All about the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights

"The 1970s was a significant decade for the LGBTQ+ movement. Building on the Stonewall uprising of 1969, new organizations were formed, such as the National Gay Task Force (later the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and now the National LGBTQ Task Force), PFLAG, and Lambda Legal. The decade's work culminated in 1979 with the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, attended by an estimated 125,000 people."

""The earliest paper trail dates the organizing back to a meeting held during Thanksgiving weekend in 1973 by the National Gay Mobilizing Committee in the student union at the University of Illinois' Urbana-Champaign campus," Amin Ghaziani wrote in the Gay & Lesbian Review in 2005. Leading the meeting, Jeff Graubart, said one of the march's purposes would be "to gain solidarity for the gay movement in the country, which ... is now isolated and fragmented." But no infrastructure for the march emerged from the meeting."

The 1970s saw rapid growth in LGBTQ+ organizing following the Stonewall uprising of 1969. New groups emerged, including the National Gay Task Force (now the National LGBTQ Task Force), PFLAG, and Lambda Legal. Initial organizing traces to a Thanksgiving 1973 meeting at the University of Illinois intended to build solidarity but producing no infrastructure. A Minneapolis committee revived planning in October 1978 but dissolved amid internal disputes over racism and classism. San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk stepped in to lead planning after the collapse, but he was assassinated and did not live to see the 1979 march, which drew about 125,000 attendees.

Read at Advocate.com