PrideFest parade: 30 years of taking steps toward gay rights

The Pittsburgh PrideFest will hold its 30th annual march today, and gay-rights activist Randy Forrester will be marching in it, as usual.

Forrester, who with his partner cofounded Persad Center as a mental health center for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people in western Pennsylvania more than 30 years ago, says he will see gay friends there -- not marching, but anonymously waving from the sidelines, as usual.

In this city that serves as the setting for Showtime's television show "Queer as Folk" -- which is filmed in Toronto -- Forrester sees a gay populace that has blazed a trail into the regional political sphere but still is willing to accept "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" as a mantra.

Branden Dudek, 22, agrees.

Dudek, who coordinates several sociopolitical projects out of a storefront space in Garfield, also runs RESYST, a Thomas Merton Center project that he describes as a "radical queer organization" that attempts to unite gay-rights efforts in the Pittsburgh area.

"I wouldn't say the (gay) people here are ashamed, but they're just not politically active here. ... I think people are tolerant of their own oppression because it doesn't oppress too much," he says.

Heterosexual Pittsburghers have always tolerated homosexuals, if mildly, says Forrester, a Shadyside resident who graduated from North Allegheny High School.

"Can I tell you stories of being out, cruising, and getting beaten with a two-by-four• Yes," he says. "Can I tell you stories about cruising and getting a knife to my neck• Yes.

"Could you say the same about another city, like Manhattan• Yes."

Pittsburgh's small-town atmosphere keeps it from being an openly hostile place, Forrester says. "People know each other, and that breeds a certain amount of acceptance."

Political acceptance didn't come until 1990, when Pittsburgh's City Council passed an ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. It bans discrimination in housing, treatment by police and public gathering places, and by labor organizations and any employer receiving government money. It had been voted down the previous year.

Afterward, a group of Pittsburghers circulated a petition to reverse the 1990 city ordinance. The petition had the thousands of signatures necessary to put a referendum to Pittsburgh voters on whether to support gay rights.

Persad Center and its allies -- gay-rights groups around the city -- went into action.

"We bought the city election rolls on disk. We were able to organize enough computers and people to work. If there was a computer, someone would be using it."

The workers checked every single name on the rolls against those on the petition. In three days, the group had struck enough ineligible names from the petition that the number of legitimate signatures fell below the required amount for a referendum. The challenge to the 1990 ordinance never made the ballot.

Local politicians couldn't help but notice the perseverance of gay activists in Pittsburgh. That's when the gay community became recognized, politically, as anything but a joke, Forrester says.

Pennsylvania is a tougher adversary. The University of Pittsburgh ran afoul of Pittsburgh's gay-rights ordinance for refusing to grant domestic-partner benefits to unmarried couples. (Gays' right to marry or form a civil union is recognized only in Vermont.) A 1996 lawsuit challenging Pitt's policy hasn't succeeded, and the university has the support of Pennsylvania state legislators, who in 1999 exempted public universities such as Pitt from offering such benefits.

The city's Gay Pride parade doesn't experience anti-gay confrontations as it does in some other cities, says Billy Hileman, who publishes and edits the gay newspaper Planet Q -- one of two in Pittsburgh.

But with 2,500 expected attendees, it's smaller than the parades in some comparable cities. Cleveland, with a metro-area population that's 30 percent larger than Pittsburgh's, expects 7,500 for its Gay Pride parade and festival today. In 2002, Columbus' parade drew an estimated 42,000 to a metro area two-thirds the size of Pittsburgh's.

Marching for gay pride is easy in a transient, diverse place such as San Francisco, where no one knows who you are, Forrester says. But in Pittsburgh, a place where families stretch back for generations and newcomers are few, chances are that your family is going to find out you're in the parade.

Many sexual minorities in Pittsburgh, he says, are happier not going public, and will prefer to offer silent support from Shadyside's sidewalks during the parade today.

Most gays within Pittsburgh's city limits seem to be complacent with the treatment they receive, Forrester says. In the suburbs and beyond, it's less comfortable.

"Out there, you're 'just friends,'" with a gay partner, says a 29-year-old Lawrenceville musician, who asked not to be identified.

All the more reason for supporting the parade, Forrester says.

"It's not about you. It's about the guy next to you who lost his job."

Randy Forrester, cofounder of Persad Center, was there at Pittsburgh's first Gay Pride parade -- June 17, 1973. Dr. Evelyn Hooker, then of the National Institute of Mental Health, had the previous year challenged the conventional assumption that homosexuality was a mental disorder. She spoke in Pittsburgh earlier that week.

"I was scared at the first march. I don't think we talked about the fear," Forrester says.

The crowd of roughly 100 had been through antiwar marches and civil-rights marches. They braced themselves for what lay ahead.

"We didn't know what was going to happen," he says. "Would there be sidewalk crowds that would get hostile?"

In the end, nothing happened. The crowd moved effortlessly along the sidewalks.

Well, not effortlessly.

Forrester recalls that march, jokingly, as the "Great Hike," a four-mile trek from Market Square, Downtown, to Flagstaff Hill, Oakland -- almost entirely uphill, and excruciatingly hot.

"Whose idea was that?" he says.

One of the marchers, simply known as "Brother," was carrying a pet boa constrictor on his shoulders. It died on the way.

"It was so hot. I didn't give a damn about gay rights after four miles," Forrester says.

That was the last year of that route. Other routes led back down the hill, from Freedom Corner into Downtown, or stopped by Downtown government buildings. Tony, leafy and quiet Shadyside has been its usual home in recent years.

"I think the route in Shadyside has helped to create an audience it didn't have," says Billy Hileman, who publishes and edits the gay newspaper Planet Q. Hileman has been in the parade since its early years. It wasn't annual until the 1990s.

"For example, when it went Downtown, it had an audience, but an accidental audience. On Walnut Street, there's a very high energy. I don't think they make a picnic out of the event, but they come out of the stores and show their support."

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