A mural on the side of the 12th Street Gym that honored Casarez was painted over and then torn down in 2020 after a fight to preserve it failed this marker was installed in 2021, and is the first marker in the city commemorating a Latinx person. Casarez was the executive director of Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative (GALAEI), and was the city’s first director of LGBT affairs under then-Mayor Michael Nutter from 2008 to 2014, where she fought for the LGBT Equality Bill, which passed in 2013. Casarez spent much of her life fighting for civil rights for queer, trans, Latinx, and homeless communities, among others. This marker commemorates LGBTQ activist and leader Gloria Casarez, who died in 2014. ➡️ Walk north to Walnut Street turn right and continue to Broad Street walk north to City Hall. By the end of the next week, the Dewey’s management changed their policy so they would serve anyone. On April 25, 1965, Dewey’s (a chain lunch counter with a location here) was the site of a sit-in protest by three young people, because the restaurant refused to serve gender-nonconforming and gay patrons (including “ ‘homosexuals,’ ‘masculine women,’ ‘feminine men,’ and ‘persons wearing non-conformist clothing.’ ”, according to ) The youths were arrested, along with prominent gay activist Clark Polak, for disorderly conduct. Taking its inspiration from lunch counter sit-in demonstrations against racism by Black civil rights protesters, Dewey’s was the site of the first transgender and gay sit-in in the country. While many people think that the Stonewall riot was the event which kicked off the LGBTQ civil rights movement, this was the site of a critical protest several years before Stonewall. ➡️ Walk east on Locust Street walk through Rittenhouse Square, and turn left on 17th Street.
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in the heart of Gayborhood is named after her. In addition to this marker at her former home, a section of Locust St. Gittings was instrumental in organizing protests and demonstrations throughout the 1960s and 1970s, promoted positive LGBTQ literature in public libraries, and was part of the fight to change the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of homosexuality as a mental illness. “They didn’t want to sit around and have tea.” In 1968, she helped start a new group called the Homophile Action League. Gittings routinely spoke out against police raids in lesbian bars and pushed the Philly DOB to be more radical than its national arm because “Philly women were not having it,” says Skiba. Gittings was the editor of The Ladder, the nation’s first lesbian magazine, and the founder of the Philly chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the nation’s first lesbian organization, which started as a social and educational group.
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with her partner, Kay Tobin Lahusen, an openly lesbian photojournalist and documentarian. ➡️ Walk north on 21st Street to Locust Streetīarbara Gittings played a huge role in LGBTQ history in Philadelphia. The signs were not popular with some residents, and even drew criticism from people inside the city government, “It’s kind of stretching it,” then-deputy streets commissioner John Scruggs told The Inquirer, “to think you can regulate human behavior with a traffic sign.”
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In 1974, then-mayor Frank Rizzo put up traffic signs like this one in an effort to crack down on cruising by making it harder to drive through the streets. Rittenhouse Square was also a popular cruising spot for gay men, and Delancey Street was known as the “Merry-go-round.” “Men would drive around in circles, and they would sit on the stoops, and it was to meet other men after the bars closed,” says Skiba. Gradually, as gentrification set in, “one by one, bars started to close West of Broad St.,” says Bob Skiba, curator of the John J. In the 1960s and 1970s, Rittenhouse Square was the center of gay life in Philadelphia, and the first Pride march in Philly started at Rittenhouse Square and ended at Independence Hall.