Box Turtle Bulletin

Today In History, 1965-1969: “Annual Reminder” Pickets at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall

The first Annual Reminder, 1965.

The Fourth of July commemorates the day in which a group of second class citizens decided that it was finally time to not only declare their independence, but also their dignity for having been created equal and endowed with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, not all Americans gained their freedom on that date in 1776. Instead, that marked the starting point for a long struggle, one which nearly destroyed the union almost a century later, and one which continues today. The 1960s will be long remembered as an important era in that struggle as racial barriers began to fall across the nation. But barriers against gay people held fast. In 1965, gay people were prohibited from holding jobs with the federal government by an Executive Order, homosexuality was illegal in every state in the country except Illinois, and gay people were regarded as mentally ill by the American Psychiatric Association.

The first Annual Reminder, 1965. Photo by Kay Lahusen. (Source)

To protest those conditions, LGBT activists, under the collective name of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO), met at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on July 4, 1965 for a demonstration to remind their fellow Americans that LGBT people did not enjoy some of the most fundamental of civil rights. Forty-four activists, including Frank Kameny (May 21), Barbara Gittings (Jul 31), Kay Tobin Lahusen (Jan 5) and Craig Rodwell, picketed in front of Philadelphia’s potent symbol of freedom, carrying signs reading “15 million homosexual Americans as for equality, opportunity, dignity,” and “homosexuals should be judged as individuals.”

Craig Rodwell, a member of New York’s Mattachine Society and owner of the first gay bookstore in the United States (Nov 24), is credited for coming up with the idea. He envisioned the protest morphing into a kind of a gay holiday. “We can call it the Annual Reminder — the reminder that a group of Americans still don’t have their basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he suggested. Kameny, Gittings and the others eagerly agreed. Kay Lahusen described the picketing in the Daughters of Bilitis’ magazine The Ladder:

Barbara Gittings and Randy Wicker picketing at Independence Hall on July 4, 1966. Photo by Kay Lahusen. (Source)

“We are not,” asserted one picketer, “wild-eyed, dungareed  radicals throwing ourselves beneath the wheels of police vans that have come to cart us away from a sit-in at the Blue Room  of the White House.” The firm rules followed by homosexual picketers are, in part: “Picketing is not an occasion for an assertion of personality, individuality, ego, rebellion, generalized non-conformity or anti-conformity. …Therefore the individual picketer serves merely to carry a sign or to increase the size of the demonstration; not he, but his sign should attract notice. …Dress and appearance will be conservative and conventional.” And so they have been. Women wear dresses; men wear business suits, white shirts and ties.

…”I didn’t know you people had problems like these.” exclaimed one man after reading the leaflet. His response gratified the key expectation of every picketer. A front-page mention of the demonstration in the Philadelphia Inquirer and coverage on local CBS-TV possibly multiplied his comment a thousandfold. Picketing had drawn public attention to long-hidden injustices.

This dignified protest, which startled many a citizen into fresh thought about the meaning of Independence Day, might well have been applauded by our Founding Fathers, who were intent on making America safe for the differences.

Peter Ogren (probably) and Craig Rodwell, marching at the Annual Reminder march in 1968. Photo by Randy Wicker. (Source)

East Coast activists had already staged several pickets elsewhere that year before descending on the City of Brotherly Love. Actually, the first was in 1964, when a small band of activists protested in front of a New York City army induction center (Sep 19). That action was followed in 1965 with pickets in front of the White House (Apr 17,  May 29), the Civil Service Commission (Jun 26), and the United Nations in New York City (Apr 18). But Philadelphia’s protests would be an annual event, taking place every July 4th in front of  Independence Hall for the next four years.

But with 1969’s Stonewall rebellion, the gay community gained an independence day all of its own. The “Annual Reminder” for 1969, occurring just a few days after that declaration of freedom on Christopher Street in New York, would be the last, a victim by the rising tensions between the old ways of doing things and the rebelliousness of the younger generation. For previous marches, Kamany insisted on a strict, conservative dress code — suits and ties for men, dresses for women — and a strictly businesslike behavior among the marchers.

Two women holding hands during the fifth Annual Reminder, 1969. Photo by Nancy Tucker. (Source)

But during the 1969 march, Kamany and Rodwell got into an argument when Kameny separated two lesbian picketers after they began to hold hands. Rodwell was no longer interested catering to Kameny’s insistence on appearing “respectable.” Rodwell grabbed his partner’s hand and continued marching, as did several other New York-based picketers. That incident led the New York activists, energized by the Stonewall rebellion six days earlier, to regard the Annual Reminder as an increasingly irrelevant relic. As New York Mattachine Society president Dick Leitsch explained in a letter to Barbara Gittings:

We cannot support a demonstration that pretends to reflect the feelings of all homosexuals while excluding many homosexuals from participating in the demonstration. Since our membership covers all the spectrum of gay life, we encompass drag queens, leather queens, and many, many groovy men and women whose wardrobe consists of bell-bottoms, vests, and miles of gilt chains. Rather than risk the embarrassment and insult of having some of our people rejected (as did happen a few years ago), we choose neither to participate nor support the demonstrations and to make our reasons plain in our publication…

The Annual Reminder held out such promise at its inception, and I am sorry to see it become the personal property of a few who would set themselves up as an “establishment,” no less bigoted and exclusionary than the real “Establishment” we’re supposedly fighting.

During the train ride back home, Rodwell began tossing around the idea of holding an annual march in in New York where they could do things their way — without a dress code. As Rodwell described it, their march wouldn’t be “a silent plea for rights but as an overt demand for them.” He also came up with the idea of calling it the Christopher Street Liberation Day, to take place on June 28 to commemorate the first anniversary of the rebellion. As it happens, along with the many bell-bottomed, vested, leathered, dragged, and shirtless marchers who walked from Christopher Street to Central Park on June 28, 1970, was Frank Kameny, wearing tan slacks and a polo shirt and holding a sign reading “Gay is Good” while leading a contingent of members of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C.

We’ve been celebrating Pride as a commemoration of our declaration of independence ever since. But the Annual Reminder hasn’t been forgotten. In 2005, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission erected the first historical marker to recognize and celebrate LGBT history in commemoration of those early protests in front of Independence Hall.

You can see a short film shot by gay rights activist Lilli Vincenz in 1968 of the Annual Reminder march for that year here.

[Additional sources: “Kay Tobin” (Kay Lahusen). “Picketing: the impact and the issues.”  The Ladder 9, no. 12 (September 1965): 4-8.

Simon Hall. “The American gay rights movement and patriotic protest.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, no. 3 (September 2010): 536-562.

Michael G. Long (ed.) Gay is Good: The Life and Letters of Gay Rights Pioneer Franklin Kameny (Syracuse, New York; Syracuse University Press: 2014): 93, 201. ]