Ellen Broidy

Last updated
Ellen Broidy
Nationality American
Alma mater
Occupation(s)Professor and research librarian
Known forGay rights activism

Ellen Broidy is an American gay rights activist. She was one of the proposers and a co-organizer of the first gay pride march.

Contents

Early life

Broidy grew up in Peter Cooper Village, a housing project in New York City. Broidy says she knew she was a lesbian "when [she] was eleven, or twelve or thirteen when [she] was in school". [1]

Broidy attended New York University, where she became president of the Student Homophile League that later became NYU Gay Students Liberation. [2] [1] [3] She has a PhD in U.S. history from University of California, Irvine. [4]

Activism

While living in Berkeley, CA, Broidy was a member of the Lesbian School Workers, a group born out of the Gay Teachers and School Workers in 1977. [5]

Christopher Street Liberation Day

On November 2, 1969, Broidy presented a resolution at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations on behalf of herself, Linda Rhodes, Craig Rodwell and Fred Sargeant, proposing hold an annual march on the last Saturday in June to be called Christopher Street Liberation Day, in honor of the 1969 Stonewall Riots which had taken place on Christopher Street. The motion passed unanimously. Beginning in early 1970, Broidy and the other proposers held regular meetings with members of many different gay rights organizations to organize the march, which was ultimately scheduled for June 28, 1970, the first anniversary of Stonewall. [6] [7]

The Christopher Street Liberation Day March became what is now referred to as Pride. Broidy has been critical of contemporary Pride parades as she feels they have taken on an overly corporate tone and are more of a party than a revolutionary march. [8] [9]

Lavender Menace

In May 1970, Broidy and other radical feminist lesbians dyed their t-shirts purple and printed the words 'Lavender Menace' on them, in reference to a phrase used by Betty Friedan to describe the perceived threat that association with lesbians brought to the women's rights movement. They wore their shirts to the second Conference to Unite Women in Manhattan, demanding the inclusion of lesbians in what became known as a turning point for the lesbian feminist movement. [3]

21st century

In 2019, Broidy expressed disappointment in the efficacy of the various rights movements of the 1960s and '70s, saying "The revolution did not happen." But she was more hopeful a year later, applauding the resurgence of intersectionality in Pride that had happened in the wake of the Black Lives Matter Movement:

"We always believed strongly in what we now call intersectionality, in that statement that none of us are free until all of us are free. Also, the whole revolutionary idea was that none of us wanted a piece of the pie — we literally wanted to blow up the whole bakery. We are in a whole new era now. Regrettably, it took death to bring it about, but there seems to be an energy in the streets. If people can keep this going, the revolution that failed to materialize in 1970 — in spite of the Black power movement, the anti-war movement, the LGBT movement, the women's movement — might just come into being now. I feel more optimistic than I have in a long time." [10]

Career

Broidy worked as a research librarian. [3] She also taught in the women's studies department at the University of California on both the Los Angeles and Irvine campuses. [4] [11]

Bibliography

Personal life

At the time of the organization of the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade, Broidy was dating co-organizer Linda Rhodes. [9]

Broidy currently lives in Santa Barbara, California with her spouse, Joan Ariel. [13]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stonewall riots</span> 1969 spontaneous uprising for gay & LGBT rights in New York City

The Stonewall riots, also known as the Stonewall uprising, Stonewall rebellion, or simply Stonewall, were a series of protests by members of the LGBTQ community in response to a police raid that began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Patrons of the Stonewall, other Village lesbian and gay bars, trans activists and unhoused LGBT individuals fought back when the police became violent. The riots are widely considered the watershed event that transformed the gay liberation movement and the twentieth-century fight for LGBT rights in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gay Liberation Front</span> Gay liberation groups in major US, UK, and Canadian cities during the 1960s-70s

Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was the name of several gay liberation groups, the first of which was formed in New York City in 1969, immediately after the Stonewall riots. Similar organizations also formed in the UK, Australia and Canada. The GLF provided a voice for the newly-out and newly radicalized gay community, and a meeting place for a number of activists who would go on to form other groups, such as the Gay Activists Alliance, Gay Youth New York, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in the US. In the UK and Canada, activists also developed a platform for gay liberation and demonstrated for gay rights. Activists from both the US and UK groups would later go on to found or be active in groups including ACT UP, the Lesbian Avengers, Queer Nation, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and Stonewall.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gay liberation</span> Social and political movement in the 1960s and 70s

The gay liberation movement was a social and political movement of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s in the Western world, that urged lesbians and gay men to engage in radical direct action, and to counter societal shame with gay pride. In the feminist spirit of the personal being political, the most basic form of activism was an emphasis on coming out to family, friends, and colleagues, and living life as an openly lesbian or gay person.

The Lavender Menace was an informal group of lesbian radical feminists formed to protest the exclusion of lesbians and their issues from the feminist movement at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City on May 1, 1970. Members included Karla Jay, Martha Shelley, Rita Mae Brown, Lois Hart, Barbara Love, Ellen Shumsky, Artemis March, Cynthia Funk, Linda Rhodes, Arlene Kushner, Ellen Broidy, and Michela Griffo, and were mostly members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the National Organization for Women (NOW).

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The NYC Pride March is an annual event celebrating the LGBTQ community in New York City. The largest pride parade in North America and among the largest pride events in the world, the NYC Pride March attracts tens of thousands of participants and millions of sidewalk spectators each June. The parade route through Lower Manhattan traverses south on Fifth Avenue, through Greenwich Village, passing the Stonewall National Monument, site of the June 1969 riots that launched the modern movement for LGBTQ+ rights.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Craig Rodwell</span> American gay rights activist

Craig L. Rodwell was an American gay rights activist known for founding the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on November 24, 1967 - the first bookstore devoted to gay and lesbian authors - and as the prime mover for the creation of the New York City gay pride demonstration. Rodwell, who was already an activist when he participated in the 1969 Stonewall uprising, is considered by some to be the leading gay rights activist in the early, pre-Stonewall, homophile movement of the 1960s.

The Annual Reminders were a series of early pickets organized by gay organizations, held yearly from 1965 through 1969. The Reminder took place each July 4 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia and were among the earliest LGBT demonstrations in the United States. The events were designed to inform and remind the American people that gay people did not enjoy basic civil rights protections.

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East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) was established in January 1962 in Philadelphia, to facilitate cooperation between homophile organizations and outside administrations. Its formative membership included the Mattachine Society chapters in New York and Washington D.C., the Daughters of Bilitis chapter in New York, and the Janus Society in Philadelphia, which met monthly. Philadelphia was chosen to be the host city, due to its central location among all involved parties.

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References

  1. 1 2 Shockey, Gwen (2018-12-03). "ELLEN BROIDY". Gwen Shockey. Archived from the original on 2019-11-14. Retrieved 2020-06-29.
  2. ↑ Bernadicou, August. "Come Out!". The LGBTQ History Project.
  3. 1 2 3 Kellaway, Kate (2019-04-06). "Stonewall at 50: stories from a gay rights revolution". The Guardian. Retrieved 2020-06-29.
  4. 1 2 Pizzuti, Matthew (2011-06-15). "Does Pride still matter?". OUT FRONT. Retrieved 2020-06-29.
  5. ↑ Smith-Silverman, Sara (2020). ""Gay Teachers Fight Back!": Rank-and-File Gay and Lesbian Teachers' Activism against the Briggs Initiative, 1977–1978". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 29 (1): 79–107. doi:10.7560/JHS29104. ISSN   1535-3605. S2CID   213200917.
  6. ↑ Pitman, Gayle E. (2019). "Object #41: Christopher Street Liberation Day March Advertisement". The Stonewall riots : coming out in the streets. Abrams Books. ISBN   978-1-4197-3720-6. OCLC   1145484339.
  7. ↑ Robertson, Julia Diana (2020-02-16). "Stonewall Vet Fred Sargeant on Ellen Broidy: "This is one of those important unknown stories."". The Velvet Chronicle. Retrieved 2020-06-29.
  8. ↑ Geoghegan, Tom (2019-06-17). "A riot that changed millions of lives". BBC News. Retrieved 2020-06-29.
  9. 1 2 Bendix, Trish (2019-06-17). "The Two Radical Lesbians and Two Gay Men Who Started Pride". AfterEllen. Retrieved 2020-06-29.
  10. ↑ Fitzsimons, Tim (2020-06-26). "On Pride's 50th anniversary, the 'revolution' may have finally arrived". NBC News. Retrieved 2020-06-29.
  11. ↑ Klein, Dianne (1988-04-18). "Lesbianism: Affirmation of Women". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2020-06-29.
  12. ↑ Reddy, Maureen T. (1997). McNaron, Toni A. H.; Zimmerman, Bonnie (eds.). "Ins and Outs". The Women's Review of Books. 14 (9): 17. doi:10.2307/4022626. ISSN   0738-1433. JSTOR   4022626.
  13. ↑ Smith, Delaney (2019-08-21). "Renowned Activists Kick Off Pride Week". The Santa Barbara Independent. Retrieved 2020-06-29.
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