Attaining a permit from the city was especially significant at a time when police harassment of gay and trans people was routine, and when the city did not want to use its resources to support a gay event. New York’s Pride event in 1970, commemorating the Stonewall uprisings a year earlier, is usually cited as the first Pride parade in the world, but it was actually a march, not a city-permitted parade. The organization he helped to co-found, Christopher Street West, was responsible for the annual parade, which in 2019 had over 200,000 attendees.
Troy Perry, applied for a permit to close city streets for the Pride parade, making it the first such event in the world. In June 1970, Kight and others, including Rev. Gay rights leader, labor organizer, and peace activist Morris Kight (’42), a government major and economics minor from Comanche County, is considered a founding figure in the modern American LGBTQ civil rights movement. The first official Gay Pride parade in the world happened in Los Angeles 51 years ago, and it happened because of a TCU graduate.
