Doughnuts, drag queens, and the night everything changed: The real story of Pride (Part 1)
Image of an LA Cooper Do-nuts Cafe thought to be the one where one of the first US LGBTQ uprisings began. Still from Kent Mackenzie's 1961 film "The Exiles". Source: Wikipedia.
Most people think Pride started at Stonewall in 1969, but the real story begins 10 years earlier in a 24-hour doughnut shop in Los Angeles that nobody talks about.
The Cooper Do-nuts riot
In May 1959, Cooper Do-nuts on Main Street in downtown LA sat near 2 gay bars. The doughnut shop was one of those rare places where everyone was genuinely welcome - drag queens, transgender women, sex workers, hustlers all mixing with the regular crowd over coffee.
When the cops showed up on their standard harassment patrol that night, they tried to arrest 5 people and cram them all into one patrol car. The crowd decided they'd had enough.
What happened next sounds almost comical now - people started throwing doughnuts at the police. Then coffee cups started flying, then paper plates. The cops were so overwhelmed they actually ran away without making any arrests. John Rechy was there that night and later wrote: "The street was bustling with disobedience. Gay people danced about the cars."
Few people know about this. No newspapers covered it, the police destroyed their records years later as standard practice, and the people who fought back were exactly the ones history tends to forget. But for that night in 1959, they proved that fighting back was possible.
The Stonewall riot
Fast forward to 28 June 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. The police showed up for another raid, but this time everything changed.
The Stonewall was run by the Mafia and had become a refuge for everyone other gay bars turned away - trans women, drag queens, homeless kids, people of colour. These were people who literally had nowhere else to go.
Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine led the raid at 1:20 AM, expecting the usual routine where everyone would go quietly, pay their fines, and the bar would reopen in a few days. But when officers roughed up a lesbian (many say it was Stormé DeLarverie) who complained her handcuffs were too tight, the crowd of 100-150 people outside finally snapped.⁴
It started with pennies being thrown, then bottles, then bricks. The police actually retreated into the bar and barricaded themselves inside while protesters used a parking meter as a battering ram. The uprising sparked protests over several nights with thousands joining in, chanting "Gay Power!" through the streets.
The people who started Pride
The leaders of these uprisings were people society had rejected multiple times over, and their names deserve to be remembered.
Marsha P. Johnson was a Black trans woman who became legendary on the second night of Stonewall when she climbed a lamppost and dropped a heavy bag onto a police car. When people asked about her gender, she'd tell them "Pay it no mind." She later co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) with Sylvia Rivera to house homeless LGBTQ+ youth.
Sylvia Rivera was only 17 during Stonewall, a Puerto Rican trans woman who dedicated much of her life to fighting for the people our movement kept trying to push aside. In 1973, she jumped onto the stage at a Pride rally to defend drag queens after the organisers and speakers were criticising them.⁷
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, another Black trans woman who was at Stonewall that night, went on to spend decades advocating for incarcerated trans people.
Stormé DeLarverie was a biracial person often described as a butch lesbian who many credit with actually sparking the Stonewall uprising when she shouted "Why don't you guys do something?" as police dragged her to their van. She later became known as the "guardian of lesbians in the Village," patrolling the streets to keep people safe.
These were the people who helped spark that moment and gave life to what would become the Pride movement - not despite being trans, Black, sex workers, or homeless, but precisely because they were the ones with nothing left to lose and everything to fight for.
The first Pride
Exactly one year later on 28 June 1970, something remarkable happened. Instead of commemorating Stonewall with another riot, activists organised a march. They called it "Christopher Street Liberation Day" and several thousand people walked from Greenwich Village to Central Park.
What made this revolutionary was the complete rejection of respectability politics. No dress codes, no requirements to look or act a certain way - just come as you are. Instead of the apologetic tone of earlier gay rights demonstrations, this was a march of visibility and pride. The message was clear: we're here, we're queer, and we're not going anywhere.
Craig Rodwell led the organisation of the New York march, working with Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy, and Linda Rhodes. That same weekend, coordinated marches took place in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They'd created the template for Pride as we know it - marching through city streets, making ourselves impossible to ignore, and doing it every June to remember where we came from.
Pride crosses the Atlantic
By 1972, Pride had arrived in the UK. On 1 July, around 2,000 people marched from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park in the UK's first official Pride event. The Gay Liberation Front UK, which Bob Mellors and Aubrey Walter had founded after visiting America, organised the whole thing.
According to participants, the police treated marchers "like criminals," but they marched anyway. From London, Pride spread across Britain - Brighton in 1973, Manchester's Mardi Gras in 1991, and even Belfast by 1991.
European Pride developed its own distinct characteristics. Amsterdam held their first Gay Liberation Day in 1977 and later created their famous canal boat parade in 1996. Paris saw 10,000 people march in 1981. Berlin launched Christopher Street Day in 1979.
While Stonewall provided inspiration, these movements weren't just American imports. France's FHAR (Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire) grew directly from their May 1968 leftist politics. Spain's Pride arose during the democratic transition after Franco. Each country took the core idea of Pride and shaped it to fit their own culture and politics.¹⁶
Part 2 continues with Harvey Milk, the rainbow flag, and how Pride survived its biggest challenge yet when corporate sponsors abandoned us in 2025.
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