Leah Wittenberg wouldn’t call herself an archivist.

But the Burlington resident has collected a lot of documents during her years as an activist for women’s rights, the environment and economic opportunity.

Among Wittenberg’s materials is a collection that is featured prominently in a Vermont Folklife exhibit called Pride 1983, which documents Vermont’s first Pride march. The multimedia exhibit is currently accessible online and will be moving to the Brattleboro Museum and Arts Center later this month.

As an early organizer of the event, Wittenberg supplied the exhibit with original posters, hand-drawn street maps and handouts related to the march, which took place in Burlington 40 years ago this month.

One of Wittenberg’s contributions to the exhibit is a typed document that outlines steps to maintain a safe event. Organizers recognized the potential for “confusion and panic to arise over small incidents if not handled with calm” and described ways to keep the peace and lower tensions.

“We want our base of power to be our pride, our resolve, and our affirmation of justice. We do not need to resort to violence to be powerful,” the guidelines stated.

Despite concerns about safety and professional retribution, Wittenberg and several other organizers pressed ahead with the event on June 25, 1983, an era without legal protections for the LGBTQ+ community. A common worry was being fired from a job after being publicly outed. The 1983 march, culminating on the steps of Burlington City Hall, would become an annual event.

Several planners of and participants in the 1983 event spoke with VTDigger as the 40th anniversary approached; they recalled a palpable mix of fear and unity.

It wasn’t the first Pride event in the country. By 1983, larger cities were holding them annually. Traveling to attend Pride in cities such as New York, Montreal or Boston gave the Vermont LGBTQ+ community a sense of anonymity due to the size of those events and their out-of-town location. A Burlington march would be at a different scale — and come with higher stakes.

“For so many people, it was bringing it home,” said Howard “Howdy” Russell, a longtime activist and a founder of the Vermont LGBTQ+ newspaper Out in the Mountains. Russell was one of the 1983 organizers.

“We had to do something,” said Euan Bear, an attendee who went on to edit Out in the Mountains. To Bear, “this was not a parade. This was a march.”

The LGBTQ+ community was somewhat a “divided world” in those days, according to Wittenberg. Men and women tended to organize their own meetups and events and the opportunities for overlap were few. “It was because of the times,” Wittenberg said.

In that era, there was a gay bar on Pearl Street called Pearl’s that both men and women frequented, but the bar tended to lean more toward the men, according to Lucy Gluck, another planner for the 1983 march. She said many of the women preferred a “women’s-only space” where they could be active in feminist issues.

Bear said a “fairly high percentage” of the women were activists who considered themselves to be “separatists.”

“It’s not that gay men weren’t OK, but it’s that we were trying to figure out the ways that men’s privilege was hurting us,” Bear said. She recalled stories of how women would lose their children after being outed as lesbian.

‘Stand here in our home state’

Repercussions and retaliation for being out were felt across the whole community. Bill Lippert, a former state representative who attended the parade, noted incidents of people being physically attacked outside of bars. Bear remembered when she and other women were thrown out of a Burlington apartment they rented because the landlord “didn’t like our lifestyle.”

Sometime in 1983, Wittenberg, Gluck and another woman sat in an apartment in Burlington and wondered where they were going for Pride that year. At first, they considered one of the larger cities.

“And suddenly we were saying, ‘No, we want to stand here in our home state and take the risk,’ which was considerable at the time, to take the risk to be seen,” Wittenberg said.

Speaking about the inspiration for that first parade, Wittenberg seized on that moment, emphasizing the “small act from a small group of people” that set a path for the rest of the state.

“So much when things are happening that you need to fight against, there’s not an organization there that’s going to help you do it,” Wittenberg said. “We weren’t an organization. We were just people saying, ‘Let’s do this.’ We didn’t have a staff. We didn’t have funding. We didn’t have anything but ourselves and our courage at that point.”

While the 1983 event was organized mostly by women, Wittenberg said its leaders enlisted the help of some of the gay men from the area, particularly Russell, who also spoke at a rally at City Hall Park that followed the march.

Bringing members of the gay men’s community into the organizing group was a noteworthy event, Wittenberg said. “It was really the first time there was an out-loud public collaboration of the gay male and lesbian community,” she said. “I think it was a real beginning.”

From that point, the organizers sought permits and planned a downtown route for the march, which started and ended at City Hall. Posters were made by hand, promoting the event as a “Lesbian & gay pride parade and celebration.” The Vermont Folklife exhibit includes a copy of Wittenberg’s poster: a drawing of a winding river with the tagline, “water won’t run straight & neither will we.”

‘Lots of people showed courage’

The group wanted more than just permission from the city. They wanted an endorsement. In mid-June that year, the group asked the Burlington Board of Aldermen, a precursor to the current city council, to proclaim June 25 “Lesbian and Gay Pride Day” in the city. On June 13, the board approved the proclamation, but it was far from unanimous. It passed on a vote of 6-5 with two absences. Then-Mayor Bernie Sanders signed it.

One week later, a church in Essex Junction petitioned the board to rescind the proclamation. Russell recalled that the two board members who were absent from the vote later made clear they would have voted against the proclamation. After the church’s request, all it would have taken was one board member who had voted “yes” to ask for a reconsideration and the proclamation would have come up for another vote and likely failed. None of the “yes” votes wavered.

“Lots of people showed courage, not just the people marching in the street,” Russell said.

Just one day before the event, the Burlington Free Press opinion page published seven letters to the editor on the subject of the march and proclamation. All the writers were opposed and many expressed hateful views, including one that compared the group to Nazis and another who claimed it would be “a slap in the face” to war veterans.

“It’s also sad that Burlington, ‘The Queen City of Vermont,’ may be known as ‘Queer City of Vermont,’” Margaret McCluskey wrote at the time. “What’s next, City Hall? The Ku Klux Klan? Oh well, that may be refreshing after being exposed to jellyfish and gays.”

Despite the vitriol, the march went on. It took place on a Saturday afternoon and, while organizers didn’t know how many participants to expect, there ended up being hundreds. The parade started at City Hall Park, turned through downtown blocks and Pearl Street until marching up Church Street, around to Main Street and finishing at City Hall Park again.

The Burlington Free Press covered the march in a front-page story, describing a “laughing, exuberant crowd of 350 people.”

‘Quite another thing’

Lippert, the former state representative who attended the parade, recalled the event.

“It’s one thing to be in a large crowd, in a large city, away from Vermont,” Lippert said. “It’s quite another thing to be a much smaller group of people and marching and walking through the streets of Burlington, going down Church Street.”

Lippert said he remembers there being a rumor that someone had been overheard prior to the parade saying they planned to throw stones from a rooftop. Lippert didn’t know how accurate it was at the time and said the event ended up being “celebratory.” But he also noted that “it wasn’t without some sense of concern for what might happen and there was definitely a lot of friends who felt like they could not risk … being that public, right in Vermont.”

One of Russell’s strongest memories of that day was a moment as the march passed along Church Street. He described how there were many shoppers and people just passing through along the sidewalk as the group of marchers went by. He recalled the feeling he had as “the epitome” of being out. But he also remembers observing “a lot of gay and lesbian people standing on the sidelines, you know, because it was a different time.”

Weaving through downtown Burlington, the crowd of marchers finished in City Hall Park, where the rally took place.

Deane Brittingham was one of the speakers quoted in the Free Press story published the next day.

“I thought there would be about 10 of us out here,” she said. “We are everywhere. Look how normal we look. We are not invisible and we will not be made invisible.”

Russell didn’t particularly want to speak, he said in a recent interview, but after a few women spoke, he thought a man should get up there as well.

“I’m scared … but I’m a little more angry than scared,” the Free Press quoted Russell as saying. He said that for every person who took part in the parade, “there were 10 who said they couldn’t march. That’s why we’re here.”

The impetus for legislative goals

The march and rally came to a close. It would become an annual event after that, sometimes moving to Montpelier, other times coming back to Burlington. Eventually, the Vermont Pride Center stepped in as organizer and still runs the event today. Other towns and cities in all corners of the state now hold Pride parades of their own.

Lippert, speaking from his perspective as a former lawmaker, said that the first march in 1983 was “the impetus” for setting legislative goals. It would take several more years before LGBTQ+ rights started to take shape in the Statehouse. Lippert said the first step was the addition of sexual orientation to hate crimes laws. Later, nondiscrimination laws were changed, too, and further down the road came civil unions and marriage equality.

To Gluck, recalling the event brings pride, but also concern. “There’s a lot of people suffering because of homophobia and transphobia and issues around gender identity, so for us to just kind of go, ‘Oh, we did this great thing, and we started having Pride marches and isn’t that fun and exciting.’ It’s important, I think, to keep stepping up in whatever ways people can do that,” Gluck said.

The story of the first Vermont Pride march was commemorated on a plaque in City Hall Park that was dedicated last summer, not far from where the 1983 event started and ended. It is also captured in great detail in the Vermont Folklife exhibit, curated by Meg Tamulonis from the Vermont Queer Archives.

Tamulonis said in an interview that sometime around 2005, she started working with the Pride Center on exhibits. One of those was called the Dialog Project, which archived interviews with the “elders” of the LGBTQ+ community. Eventually, that led to the idea of featuring the first Pride march.

The exhibit had its first opening around the start of the pandemic at the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury and has since traveled. It’s been on display in Burlington City Hall, in Rutland and will soon make the move to the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center from June 24 through Oct. 9.

Tamulonis said one thing she learned while working on the exhibit is that the organizers and participants of the march still have a lot to say.

“I just want to find every opportunity for us all to talk and to share our experiences,” she said. “I think that’s just one of the things that beautiful photographs and recordings and images can help to do, so the more we can get this sort of story out there, the better.”