I went to the 1987 March on Washington when I was a sophomore in college at UNC-Chapel Hill. I was young for a sophomore, just a few months past my 18th birthday.  I had found out about the  march from the campus gay group, then called CGLA, and several of us decided to go. We were quite aware of the relevance of politics to our lives, partly because Jesse Helms represented our state in the US Senate. He had begun campaigning on anti-gay issues and had even mentioned our student group in some of his diatribes, so we took national politics personally. I also knew fellow students with HIV (AIDS back then), and that contributed to my understanding of how important political action was.

A bus (or perhaps a couple of buses) went to the march from the Triangle Area. We signed up for the bus trip at Internationalist Books, run by the late, great Bob Sheldon; at his store we also bough pink triangle pins which we wore proudly to the march. One the bus was a mix of college students and people from the larger Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. The bus ride was really the first time I'd ever seen gay people who weren't college students, so that was amazing enough. Someone on the bus had brought t-shirts from a women's center in Durham,  so we wore those.

I do remember that I had never seen anything like it. It was like stepping onto another planet. There were gay people of every possible variety. I specifically remember seeing radical faeries and leather dykes (neither of which I had ever seen or even heard of), a big MCC contingent, PFLAG, and student groups (of which we were one). Old people, young people, people with kids.  One of our fellow students had gone up early to meet up with ACT-UP folks and was going to do the arrest at the Supreme Court, and I remember being very impressed with that. I had gone to high school near NIH in Bethesda and knew about the growing critique of federal AIDS policy. I remember shouting "Shame!" as we walked past the Supreme Court and perhaps also the Justice Department. I also remember how incredibly moving the AIDS quilt was, and walking around crying as I looked at it.

I'm frustrated that my memories of the march itself are pretty vague. I went to several other big protests and marches in Washington while I was in my late teens and early twenties. I'm not even sure this was my first DC protest as a college student. At some point I'd gone up for a protest of US policy in Central America and South Africa, and I think that might have been the previous spring. I also was at the 1993 GLBT march, and I think at least one of the marches for women's lives. The memories blur together somewhat.