Excerpted from the memoir, “50 Years from Stonewall: A Gay American Life in a Time of Change” by John Knoebel

One of the other joys in those months with my 95th Street Collective was taking the subway down to the Village on warm weather evenings to see what was up. To me 1970 was the true “Summer of Christopher Street.” Many people said it was the first time that any street in New York had an ongoing nightly gay-presence. It’s where a whole new generation of out and proud gay men found they finally had a place to call home. That year the men’s late night cruising street had shifted from Greenwich Avenue between 6th and 7th Avenues to around the corner onto the first few blocks of Christopher Street making everything all the more busy. There was constant foot traffic up and down the street with guys meeting, making friends, cruising, laughing, dressing in outrageous clothes, getting stoned, and discovering a physical, public place of joy and family for themselves that had never existed before.

People who know the city well may remember that one side…

By Mark Horn

After Mark Segal left Gay Youth, I was elected the group chair. Gay Youth was probably more diverse than GLF, with pretty much equal representation between black and white members, along with a not-small group of Latinx members. Our members ranged from those whose families lived on Central Park West to those members who had been thrown out by their families and were living on the street. Long before the phrase “non-binary” entered the vocabulary, we had members who identified across a wide spectrum of gender identity. So the day Marsha and Sylvia came to a meeting, the only reason they stood out from the rest of our membership was that they were over the age of 21.

Poem by Fran Winant

with our banners and our smiles
we're being photographed
by tourists police and leering men
we fill their cameras
with 10,000 faces
bearing witness
to our own existence
in sunlight

By John Knoebel

In July of 1970, New York’s Gay Liberation Front was invited to participate in the first “United Nations World Youth Assembly.” This event was a weeklong gathering organized by the UN as part of its 25th-anniversary observance in which they brought over 600 youth…