Pride said gay cops aren’t welcome. Then came the backlash

It was two weeks before the start of Pride month, and the organisation that runs New York’s Pride march was fighting about cops. The leadership had just announced that officers could no longer take part in the march, including a contingent of LGBTQ officers that has marched in uniform since 1996.

The officers were angry. The mayor called it a mistake.

At a tense Zoom meeting on May 20, members of the organisation, Heritage of Pride, tore into their leadership, moving to overturn the ban and unseat the executive board. Some called the ban no different from the discrimination they all faced.

Passions flared on both sides of the issue, often dividing along racial or class lines. After two hours of debate, members voted to overrule their own board, allowing cops to march.

Minutes later, in a closed session, the board unanimously rejected the members’ vote. Members learned about this through a late-night email.

“This is the worst that I’ve ever seen it,” said Maria Colón, a longtime Heritage of Pride member and former board member. “We’re at a pivotal moment where we either come back, or people will look elsewhere.”

For Heritage of Pride, which just two years ago staged the biggest march in its history, with 5 million spectators attending, it was a stunning turn. How did a celebration that delights millions of people create so much rancor and mistrust?

Stories about Pride — and there must be millions of them — often go something like this. Michael Donahue was 25 and living with his parents in the Rockaway section of Queens in 2005, not fully open about his sexual orientation. When a friend dragged him into Manhattan for Pride, an hour-plus subway ride, he expected brunch and a little parade.

“It was like the whole world opened up to me,” he said. “It was a whole other experience of love and light and excitement.” On a rooftop at the end of the day, after some drinks, he called home and told his father that he was gay. It was an awkward moment. After they hung up, his father called back and said: “Have fun today. I love you. I’ll always love you. Let’s talk more when you get home.”

Such experiences are the heart of Pride, said André Thomas, a co-chair of the organisation. “It’s always someone’s first Pride,” Thomas said.

Francesca Barjon, 25, who is Black and bisexual, did not see herself in these stories. At the Pride march in 2018, her second, she recalled seeing all the corporate floats and the stores with rainbow flags and thinking, This doesn’t feel real.

“We didn’t have job protections,” she said. “Black trans women were being murdered. So I could see the Heritage of Pride parade as this thing for white gay men, muscly, in glitter. My first Pride march was so exciting, but what are we actually doing?”

Barjon found she was not alone. She heard about a group called the Reclaim Pride Coalition, which had formed a few years earlier in frustration over what the Pride march — originally a protest against police harassment — had become.

Many of Reclaim’s organisers were veterans of ACT UP or other protest groups, reinvigorated after the election of Donald Trump. They initially tried to work within Heritage of Pride, pushing to reduce the police presence at the march and to get rid of corporate floats.

“It was clear we were just hitting our heads against a wall,” said Ann Northrop, one of Reclaim’s organisers and a longtime activist. When Reclaim announced its own march in 2019, for the morning hours before the official Heritage of Pride march, no one knew what to expect.

At 9:30 that Sunday morning, the streets of Greenwich Village filled with people, some carrying signs declaring “Stonewall Was a Riot!” With almost no budget, and no corporate sponsors or floats — no parade permit, either — tens of thousands of people marched north to Central Park in what was called the first Queer Liberation March.

Later that day, Heritage of Pride mounted the biggest march in its history, with live TV coverage and a closing performance by Madonna. It was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and close to 4 million visitors flocked to New York in a show of LGBTQ power and visibility that would have been unimaginable to the demonstrators in that first march 49 years earlier, when it was still illegal for two men to dance together in New York.

But behind this success, there was turmoil within Heritage of Pride, a mostly volunteer organisation with a volunteer board elected by members and a small paid staff.

“People were afraid to speak up because there were smear campaigns,” said Evan Brewer, who served in several leadership roles. “And we were hearing cries from the community that we were becoming too corporate. We were moving too far away from the grassroots.”

A slate of new board members complained about a lack of financial transparency and support for members of colour. As the arguments grew, the two co-chairs resigned. When newcomers tried to make changes, said Vincent Maniscalco, who became the director of governance and briefly a co-chair, “we met resistance at every turn.”

He left the organisation last year, along with a handful of other board members.

“We’d joke about being insurgents, but we were reformers,” said Maria Tamburro, who served several terms on the board before being expelled last year amid disputes with other members.

Divisions within the Pride community are as old as the march itself. The first Christopher Street Liberation Day march in 1970 was a break from its precursor, the Annual Reminder picket, where women had to wear dresses and marchers could not kiss or hold hands. “It wasn’t in touch with the revolutionary spirit of the ’60s,” said Ellen Broidy, one of the Christopher Street Liberation Day organisers. The energy unleashed at Stonewall had changed everything. “Gay liberation,” she said, “meant revolution.”

In 2019, Broidy, who left New York in 1971, returned as a marshal at Pride. She was taken aback by what the march had become.

“I have two contradictory feelings,” she said. “One is, yeah, it’s wonderful that there are literally millions of people in the street and on the street watching this. I never thought I would be in a march with Citibank and the NYPD marching behind me.

“On the other side of that coin, it’s lost some of its revolutionary fervour. It’s a party now. When we started, we had no floats, no television coverage. We had a bunch of people taking to the streets to say, ‘My life means something.’ And when I look at the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, where they don’t have floats, and there’s tons of handmade signs and people in the street saying, ‘Look at me, this is what I need, this is what I want,’ I mourn the loss of that, and what Pride has become. I mourn the loss of the revolutionary fervour. The significance of the event gets lost in the glitter.”

Within Heritage of Pride, a contentious issue became the police’s role in the event. Groups in other cities, including No Justice, No Pride in Washington, were pushing to remove the police or corporations from their marches. In 2017, members of Hoods4Justice and other groups sat down in front of police contingents at New York’s Pride march, halting the parade until 12 demonstrators were arrested. Some in the crowd booed the protesters.

In Phoenix, a group called Trans Queer Pueblo disrupted the city’s Pride march to protest the participation of law enforcement agencies and banks that work with immigration detention centres. Other marchers yelled at them to “go home,” a racially loaded barb for protesters seeking immigrants’ rights.

Then came COVID, which forced Heritage of Pride to move all of its 2020 events online, without the catharsis of a big, boisterous march. A year after its biggest success, Pride was quiet.

For Reclaim Pride, many of whose members were marching in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations last June, it was an opportunity.

“All of the folks under 50, and a few of us over 50, were immediately out in the streets every day,” said Jay W. Walker, a Reclaim organiser. “We said, ‘We’ve got to have the Queer Liberation March be out on the streets, and it’s got to be for Black lives.’”

A Brooklyn march for Black trans lives drew around 15,000 demonstrators, most dressed in all white, and drew worldwide attention on social media.

“This might be the start of a new movement,” said Devin-Norelle, a transgender activist, writer and model. “So many people showed up and protected us. People are speaking up about the discrimination trans people face.”

Two weeks later, on Pride Sunday, Reclaim’s march, dubbed the Queer Liberation March for Black Lives and Against Police Brutality, drew a crowd that organisers estimated at 50,000 people and that ended with a skirmish between protesters and police officers.

“It was complete and utter chaos,” said Skylar Moore, a member of the Reclaim group. “They pulled batons out on us. People got pepper-sprayed. I thought, this is going to be Stonewall 2.0.” The demonstrators left angry but exhilarated.

With clashes between protesters and police filling social media, pressure rose on Heritage of Pride to reduce police involvement, including banning the Gay Officers Action League, which routinely receives effusive cheers during the Pride march. The Pride board announced a monthlong pause to reassess its goals and practices.

“It was important for us to take a step backwards and hear from the community about what worked or didn’t work,” said David Correa, the interim executive director. The New York City Anti-Violence Project called on Heritage of Pride to break all ties with police and corrections officers and to hire private security for its events.

As part of its reassessment, Heritage of Pride created a task force and engaged four outside activists to help it address its relationships with corporations and the police. “It was super uncomfortable for the first two calls,” said Devin-Norelle, who was one of the activists. “There was a lot of pushback. It made me question whether I wanted to be a part of it. But the work had to be done. We got through it.”

This past February, a group of trans activists, including the Strategic Transgender Alliance for Radical Reform, called on Heritage of Pride to turn the march over to people of colour. Talks between the two groups fizzled immediately. “HOP is over,” said Mariah Lopez of STARR, which reprises an organisation formed in 1969 by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, after the Stonewall uprising.

Then in early May, Heritage of Pride told reporters it would be announcing a ban on police marching in uniform, at least until 2025, explaining that the “safety that law enforcement is meant to provide can instead be threatening, and at times dangerous, to those in our community who are most often targeted with excessive force.” The board did not tell members about the decision or ask for a vote.

When the Gay Officers Action League learned about the coming policy, it preempted Heritage of Pride with its own statement calling the ban “shameful.” For many Heritage of Pride members and volunteers, the officers’ statement was the first they heard of the ban.

The response was immediate and heated.

“It’s flat-out discriminatory,” said Russell Murphy, who was a member for 20 years and on the board for many of them. “To ban an organisation that has been instrumental in Pride since its inception is just wrong.”

Cathy Marino-Thomas, a leading activist in the campaign for marriage equality, said she was ending her associate membership in Heritage of Pride, calling it “out of touch.”

“Not that there’s no issue with the police,” she said. “I’m completely on the side of our various communities that have suffered abuse from the NYPD. But to not allow a group of our siblings to tell their coming-out story, we become our oppressors.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio and opinion writers at The Washington Post and The New York Times condemned the ban as discriminatory. Other media pushed back.

After years of being criticised for allowing officers to march, the organisers found themselves under fire for banning them.

“My God, what a debate over this,” said Andy Humm, a longtime co-host of “Gay USA,” a TV news program. “And it’s mostly white people moaning over process. The majority of the executive board are people of colour. They want a different direction. This is where a lot of the community is going.”

At the hastily called May 20 Zoom meeting, emotions flared on both sides.

Some supporters of the ban broke down in tears, describing how the presence of uniformed officers at the march made them feel unsafe and unwelcome. Sally Fisher, a member, moved for a vote of no confidence in the board, which was tabled until after Pride month. Another member, Antonio Centeno Jr., moved for a vote to overturn the ban.

“They said they consulted all the stakeholders,” Centeno said last week. “What about the stakeholders that elected you to the board?” Centeno said that as a Puerto Rican man whose father had been beaten by the police, he knew the fear they engendered and the need for reform. “But what’s happening here is not police reform.”

Bansri Manek, a board member who supported the ban, said she saw the conflict coming. “This organisation grew up back in the ’80s, and at that point this movement was largely cis white men,” she said last week. “The new board that came in is a very diverse board.”

She added, “At some point, hopefully, they’ll try to step in my shoes, and maybe they can see the other side.”

As members argued about the ban, Thomas angrily accused some of dismissing the negative experiences so many African Americans had with police. In the past week, he told them, he had received online messages of hate consistently from white gay men, to the extent that his family feared for his safety. “This organisation will no longer get any more of my Black life, my Black labour and my Black body,” he told them, according to his own account. “You’ll receive my resignation tomorrow.”

After members voted to rescind the ban, the meeting broke up, with hard feelings all around. “Everyone was frustrated, on principle and on process,” said Hannah Simpson, an associate member who opposed the ban.

The 13-member board then met — without Thomas, who did not attend — and overruled the vote, sending notice to members just before midnight. “My jaw hit the floor,” said Fisher, who had called for the vote of no confidence.

Brian Downey, president of the gay officers group, said he felt “betrayed” by the ban, especially because the officers “put so much of themselves on the chopping block” by working to change practices and attitudes within their departments.

“I understand that there’s community sensitivities towards law enforcement, and justified,” Downey said. “We’re working to change the system from within, which we have for 40 years. I don’t know how this got here in the flick of a light switch.”

In the meantime, Pride month approaches.

Heritage of Pride is planning a mostly virtual slate of events, creating a vacuum for other marches to fill. Dan Dimant, the organisation’s media director, said no sponsors had withdrawn their support after the ban on police officers. VIP ticket packages run to $475 for full access, which includes ingredients for a virtual cooking lesson.

Thomas announced Monday that he was not resigning from Heritage of Pride after all, promising members he would work “even harder on fixing the systemic racism that plagues this organisation, as it does this country.” He lamented members’ opposition to the ban and vowed, “Our mission demands we educate them.”

Some members were insulted.

The Dyke March, which was started in 1993 by women who felt erased by the larger Pride march, will proceed down Fifth Avenue on Saturday, June 26. As always, it has no police permit or police presence.

The Reclaim coalition and STARR are both planning marches for June 27, either together or separately, or some combination.

Now in its third year, Reclaim’s march has a broad agenda that goes beyond strictly LGBTQ issues to include support for Indigenous people, Palestinians and people who have disabilities or are homeless.

Pride marches in Seattle and Denver followed New York’s lead in banning the police. And New York’s marches come as the city is bursting to congregate — to rally for social justice or just to party. How many people will show up is anyone’s guess.

Last Sunday, Reclaim volunteers fanned out around the city with posters and cards promoting its march. At Dive Bar Lounge, a Hell’s Kitchen bar decked in rainbow flags, Devin Revolorio approached three men at a table.

“We want to highlight the QTBIPOC community and their struggles,” Revolorio said, using an acronym that did not seem to engage the men. Finally, Justin Lovecchio took a card. He was interested, he said.

“The LGBT community has gotten too exclusive,” he said. “This sounds like more of a community thing.”

His friends smiled and took cards, then returned to their beers.

© 2021 New York Times News Service