San Francisco’s first LGBTQ Pride parade was almost unrecognizable by today’s standards. To pay tribute to the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City—a six-day clash between police and queer bargoers in the West Village—around 30 people gathered on June 27, 1970 for a short march down Polk Street.
The marchers were largely hippies, radicals, and “hair fairies,” the latter a colloquial term for trans people before the word “transgender” was popularized. There were no floats and no rainbow Pride flags at the march, as the design for the iconic LGBTQ banner wouldn’t be created by Gilbert Baker until 1978.
A “gay-in” held at Golden Gate Park the next day was similarly low-key, drawing about 200 people. It more closely resembled a large family picnic than the modern equivalent of Pride, a corporate-funded saturnalia featuring mid-level executives dancing on Wells Fargo floats to Lady Gaga.
Beyond aesthetics, though, one of the starkest differences between early Pride parades and actions and the ones we have now is the relationship to law enforcement: Today, Pride parades have a heavy police presence, whereas the San Francisco gay-in ended with cops rounding up attendees.
This “gay in” was five years before California repealed its anti-gay sodomy laws, and homosexuality was still illegal in the vast majority of U.S. states. The frequent police raids at bars like the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles in July 1967, in which undercover officers began beating and handcuffing patrons who were kissing to celebrate New Year, were a reminder that the very fact of being gay was treated as a criminal act.