In addition to championing gay rights, Kight fought for other social causes. Kight famously organized a week-long demonstration outside Barney’s Beanery, a well-known Hollywood bar, which was displaying a sign that read “Fagots Stay Out.” This was the first major protest organized by the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front (which Kight co-founded), a sister organization of New York City’s Gay Liberation Front, which had formed after the Stonewall uprisings in 1969. “He was fearless.”Īs a reminder to remain vigilant, Kight kept a copy of the anti-gay sign from Barney’s Beanery in his home. “In those days, you were risking your well-being,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky told the LA Times. Kight advocated for gay rights at a time when harassment, discrimination, and violence against gay people was not only common, but widely accepted as a social norm. Kight described experiences of police violence in an interview with historian Eric Marcus in 1989.
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.