Nine years after the first Gay Pride marches, Birmingham held its first Pride celebration on June 24, 1979. The term Pride to describe the marches, parades, and other festivities has come to signify an activist movement and a critique of space that openly embodies and embraces the political and cultural acceptance of the LGBTQ community in public social life. After the first Christopher Street Liberation Day Parades in 1970, the event spread to more cities across the United States, eventually adopting the name PRIDE, an acronym for Personal Rights in Defense and Education. Emboldened by the events at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, activists decided a more radical approach was necessary to secure their vision of a more accepting future. Frank Kameny had organized a demonstration known as the “Annual Reminder” in Philadelphia starting in 1964, in which participants dressed conservatively and refrained from expressing public affection. These marches were not the first attempts to secure equal rights for the LGBTQ community. These early marches, originally called the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parades after the street on which the Stonewall Inn was located, concentrated on political activism and securing rights for the individuals in the LGBTQ community. The first annual Gay Pride marches were held on or near June 28, 1970-the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots-in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
