Although the number of new cases in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco multiplied quickly over the first two years of the epidemic, at first the number of people with AIDS in Philadelphia rose slowly. Within the first year, only seven cases were reported locally, but by early 1983 trends in Philadelphia seemed to be catching up to the rapidly growing epidemic witnessed in New York and California. The disease also appeared in New Jersey, particularly in the urban corridors between Philadelphia and New York and between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, and in Delaware.

As gay men watched their friends and lovers die in increasing numbers, they organized in response. Philadelphia Community Health Alternatives (PCHA, later known as the Mazzoni Center), a health clinic founded in 1979 to serve the local lesbian and gay community, formed the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force to provide social services to those affected and offer information about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases through a local hotline. Meanwhile, social clubs like the Gay Men’s Chorus and Girlfriends Motorcycle Club joined forces to raise funds for PCHA’s education and prevention efforts.

Spread of AIDS

By the middle 1980s public health authorities recognized that the AIDS epidemic had grown beyond the communities of gay men in which doctors first identified the disease. Researchers in the United States and France had identified HIV as the cause of AIDS in 1983, and thus definitively determined that the disease could be transmitted through blood-to-blood contact, including needle-sharing among intravenous drug users, blood transfusions, and from an infected mother to her unborn child. At the same time, in cities around the country, reports showed the growing incidence of HIV and AIDS among African Americans and Latinos, particularly within networks of intravenous drug users and among their sexual partners and young children. Although those in this “second wave” of new cases had likely been infected for some time, their low access to medical care combined with the long latency period of HIV, during which time the virus spreads throughout a patient’s system but does not produce symptoms, to initially mask the prevalence of AIDS within communities of color.

In Philadelphia, by 1985 African Americans made up almost half of all reported AIDS cases, and the majority of cases among people under twenty five years old. David Fair, a longtime local gay activist and secretary-treasurer of a local predominantly Black health care workers’ union, and Rashidah Hassan, a nurse who had worked with PCHA and its AIDS Task Force, became dissatisfied with the groups’ failure to effectively reach out to African Americans at risk of contracting HIV. To stem the rising tide of new infections in Philadelphia’s Black community, in 1986 they founded Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues (BEBASHI), one of the nation’s first Black AIDS service organizations. Perceiving that the AIDS Task Force’s efforts to reach out to the Black community had been undercut by its reputation as an all-white organization, BEBASHI representatives worked through existing social institutions like African American churches so that their education and prevention messages that would resonate with Black audiences.  In New Jersey, Project IMPACT (Intensive Mobilization to Promote AIDS Awareness through Community-based Technologies) also reached out to African American leaders in urban areas.

In 1987, as the AIDS community nationwide became frustrated with the dearth of effective treatments and President Ronald Reagan’s reticence on the epidemic, grassroots AIDS politics took a radical turn. In March, a group of New York activists founded the inaugural chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), an organization whose protest actions became the public face of AIDS advocacy in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The group quickly spawned a network of chapters in cities across the country and abroad, including Philadelphia, South Jersey, and Delaware.

Dramatic Demonstrations

Members of the Philadelphia branch of ACT UP began staging theatrical “die-ins” and other dramatic demonstrations to highlight the human cost of high prescription drug prices and inadequate public health policy. To protest the Catholic Church’s opposition to condom use, in May 1991 around one hundred ACT UP Philadelphia members interrupted a prayer service for people with AIDS conducted by  Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua and tried to place wrapped condoms near his hands and feet, shouting, “These will save lives–your morals won’t.” In addition to public protests, ACT UP became well known for creating memorable visual messages to both educate people about AIDS and mobilize those affected by the epidemic. In this vein, during one holiday season the Philadelphia chapter circulated stickers featuring an HIV-positive Santa Claus with the tagline, “If only Reagan and Bush had told the truth, Santa wouldn’t have to die from AIDS.”

During the mid-1990s, ACT UP declined in national prominence as the white gay men who filled much of the organization’s ranks passed away, grew tired of activism, or gained access to the highly effective (but expensive) class of new antiretroviral drugs that became available due to advances in HIV treatment research. The Philadelphia chapter, however, remained vital due to the recruiting efforts of a core group of members, who reached out to lower-income people of color, among whom the nationwide AIDS epidemic continued to grow fastest. The changing membership in turn shaped the direction of the group’s activism, as it increasingly focused on affordable housing, HIV prevention in prisons, and access to medications for impoverished people in the United States and throughout the developing world. Working with Health GAP (Global Access Project), a coalition of AIDS activists and allied organizations, Philadelphia ACT UP members pressured the White House to move forward with a coordinated response to the worldwide AIDS pandemic.  This effort, supported by numerous AIDS action groups in Philadelphia and the Cooper Early Intervention Program in Camden, culminated in 2003 with President George W. Bush’s announcement of the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a five-year, $15 billion commitment funding HIV prevention and drug access programs in Africa. In 2008, Congress reauthorized the program through 2013, and expanded its funding to almost $48 billion.

Four Decades

As the epidemic entered its fourth decade, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health estimated that 1.3% of the city’s population was living with HIV or AIDS, about three times the national average. Center City and the surrounding area had the greatest prevalence of cases in Philadelphia County, with additional areas of high concentration in the Northeast, West Philadelphia, and around Germantown. Despite the city’s relatively large percentage of people living with HIV and AIDS, local trends reflected patterns of infection for the United States as a whole, inasmuch as the epidemic in Philadelphia disproportionately affected African Americans, and in particular men who had sex with men and women, among whom the disease was growing fastest.

Regionally, statistics collected by the Centers for Disease Control from the beginning of the epidemic through 2008 showed New Jersey ranking fifth-highest in number AIDS diagnoses among the fifty states; Pennsylvania ranking seventh; and Delaware ranking thirty-third (although in rate of cases per thousand population, Delaware ranked eighth-highest in the nation). By 2010 Philadelphia accounted for the highest proportion of AIDS cases in Pennsylvania, surpassing other counties by far (20,411 diagnosed cases from 1980 to 2010, compared with 1,098 in Montgomery County, 1,743 in Delaware County, 802 in Bucks County, and 603 in Chester County).  In South Jersey, by 2010 the disease was most prevalent in Atlantic County.

In light of these realities, activists reignited the search for an AIDS cure. In 2009 a group of veteran Philadelphia activists, many of whom had been part of ACT UP chapters around the country during the organization’s heyday, founded the AIDS Policy Project to advocate for funding and scientific research on treatments to not only slow the spread of HIV within a patient’s system, but eliminate it altogether.  In this way, Philadelphians sought to lead the way to the end of the AIDS epidemic once and for all.

Dan Royles is a Ph.D. Candidate at Temple University.  This essay is derived from his dissertation research on the political culture of African American AIDS activism. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In the second half of the twentieth century, a growing number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans claimed political rights as people whose same-sex desire or gender presentation challenged prevailing social mores. As movements for African American, Latino American, and women’s rights gained traction and visibility, so too did movements for LGBT civil rights. In this context, LGBT activists in Greater Philadelphia pressed for the extension of the rights and protections that would signal their inclusion in American society. By the time the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the landmark case of Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, LGBT Philadelphians could point to victories at the local and state levels, achieved through a combination of theatrical protest and political advocacy. At the same time, however, Pennsylvania lagged behind New Jersey, Delaware, and other northeastern states in the civil rights afforded to LGBT residents.

Displays of homosexual affection and cross-dressing had been part of public life in cities like Philadelphia going back to the colonial period. However, it was not until the decades following World War II that such practices, and the sexual and gender identities associated with them, became explicitly politicized. During the 1950s and 1960s, the first gay and lesbian civil rights protests in Philadelphia reflected the growing political consciousness of homophile activists. These demonstrations also borrowed tactics from the much more widespread movement for Black civil rights unfolding at the same time.

The first documented public protest for LGBT civil rights in the city began with a sit-in. On April 25, 1965, Dewey’s, a diner near Rittenhouse Square with a large clientele of gay youth, drag queens, and sex workers, began refusing to serve customers who appeared to be gay or lesbian, as well as those wearing clothing that did not match their gender. After more than 150 such customers had been denied service, three teenagers refused to leave and were arrested. Over the next five days, members of the Janus Society, a local gay and lesbian political group, protested outside of Dewey’s, and distributed their literature to passersby. On May 2, one week after the first sit-in, a group of teenagers staged a second protest. This time, no arrests were made, and the restaurant resumed serving LGBT customers.

Demonstrations at Independence Hall

Although the Dewey’s sit-ins showed that some gay and lesbian activists were willing to stand up for those who publicly dressed and acted in unconventional ways, most hewed to a politics of respectability. They described themselves as “homophiles” rather than “homosexuals” in order to distance themselves from sexual acts, a strategy that many saw as a necessary step toward inclusion in American society. The Annual Reminder demonstrations, held in front of Independence Hall every Fourth of July from 1965 to 1969, also reflected this concern. As they protested anti-sodomy laws, the firing of gay men and lesbians from federal employment, and their exclusion from military service, Annual Reminder marchers dressed professionally and in ways that conformed to gender expectations, with men in suits, jackets, and slacks, and women in dresses. The choice of time and place for the demonstrations underscored the marchers’ political claims. In contrast to the counterculture and anti-war movements, which criticized U.S. society as crassly commercial and militaristic, Annual Reminder marchers situated themselves squarely within American identity by marching on July Fourth in the place where the nation’s founding documents had been written and signed.

In the early 1970s, homophile activism gave way to gay liberation, although the more radical goals and tactics of gay liberation groups did not preclude their involvement in conventional politics. The Homophile Action League and the Gay Activists Alliance, which staked out more militant positions than their Annual Reminder predecessors, pressed local lawmakers to extend Philadelphia’s anti-discrimination protections to gay men and lesbians. In 1974 the City Council held hearings on a bill to add sexual orientation to the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance, to outlaw anti-gay discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. However, with vocal opposition from both council members and religious leaders, including members of Philadelphia’s Black clergy, the bill failed to make it out of committee. Opponents of the measure contended that race and sexual orientation were fundamentally different, and questioned gay and lesbian activists’ attempts to claim protections as an aggrieved minority alongside African Americans, Jews, and other historically persecuted groups.

Local and State Victories

In 1978, activists with the Christian Association, a philanthropic group at the University of Pennsylvania organized the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force (PLGTF) to advocate for sexual rights in the city. Under the leadership of Reverend James Littrell (b. 1943) and Rita Addessa (b. 1945), the group’s first two executive directors, PLGTF forged alliances with local African American political and religious leaders. When a second effort to amend the Fair Practices Ordinance went before city council in 1982, W. Wilson Goode (b. 1938), the city manager who later became Philadelphia’s first African American mayor, and members of the newly visible Black gay community testified in support. With broadened support for gay and lesbian civil rights, the bill passed. Harrisburg, the state capital, revised its own City Code to include protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in 1983. Lancaster similarly added sexual orientation as a protected class to its Codified Ordinances in 1991. York added an anti-discrimination measure covering sexual orientation to its City Code in 1993, and a measure covering gender identity in 1998.

In the 1990s, LGBT activists, along with allies in local government, pressed for domestic partnership laws in the city. City council member Angel Ortiz (b. 1941) and Mayor Edward G. Rendell (b. 1944) introduced different bills providing for domestic partnership recognition and benefits in 1993. The bills failed as opponents, including City Council President John F. Street (b. 1943), argued that domestic partnerships would undermine traditional family structures. In June 1996, Rendell signed an executive order granting benefits to the domestic partners of some five hundred city employees, representing only a fraction of the almost 26,000 working in local government. Street vocally opposed the measure, and joined with Catholic Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua (1923-2012) and the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity to reverse the order. Rendell refused, and a trio of domestic partnership bills passed the council in 1998, granting health and pensions benefits to the “life partners” of city employees.

In 2013, the City Council expanded life partnership provisions to include hospital visitation with the passage of the LGBT Equality Bill, which also added gender identity to the city’s non-discrimination ordinance and offered tax credits to companies that expanded their employee benefits to include coverage of transgender-specific health care and health benefits for same-sex domestic partners. In May 2014, a federal district court judge ruled that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. The following year, in June 2015, the United States Supreme Court invalidated similar state-level prohibitions clearing the way for same-sex marriage across the country.

The twenty-first century also brought a greater focus on the rights of transgender people. In 2009, Philadelphia activists formed Riders Against Gender Exclusion (RAGE) with the goal of eliminating gender identification stickers from Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) TransPasses. RAGE members argued that the stickers opened a risk of embarrassment and harassment of people whose outward gender expression did not match the stickers on their cards. Over the course of a three-year campaign, the group collected stories of harassment from transgender and gender non-conforming SEPTA riders, staged a protest drag show inside a SEPTA station, and interrupted a public SEPTA hearing to present officials with a six-foot-long “RAGE Rider’s Bill of Rights” outlining their demands. On July 1, 2013, for the first time in thirty-two years, SEPTA riders were able to use TransPass cards without the gender identification stickers.

Hate Crime Legislation

Beginning in the late 1980s, Philadelphia LGBT activists and their allies also worked to add sexual orientation and gender identity to existing hate-crime laws. The Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force made anti-gay violence a political issue as early as 1986, and in 1990 state representative Babette Josephs (b. 1940) introduced an unsuccessful bill that would have extended the state’s hate-crime law to cover sexual orientation. The 1998 killing of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard (1976-98), which became a national news story, revived local interest in the issue. Weeks after Shepard’s death, the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force organized a protest at the Liberty Bell to call for a state-level hate-crime law covering sexual orientation. In 2002, after the brutal beating in Middleburg, Pennsylvania, of a man who was perceived to be gay, the state legislature finally passed a bill that expanded Pennsylvania’s Ethnic Intimidation Act to include sexuality and gender identity. However, the state supreme court struck down the 2002 expansion of the law in 2008.

Following a highly publicized attack on two gay men in Center City in September 2014, the Philadelphia City Council passed its own hate-crime bill. Pennsylvania lawmakers also introduced, but never voted on, hate-crime legislation covering sexual orientation and gender identity at the state level. In contrast, New Jersey added sexual orientation to its hate crime statute in 1990, and did the same for gender identity in 2008. Wilmington, Delaware, added a provision for hate crimes based on sexual orientation to its City Code in 1992. The state of Delaware added sexual identity to its own hate crime statute in 1998, followed by gender identity in 2013.

Pennsylvania similarly lagged behind its neighbors in guaranteeing LGBT civil rights. Although Pennsylvania became the first state to ban sexual orientation discrimination in state employment, under a 1975 executive order by Governor Milton Shapp (1912-94), as of March 2016, Pennsylvania had no law barring discrimination against LGBT people in housing, employment, and public accommodations. In contrast, New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination included provisions for sexual orientation beginning in 1991 and for gender identity and expression beginning in 2006. Delaware passed legislation barring discrimination based on sexual orientation in 2009, and a similar law against discrimination based on gender identity and expression in 2013. In Pennsylvania, state legislators in 2015 continued to press for the Pennsylvania Fairness Act, which would update a 1995 state law against discrimination to include sexual orientation, as well as gender identity and expression.

The struggle for LGBT civil rights in Philadelphia after World War II yielded important gains for people who had been vulnerable to discrimination and harassment on account of their sexual and gender identities. Activists also won recognition for same-sex couples, first in Philadelphia, then in Pennsylvania, and, finally, nationwide. In so doing, they challenged prevailing ideas of sexual citizenship, and laid claim to both symbolic and material forms of belonging in American society. At the same time, the periodic failures and reversals suffered by activists exposed the extent to which LGBT Philadelphians were impacted by local, state, and federal policies—and the work that remained to be done.

Dan Royles is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Florida International University. His first book, To Make the Wounded Whole: African American Responses to HIV/AIDS, is under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press. (Author information current at time of publication.)

(Editor’s note:  Additional future essays will cover civil rights for African Americans, women, and persons with disabilities.)

Dewey’s was a chain of hamburger restaurants in the greater Philadelphia area. The first Dewey’s opened in the mid-1930s in Atlantic City, and the chain, originally owned by Louis Yesner (1894-1979), eventually grew to fifteen restaurants. Two of these locations—one at 208 S. Thirteenth Street and one at 219 S. Seventeenth Street in Philadelphia—became gathering places for LGBT people in the 1960s.

The sit-in took place at the Seventeenth Street Dewey’s. In response to a disruptive crowd of gender-variant teenagers, Dewey’s management instructed staff to refuse them service. Employees interpreted this instruction widely, refusing service to any customers who appeared to be gay or lesbian, or who otherwise challenged accepted gender conventions. The teenagers joined forces with the Janus Society, a local gay and lesbian rights organization, to protest this policy. On April 25, 1965, 150 people were refused service at the Seventeenth Street Dewey’s. Three teenagers and Clark Polak (1937-1980), president of the Janus Society, were arrested and found guilty of disorderly conduct.

After the arrests, the Janus Society demonstrated outside of this Dewey’s location, distributing 1,500 leaflets over the course of five days. On May 2, 1965, another small sit-in took place. Though police were present, there were no arrests, and subsequently Dewey’s discontinued its policy of denying service to those who appeared homosexual.

The Dewey’s protest was both part of larger historical trends and the start of something new. It took place during an era of grassroots activism, political protests, and urban unrest. Many participants in the burgeoning gay and lesbian movement were involved in other 1960s political efforts as well, and the particular format of the Dewey’s protest—the sit-in—drew directly from a political strategy made famous by the African American civil rights movement of the early 1960s.

Within the gay and lesbian rights movement, this incident occurred during a season of direct action in support of the rights of homosexuals. On the east coast, between April and June 1965, demonstrations of varying kinds occurred in Washington, New York, and Philadelphia. And on Independence Day 1965, activists from throughout the mid-Atlantic picketed in Philadelphia at the Liberty Bell, demanding fairer treatment for gays and lesbians. These protests, known as the “annual reminders,” occurred every Fourth of July for five years.

In many ways, the Dewey’s sit-in exemplified political trends of the mid-1960s. Yet, it also represented the beginning of a more radical approach to LGBT activism, which became more fully realized in the years immediately following the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in New York. In contrast to earlier LGBT activism, which sought access to legal protection and freedom from harassment and discrimination, by the late 1960s some LGBT activists were beginning to challenge the very structure of society. People who did not conform to established gender roles—many of them still teenagers—were at the forefront of this shift. Dewey’s was possibly the first action where an established gay rights organization explicitly defended the rights of people to defy gender conventions and still be treated with dignity. Although the Dewey’s sit-in did not generate national media coverage in 1965, later historians recognized it as an important event in the history of LGBT activism.

Susan Ferentinos is a public history researcher, writer, and consultant specializing in project management and using the past to build community. She holds a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Indiana University and is the author ofInterpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). (Author information current at time of publication.)

After World War II, Philadelphia’s gay geography, like that in many American cities, expanded greatly. The war had uprooted millions of men and women across the country and exposed them to urban life here and abroad they had never seen before. Postwar downtown Philadelphia, or “Center City,” as it was beginning to be called, had the largest concentration of apartments and rental rooms in the “City of Homes,” providing gay men, lesbians, and transgendered people with the privacy and urban anonymity they sought.

By the 1950s, Rittenhouse Square and the beatnik coffeehouses nearby on Sansom Street had become part of the public gay geography of the city. So many gay men moved into apartments south of the square that even straight people commonly referred to gay men who lived in Center City by the coded term “Spruce Street boys.”  Gays, of course, lived all throughout the city, with a significant lesbian presence in the Germantown/Chestnut Hill area. In an era when racism extended even into the LGBT community, many African American gay men and lesbians socialized in bars or through private parties north of Market Street, in North Philadelphia, or across the Schuylkill in West Philadelphia.

The LGBT presence in Philadelphia became increasingly visible. In December 1962, Greater Philadelphia Magazine published an essay by Gaeton Fonzi (1935-2012) about the city’s gay community. Titled “The Furtive Fraternity,” it was the first article in the country about a city’s LGBT population to appear in a mainstream publication. The article mentioned a dozen or so gay bars and coffeehouses scattered along Spruce Street west of Broad and along the Locust Street area east of Broad. Fonzi also interviewed a handful of gay people, many of whom remained anonymous. Despite its semi-sensationalist subtitle—“Philadelphia’s homosexuals lead a strange twilight life outside the law and outside of society”— the story steered away from the lurid and focused instead on the problems of gay people in Philadelphia and the burgeoning gay political scene. Only a few years later, from 1965 to 1969, Philadelphia activists collaborated with groups in Washington, D.C., and New York to stage annual demonstrations for gay rights in front of Independence Hall.

The “Twilight Life”

The cliched “twilight life” described by early newspaper and magazine articles did have some basis in fact. Many gay men, lesbians, and gender-variant people who lived through the 1950s and 1960s experienced compartmentalized lives. They described themselves as being “straight during the 9 to 5 work week, but damned gay on weekends.” The parks, bars, and restaurants that crowded Center City streets provided semipublic spaces where LGBT people could socialize and be themselves.

A number of factors worked together to turn the few blocks that radiated from Locust and Thirteenth Streets into the neighborhood that became known as the Gayborhood. Close to the hotels and theaters on Broad Street, by the 1940s the Locust strip became a major center of Philadelphia nightlife. The street was dotted with nightclubs, restaurants, and musical bars that featured top national performers like Fats Waller (1904-1943), Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996), and Patti Page (1927-2013). By the 1950s, however, some of the spots did away with the expensive first-rate entertainers and began featuring Las Vegas-style showgirls instead. As the character of the area changed, a few of the “musical bars” on the hidden, smaller streets like Camac and Quince began attracting a gay clientele and a few venues became predominantly gay.

In the 1960s, the area declined. City planner Edmund Bacon’s (1910-2005) plans for Washington Square East and Washington Square West came to a halt in the late 1960s when federal funding dried up after his successful redevelopment of Society Hill. The city bought and demolished many buildings in the section that encompassed the emerging Gayborhood, but lack of funds left the area pockmarked with vacant lots and no real plan for development. By the late ’60s many of the musical bars and nightclubs degenerated into seedy strip joints with links to organized crime. The Philadelphia Inquirer began referring to the area as “Lurid Locust Street.”

To make matters worse, the construction of the Vine Street Expressway and the destruction of what had been Philadelphia’s Tenderloin district to the north pushed prostitution, gambling, and drug dealing down Thirteenth Street as far south as Locust. Police actions on area strip clubs led by then-Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo (1920-1991) usually included raids on gay bars, lumping prostitutes, drug dealers, and homosexuals all together as “undesirables.” Even gay and lesbian private clubs, incorporated to get around the city’s ban on same-sex dancing, were not immune. Police raids on gay bars were common well into the 1980s.

Demonstrations After Stonewall

The strip bars and “gentlemen’s clubs” kept the area depressed through the early ’70s, but the gay community was evolving rapidly. Philadelphia was not far behind New York in responding to the revolutionary call raised by the Stonewall Riots of 1969.  Within a few years, Philadelphia saw the birth of several radical, new-left organizations including the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activist Alliance, and Dyketactics. In 1972, Philadelphians held their first Gay Pride demonstration, with an estimated 10,000 people marching from Rittenhouse Square to Independence Mall, signaling the end of a “furtive fraternity” and the beginning of a new, highly visible presence. The city’s LGBT community was out and proud. By 1976, gay Philadelphia had opened a gay community center on South Street, founded the Philadelphia Gay News, and began pushing for a citywide gay rights ordinance.

The new LGBT involvement in politics affected the geography of the Gayborhood. Gay spaces proliferated, with gay bars opening both east and west of Broad Street, along South and Front Streets, and in suburbs like Cherry Hill and Norristown. New African American bars opened along Arch and Filbert Streets, just north of Market Street, and along Broad Street in North Philadelphia. Many of the bars, restaurants, and shops in the Gayborhood advertised themselves as gay-owned and operated, and the first LGBT business associations were formed. By the end of the decade, city food writers attributed Philadelphia’s restaurant renaissance to its gay entrepreneurs.

As the 1980s began, the worst parts of Locust Street had been razed and rebuilt.  When crime continued to be a problem in the area, particularly manifesting itself in violence against transgendered people, the community and business associations came together to form neighborhood watches to patrol the area. In 1982, the Gay Rights Bill that had stalled year after year through the 1970s passed in City Council with almost no opposition.

The devastation of the AIDS epidemic and horrendous loss of life in the 1980s brought the community together. When federal, state and local governments failed to respond, Philadelphia activists stepped up. They formed groups like ActionAIDS, Unity, Manna,  ACT-UP, and the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania to promote AIDS education, to care for victims of the disease, and to fight for legislation and medical research.

The Gayborhood Gets Its Name

Center City’s gay neighborhood gained its name in 1995 at Outfest, a commemoration of National Coming Out Day, when David Warner playfully paraphrased the Mister Rogers children’s song and declared, “It’s a beautiful day in the Gayborhood!” The name stuck, and what had been a “gay ghetto” gradually became commonly known as the Gayborhood. In 2007, the city of Philadelphia installed thirty-six rainbow street signs in the area bounded by Eleventh and Broad Streets and Pine and Walnut Streets to honor the history and diversity of the area. In 2012, a section of Locust Street from Twelfth to Thirteenth Streets was dedicated as “Barbara Gittings Way,” in honor of Philadelphia’s pioneer activist.

By the twenty-first century, the Gayborhood was anchored by the William Way LGBT Community Center on Spruce Street and Giovanni’s Room, the country’s oldest LGBT bookstore, on Pine Street. In February 2014, the John C. Anderson Apartments, Philadelphia’s only housing for LGBT seniors, opened on Thirteenth Street near Spruce. Farther north on Thirteenth, upscale sidewalk cafes have replaced the hookers and drug dealers. The building at Locust and Thirteenth Streets that once housed the All in the Family strip club became Nest, a play space for Washington West toddlers. A combination of political activism, business savvy, and community involvement have succeeded in transforming Philadelphia’s downtown gay neighborhood.

Bob Skiba is the archivist at the William Way LGBT Community Center and the President of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides. In 2013, he co-authored Lost Philadelphia, with Edward Mauger. Skiba maintains a Philadelphia Gayborhood history blog at http://thegayborhoodguru.wordpress.com/ (Author information current at time of publication.)

This “spree killing,” which is a killing of three or more unrelated individuals without a cooling-off period, has been widely attributed as the United States’ first mass shooting. However, earlier incidents, such as a 1903 shooting in Winfield, Kansas, in which nine were killed and twelve injured, and various historical racially motivated acts of violence against Native Americans and enslaved Africans also meet the standards of a mass shooting. Nevertheless, news media outlets have often listed Unruh’s shooting as the first because it was the first to attract widespread news coverage.

In his confession to the crime, Unruh cited deteriorating relationships with his neighbors as a motive, claiming that he resented their “derogatory remarks about [his] character.” He also insinuated that neighborhood boys had mocked him for being homosexual and carrying on relationships with men in Philadelphia. The night before the shooting, when Unruh returned home to Camden late after seeing a movie, he found that someone had ripped out a gate he and his father, Samuel Unruh (1893-1953), had built as a shortcut out of their yard at 3202 River Road. He concluded this had been done by his next-door neighbor, Maurice Cohen (1910-49).

The following morning, after eating breakfast, Unruh allegedly threatened his mother, Frieda Unruh (1898-1985), with a wrench before she ran up the street in distress to a friend’s home. At 9:30 a.m., he left through the back door armed with a 9-millimeter Luger P08 pistol and cut through an alley to enter the shoe repair shop of John Pilarchik (1922-49). Walking up to the counter, Unruh shot Pilarchik through the head and chest. Turning left, Unruh went to the adjacent barbershop owned by Clark Hoover (1916-49) and with a single shot killed Hoover and Orris Smith (1943-49), a 6-year-old boy getting a haircut before he was due to start first grade the following day.

A Son, Hidden, Survives

Unruh continued to the pharmacy owned by his neighbors, the Cohens, on the corner of River Road and Thirty-Second Street. As he approached, he encountered an insurance salesman, James Hutton (1904-49), and shot him at point-blank range when he did not move out of the way fast enough. Leaving Hutton’s body in the doorway, Unruh pursued Maurice Cohen upstairs to his second-floor apartment. Cohen tried to escape through a window onto the roof, but Unruh shot at him twice, causing Cohen to fall onto Thirty-Second Street, where he died. Unruh also murdered Cohen’s wife, Rose (1911-49), who managed to hide her 12-year-old son, Charles (1937-2009), in a closet. Unruh then shot Maurice Cohen’s mother, Minnie (1886-1949), as she tried to call the police from a bedroom.

Crossing River Road, he tried to enter the American Store grocery market, but after finding the door locked he spotted a gray Nash coupe pulling to the curb outside the Cohen’s pharmacy and shot the driver, Alvin Day (1925-49), an RCA television repairman. He then moved up the street and entered a tavern owned by Frank Engel (1910-83), but he found the bar empty and fired into the front window of an apartment at 3208 River Road, killing 2-year-old Thomas Hamilton (1947-49) before turning his attention to a tailor shop owned by Thomas Zegrino (1911-93). In the shop’s back room, Unruh found Zegrino’s wife, Helga (1921-49), a schoolteacher, shot her once, then attempted to break into the neighboring delicatessen and luncheonette.

Finally, Unruh encountered a blue Chevrolet coupe stopped at River Road’s intersection with Thirty-Second Street. Unruh fired once at the driver, Helen Wilson (1912-49), and missed but hit her 9-year-old son John (1940-49) in the neck. He fired again, striking Helen and her mother, Emma Matlack (1881-1949). Moving back through the alley, Unruh entered a home at 942 N. Thirty-Second Street, where he wounded Madeline Harrie (1912-2003) and attempted to murder her 16-year-old son, Armand (1933-2003) but ran out of ammunition. Unruh pistol-whipped Armand and retreated to his apartment at 9:42 a.m.—the whole ordeal unfolding over just twelve minutes.

Unruh later surrendered after a standoff with the police. Prosecutors brought charges for thirteen counts of “willful and malicious slayings with malice aforethought” and three counts of “atrocious assault and battery.” However, Unruh was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and deemed incompetent to stand trial. He was confined to the maximum-security Vroom Building at the Trenton State Hospital for the next sixty years until his death at age 88 on October 19, 2009. The mass shooting has continued to be a touchstone for media commentaries on contemporary instances of spree killings in the United States.

Matt Fulton is an independent writer, filmmaker, and an English graduate student at Rutgers University—Camden. He is the author of a series of spy novels, two short horror films, and The Walk, a one-act play dramatizing the story of Howard Unruh and the Camden mass shooting. (Author information current at date of publication.)

In the early 1980s, Philadelphia, along with New York and Los Angeles, saw the first diagnoses of illnesses later understood to be the AIDS virus. Because of this historical relevance, Sharon Pinkenson (b. 1948) of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office suggested to Jonathan Demme (1944-2017), the film’s director, that he set his production in Philadelphia as a tribute to the people affected by the disease. Originally, Demme was in search of another major city for his film. However, after spending time in Philadelphia and realizing it to be a symbol of independence, exuding at times a culture of tolerance and brotherhood, Demme found it an ideal location to host a story about discrimination and prejudice.

In the film, Tom Hanks (b. 1956) plays the role of Andy Beckett, who contracts AIDS while simultaneously ascending the ranks of a prestigious Philadelphia law firm. Andy is a passionate, knowledgeable, and dedicated lawyer, who in the beginning of the film wins an argument before a judge over the environmental toxicity of building materials used by a company that his firm represents. Despite his initial success, Andy is dismissed from the firm after his colleagues discover that he is infected with AIDS. The plot develops around Andy’s wrongful termination and his exposure of the firm’s true motives for firing him. Andy eventually gains the sympathy of an African American lawyer, Joe Miller, played by Denzel Washington (b. 1954), who decides to represent Andy after identifying with the prejudice he faces as a victim of AIDS.

A number of legal and social initiatives at the time of the filming and release of Philadelphia similarly advocated for those affected by the illness. The federal Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, prohibited termination of an employee solely because of an illness, including AIDS, or other circumstance brought upon them involuntarily. The AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania, a nonprofit law firm founded in 1988, specialized in assisting AIDS victims by taking on cases such as workplace discrimination, harassment, and estate settlements. These initiatives sought to challenge employers who asserted probable cause when dismissing a queer or infected individual from a job. As in Andy’s case in the film, victims argued that the illness did not inhibit them from performing their work duties and therefore should not be a basis for firing or otherwise quarantining them from society.

While vested in social issues confronting Philadelphia and beyond, the film also documents a panorama of locations across the city in the early 1990s. Its opening scene and many interludes feature views of the skyline, including buildings such as One Liberty Place and City Hall. In one instance, the film shows the charred remains of One Meridian Plaza, the high-rise on Fifteenth Street across from City Hall that was condemned after a 1991 fire that took the lives of three firefighters. On Market Street, the Mellon Bank Building played the role of headquarters of Beckett’s prestigious law firm, and a building at Nineteenth and Chestnut Streets served as the law office of Joe Miller, the lawyer who represents Andy in his wrongful dismissal suit. The climax of the film takes place in and around City Hall, which served as the site of the court case that is the pivotal moment in Andy’s story.

Philadelphia earned two Academy Awards, one for Hanks as best actor and the other for best original song, “The Streets of Philadelphia,” by Bruce Springsteen. While garnering critical praise and popularity, the film received mixed responses from the gay community. Some questioned Demme’s knowledge of gay sexuality in his representation of the relationship between Andy and Miquel, played by Antonio Banderas (b. 1960). Others, however, praised the production for its advocacy of an issue towards which the rest of society was dismally silent. Philadelphia prevailed at a time when AIDS was both widespread and grossly misunderstood, and by penetrating the social ignorance towards the disease the film taught people to empathize with affected individuals instead of shun them for their malady.

Damiano Consilvio is a Ph.D. student at the University of Rhode Island and studies the ways in which digital technologies can enhance the practice of textual editing. His book project, Ethan Frome: A Digital Scholarly Edition, is forthcoming.

The 1965 Reminder picket, organized by the East Coast Homophile Organization (ECHO), responded to a similar successful picket at the White House in April 1965. The leader of the Washington demonstration, Frank Kameny (1925-2011), together with Philadelphia activist Barbara Gittings (1932-2007), helped orchestrate the 1965 picket in Philadelphia in just three months. Kameny insisted that everyone participating in the demonstration wear business-appropriate dress in an effort to show the normalness and employability of the homosexual community. The emphasis on societal conformity led some to question whether the Reminders represented all homosexual people, especially transgender individuals.

Projecting an appearance of normality was of particular importance to Kameny, who had fought a protracted legal battle with the federal government from 1958 to 1961 over his dismissal from public service due to his sexual orientation. With Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell as a background, the professionally dressed picketers carried placards demanding equal treatment under the law for more than two hours in front of a sizable crowd.

At the time of the 1965 march, the demonstration constituted the largest known demonstration for homosexual issues in the United States. The “Annual Reminders” also became the first such demonstrations to be repeated over consecutive years (1965-69).

The Reminders reflected broader trends in civil rights activism in their organization, evolution, and eventual dissolution. While the pickets were peaceful, they were a step up from sit-ins such as the Dewey’s Lunch Counter sit-in by gender-variant teenagers just months earlier, in May 1965. In the mid to late 1960s, civil rights demonstrations became more overt and confrontational, a trend that culminated for the homosexual movement with the Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969, in New York City. The final Reminder Day protest occurred that year on July 4. Although forty-five individuals participated, the organizers concluded that the course of homosexual activism had been changed with the events of Stonewall and so the Reminders were put aside in favor of events that evolved into the pride parades that continued into the twenty-first century.

In 2005, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission placed a marker at Sixth and Chestnut Streets, near Independence Hall, to commemorate the Annual Reminders as a pivotal moment in the homosexual movement. In 2015, a weekend-long celebration and reenactment paid tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of the first Reminder Day picket. The placement of the marker, as well as the continued celebration of the Reminder Days, sought to assure that Philadelphia’s contribution to homosexual activism would have a place in history alongside Stonewall.

Alaina Noland is a graduate student in history at Rutgers-Camden. (Author information current at time of publication.)