A Ray Hill Houston TBLG History Moment

TransGriot Note: Ray Hill is one of our iconic leaders here in the Houston area who has been in the BTLG rights fight locally, statewide and nationally since the 60's. 

He recently wrote a status update on his Facebook page in which he shared his thoughts about local LGBT history events that were transpiring when the TransGriot was a teenager. 

This is one of those moments in which when one of your iconic GLBT elders are speaking or writing down their thoughts for posterity, it's shut up and listen time. 

Ray also said this in the last sentence of it.  'Share this with your friends so we can celebrate today's victories in the context of where we came from and what we can do looking forward.'

I agree, which is why I'm posting it.   And now, here's Ray Hill.The GLBT movement(s) have come a long way since I began writing about the need of change in 1966: One could go to prison in all states if caught in gay/lesbian intimacy; If caught in the opposite gender's clothing; going to jail was a given; The suicide rate was the highest than among any other class of people and violence against us was rarely investigated and even more rarely prosecuted; The police themselves were frequently responsible for violence against us; Our jobs and educations could be rendered insecure after every raid on our gathering places; Our birth families more frequently rejected us than not.

I could go on because the list of oppression is endless. We had no defenses. No one except those genetically gender varied was out of the closets and they faced constant ridicule wherever they went.

In Houston a few of us began to talk about how to start an effort toward change. In 1967, The Promethean Society organized meetings. In 1968 three of us began to confront the authorities about policy changes. The authorities laughed at us even GLBT people objected to what we were doing because they had learned how to survive in the then current oppression and feared we would cause more.

In 1970 KPFT-FM went on air for the first time.  In 1973, the felony Sodomy Law was replaced by section 21.06 a misdemeanor.  In 1975 a handful us founded Houston Gay Political Caucus and Wilde N Stein began to give the community a broadcast home; In 1976 we had a Pride March on Main Street downtown (The mayor (Annise Parker) and I may be the only participants that remember that event) but in 1977 everyone remembers when Anita Bryant came to town and those of us who greeted her never returned to our closets; 1978 brought Town Meeting I, during which many of the enduring institutions that still serve our community were founded and the Transgender movement was born.

In 1980 a few of us gathered at Bering Church to found the Kaposi's Sarcoma Committee in concern for dire health indications. That organization became the K.S./A.I.D.S. Foundation in 1982 when the term AIDS was chosen at the Paris Conference, it is now AIDS Foundation Houston. What followed was at once the most devastating and the most character building part of out history, Our collective caring and organizing against the greatest pandemic in recent Centuries is remarkable and say more about who we are and what we can do than anything in anyone's memory.

I have outlived all the others who have a memory of the scope of that progress and most of the community have no grasp of where we were and how we got to where we are.

Change comes rapidly now but without the foundation laid forty years ago none of this would be possible at all.