Gay Pioneers Marker — Annual Reminders at Independence Hall

Every Fourth of July from 1965 to 1969, a single-file line of demonstrators walked in front of Independence Hall carrying signs demanding something almost unimaginable at the time: basic civil rights for homosexual Americans. They called the pickets the Annual Reminders — a reminder that the promises signed inside that building did not yet apply to them. The first picket, on July 4, 1965, drew about forty activists from New York, Washington and Philadelphia, organized chiefly by Frank Kameny and Philadelphia's Barbara Gittings. The dress code was strict — jackets and ties, dresses — because the point was to look like citizens, not outcasts. These were the first sustained, organized LGBT demonstrations in US history, running four full years before Stonewall. After the 1969 uprising, the organizers moved the energy to New York, where the first Pride march in 1970 explicitly carried the Reminders' legacy forward. In 2005 Pennsylvania erected the blue state historical marker here — the first state marker in the nation commemorating LGBT civil rights. Days after the Supreme Court's marriage-equality ruling in 2015, James Obergefell laid a wreath at this marker during the movement's 50th-anniversary celebrations, closing a circle the picketers had opened. What you see today: the marker stands on the public sidewalk at the northwest corner of 6th and Chestnut, facing Independence Hall — viewable free, any hour. Independence Hall itself requires timed National Park Service tickets. Two blocks from the Gayborhood's other markers, it makes the natural start of a Philadelphia LGBT history walk.