The Annual Reminder: LGBTQ Rights Before Stonewall

Every Fourth of July from nineteen sixty-five through nineteen sixty-nine, a small group of people walked in a picket line outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. They carried signs reading things like Homosexuals Ask for Equality Under Law and Sexual Preference is Irrelevant to Human Rights. They wore suits and dresses, because the organizers had decided that appearing respectable was a strategic necessity.

Frank Kameny, a Harvard-trained astronomer who had been fired from the Army Map Service in nineteen fifty-seven for being gay, and Barbara Gittings, founder of the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian civil rights organization in the United States, were leading voices in what became known as the Annual Reminder, a coalition effort organized together with Craig Rodwell and the East Coast Homophile Organizations. The name was the point: this is a reminder, once a year, that American citizens are being denied rights at the building where those rights were proclaimed.

It was the only annual LGBTQ civil rights demonstration in the United States before the Stonewall uprising of June nineteen sixty-nine. For four years, it attracted between thirty and forty people. The press largely ignored it.

Kameny and Gittings understood that they were building a public record, a documented history of organized peaceful protest at the symbolic center of American democracy, before the law changed, before the culture changed, before the world knew what would happen in New York in June of nineteen sixty-nine.

The final Annual Reminder was held on July fourth, nineteen sixty-nine, less than a week after Stonewall. The people who had been doing the quiet work in Philadelphia for four years were among those who understood what had changed.