over three hundred delegates agreed that a march should be held and determined that it should be held before the close of that year, the ten-year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City. The conference also tackled logistical and organizational issues. Delegates made the key decision of having the organizational structure include at least fifty percent women and twenty percent people of color. The early Gay Rights movement had been centered around white men, and this decision was an important step towards the more inclusive LGBTQ movement seen today. Finally, the Philadelphia conference adjusted and ratified the five demands drafted by Joe Smenyak as the platform of the march. In July of that same year, over two hundred delegates met in Houston. The organizers won over groups that had remained skeptical and finalized the plans for the march.

On October 14, 1979, approximately 100,000 people from across the nation descended on the nation’s capital and marched through the streets of the National Mall. The Salsa Soul Sisters, the oldest lesbians of color group in the country, led the march. The march ended between the Washington Monument and its reflecting pool, where Ray Hill and Robin Tyler emceed for a variety of speakers and musicians. National Public Radio broadcast the event in real time, and organizers later released a recording on vinyl. After October 14th, the organizers continued to hold events that included focus groups and a “Constituent Lobbying Day.” The march was hailed as a success and to many represented the transformation from local Gay Rights movements to a unified national movement.

Unfortunately, the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s and the negative stigma AIDS brought upon the gay community hindered the achievement of the goals set out in this document. However, this does not mean that the event did not achieve success. The march pushed the issues important to the gay and lesbian communities into the national spotlight and marked a step towards a more inclusive LGBTQ movement. The fight for equality does not come quickly or easily; however, the march did inspire more action on behalf of the LGBTQ community, including at the national level. Several subsequent Marches on Washington on behalf of LGBTQ rights followed this event’s lead. These include the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1987, the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in 1993, the Millennium March on Washington in 2000, the National Equality March in 2009, and the National Pride March in 2017.

Author Biography

Joe Smenyak first drafted the five demands that make up this document, and they were then amended and ratified by delegates of the 1979 National Conference for the March on Washington in Philadelphia. Smenyak was a Gay Rights activist from New York City and member of the Chelsea Gay Alliance. He played a prominent role in this National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, as well as the protests from the New York gay community over the filming 1980 movie Cruising. Together with a pair of organizations based in New York and Philadelphia, the National Outreach Committee of San Francisco sent out invitations to known gay and lesbian groups across the nation to send one male and one female delegate to the National Conference in Philadelphia. Over three-hundred delegates attended this conference from February 23 to 25, 1979. The delegates had the opportunity to adjust Smenyak’s original draft before ratifying it as their official demands. One group particularly engaged in this process was the women’s caucus. For example, the original wording of the fifth demand, which concerns gay youth, included the clause, “including revision of the age-of-consent laws.” Delegates from the women’s caucus successfully argued on behalf of the value of these laws and reworded the entire demand to the form that now appears in the document. In addition to finalizing the demands, the delegates at the conference made the official decision to march, as well as determining when to do so and how to organize such a march.

Document Analysis

Joe Smenyak wrote the first draft of these demands, and the delegates at the Philadelphia convention adjusted and ratified them. Their goals were to keep the number of demands to a minimum and to keep the demands themselves focused on Gay Rights alone. These goals resulted in the brevity and conciseness of this document. Despite this brevity, many of the authors’ demands have yet to be realized. Progress has been made regarding some of the demands, but there remains much work to be done.

The first demand is the most ambitious. It reads, “Pass a comprehensive lesbian/gay rights bill in Congress.” As of the writing of this in December 2017, such a bill has not been passed nor has one come close to passing. It is not hard to discern why the authors would favor such a bill. A law passed through the U.S. Congress and signed by the President would be better able to protect gay and lesbian individuals across the country and prove longer lasting than other forms of legislative change. However, in order to pass such a bill into law, there would need to be a majority of support in both houses of Congress and in the White House, and Gay Rights, unfortunately, have taken a while to gain traction in federal politics. It has taken decades since the march until this country reached a point where the majority of politicians in the Democratic party have voiced support of the LGBTQ agenda; however, the vast majority of Republican politicians remain opposed to LGBTQ rights, and support in the Democratic party is not ubiquitous. The one stretch when the Democratic party voiced open support for the LGBTQ agenda and controlled both houses of Congress and the White House was from 2008 to 2010. During this time, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, an important law that extended federal hate crime law to include assaults against individuals for their sexual orientation or gender identity, was passed; however, no bill as comprehensive as the authors of these demands envisioned was taken up.

The second demand reads, “Issue a presidential executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in the Federal Government, the military and federally-contracted private employment.” The authors understood that the President has jurisdiction over the areas named and would be able to end discrimination with an executive order as opposed to a law which would have to pass through Congress. Although this demand requiring only the signature of the President was less ambitious than the first, it nonetheless took decades to fulfill. On November 30, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed a Department of Defense directive which came to be known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Although this directive allowed closeted homosexuals to serve in the military, it expressly prohibited openly gay and lesbian individuals from serving. On May 28, 1998, President Clinton signed an executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in the federal civilian work force. On September 20, 2011, President Barack Obama repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” finally allowing openly gay individuals to serve in the military. On July 21, 2014, President Obama signed an executive order that finally completed the fulfillment of all of the provisions in this thirty-five-year-old demand. The order extended protections in the federal civilian workforce to include prevention of discrimination based on gender identity, and it banned discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in any hiring by federal contractors. However, in March of 2017, President Donald Trump rescinded a different executive order which had helped to ensure federal contractors were complying with President Obama’s order. While President Trump has not yet rescinded any of the executive orders or directives above, this action indicated the potential that he or future presidents could do so as well as the vulnerability of executive action in general.

The final three demands, similar to the first, have yet to be fulfilled. Whereas comprehensive legislative action at the federal level could theoretically address the issues in these demands as the authors envisioned; lack of federal action has led to these issues being addressed at the state level, with mixed results. The problem inherent in the third demand is that anti-lesbian/gay laws continue to be passed in new forms at the state level, often as pushback against progress made at the federal level. For example, after Obergefell v. Hodges ruled that gay and lesbian couples had the right to marry nationwide, various states with Republican legislatures began introducing laws, often under the pretext of “religious liberty,” that attempted to curtail LGBTQ rights in one way or another. Likewise, the fourth demand, “End discrimination in lesbian-mother and gay-father custody cases,” continues to remain unrealized. Recent studies have shown that after the end of heterosexual marriages discrimination against parents who are openly gay or lesbian persists widely. Finally, with no comprehensive action at the federal level, the fifth demand aiming to protect gay and lesbian youth is similarly unfulfilled. For example, although nine states have banned conversion therapy for minors, these practices remain legal in the remainder of the United States despite having been proven harmful.

Essential Themes

The theme of equality underlies the entire document. Although the word itself does not appear in the document, it is the ultimate goal of all five of the demands. The first demand differs from the other four in that it calls for positive affirmation of Gay Rights as opposed to the prohibition of discrimination. This first demand calls for a “comprehensive lesbian/gay rights bill” which would act, similar to the Bill of Rights, as a declaration of due rights, in this instance on behalf of the equality of individuals in the gay and lesbian communities. The following four demands call for an end to discrimination of one form or another. In fact, three of the four laws include the noun “discrimination” or the verb “discriminate.” These, too, strive for equality, although they do so in a way that is different from the first demand. Rather than calling for a positive affirmation of equality on behalf of gay and lesbian individuals, these four demands attempt to curtail existing inequality in its various forms.

Bibliography and Additional Reading