Introduction
The Freedom Day Committee (FDC) was a unique and democratic grassroots coalition that organized Seattle’s pride marches and rallies for almost two decades. We were all volunteers and many of us represented groups or were individual activists committed to bettering life for queer people. Some of us had roots in the social justice movements of the 1960s and some were new to advocating for change. In the process we all came to understand the power and the difficulty of coalition work, where we shared a goal but had different visions of how to reach it.
I focus on and give credit to the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) and the Stonewall Committee for L/G/B/T/Q Rights, two of the groups to which I belonged, and Radical Women (RW), for building FDC’s community approach to producing powerful pride events for almost twenty years. Inadvertently, FDC also functioned as an informal clearing house to help resolve issues facing the queer community, including a bitter cycle of rightwing legislative attacks and the dire AIDS crisis.
FSP, the Stonewall Committee, and RW could not have done it alone, but with their leadership and hard work the pride events were able to integrate multi-issue (intersectional in today’s terms) politics into the marches and rallies. I urge others to recognize the incredible strength of democratic coalition politics as the need to organize continues.
I used my collection of twenty-seven Seattle pride posters, spanning 1975 to 2002, as a structure for this article. Occasionally, I pull the posters out from my basement because someone asks to display them. In 2024, it was Bill Ross a former co-chair of the Freedom Day Committee, who was writing an article about the first time “bisexual” and “transgender” were added to the name of the event. That was 1992.
The Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) also asked to display them in an exhibit that commemorated fifty years of LGBTQ+ Pride in Seattle, where they were on display from mid-June to August 19, 2024. This became the time to donate them to the University of Washington Archives.
As I look through the collection, I am amazed at how the artwork on the posters graphically captures the dynamics of the times and the intense organizing done by unpaid lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, and queer people dedicated to commemorating the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The annual pride events are held in June and usually culminate in a march on the last Sunday of the month.
It is a great story.