As World Pride celebrates steps from the White House, LGBTQ pioneers call for a return to the movement’s roots in protest

By Chelsea Bailey, CNN

(CNN) — At 83, Paul Kuntzler, a pioneering LGBTQ rights activist, vividly recalls joining a picket line outside the White House that would change the course of American history.

“I was just 20 and was the only minor in a tiny gay rights movement consisting of about 150 people in five American cities,” Kuntzler recalled to CNN.

At the time, five decades ago, publicly declaring oneself to be gay could cost someone their job, their family, and even their home. But Kuntzler said he felt proud of who he was.

“I’ve always had a very positive idea about being gay, so I try to radiate that attitude towards other people,” he said.

He overcame his fear and joined the picket line. In doing so, he would become one the first Americans to bring the fight for gay rights to the steps of the White House.

“Of those 10 people who participated that day, I’m the only person who’s still living,” Kuntzler said.

Decades later – and mere steps from the White House – Washington, DC, is set to mark the 50th anniversary of Pride celebrations in the nation’s capital this weekend by hosting World Pride 2025. The global celebration honors the LGBTQ community and their ongoing fight for equality in the United States and around the world.

But the parades and parties that have come to define Pride will take place in the shadow of a presidential administration that has been openly hostile to the civil rights of LGBTQ Americans.

From the administration’s staunch anti-diversity stance and the military’s push to oust transgender servicemembers, to a looming US Supreme Court ruling that could upend health care for millions of LGBTQ Americans, the second Trump administration has ushered in a period of uncertainty and fear.

But pioneers in the fight for gay rights tell CNN the success of the gay rights movement in the United States is built on the shoulders of average men and women who had little power to fight back against the might of the US government, but who somehow found the courage – and the pride – to do so anyway.

The ‘arc of justice’ won’t bend on its own

When Candy Holmes first met then-President Barack Obama in 2009, she wanted more than just a photo op.

As a lesbian and a longtime federal employee, Holmes had been invited to the White House, she recalled, to witness the president issue a directive for federal agencies to extend benefits to same-sex couples.

The move was a step toward expanding rights for LGBTQ Americans. But as Holmes shook the president’s hand, she was determined not to waste the moment.

“We need more than just benefits,” she told Obama, noting his directive only applied to federal employees. “There’s a whole community that needs benefits – we need full citizenship.”

The president considered her comment, she recalled, then issued a challenge.

“OK, I hear that,” she remembers him saying. “Take this message back to the LGBTQ community – tell them to make me do it.”

Holmes vowed to do just that.

As Black, gay women, Holmes and her wife, Darlene Garner, said they live each day with the knowledge of all their ancestors endured – and how hard they had to fight – to secure their civil rights.

Progress in this country is not linear, Garner said. So instead of being paralyzed by that knowledge, Garner encouraged others to channel it into action.

“This is not the time to be passive, or silent, or hide away,” she said. “Change will not happen unless people demand justice for all.”

The couple were among the first to get married in the nation’s capital when DC legalized same-sex marriage in 2010.

It was a fitting, full-circle moment for Garner, who co-founded the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays in 1971 to force the burgeoning movement to fight for the equality of all LGBTQ people, including people of color.

“When you’re in your 20s, you have a lot of energy, a lot of passion, a lot of vision of how the world should be,” Garner said of the organization’s founding. “We knew disappointment, but we did not know failure.”

Garner went on to become a global leader in the Metropolitan Community Church, where she served as a reverend and an elder for decades. Holmes also took on a leadership position in the church, in addition to her job in the government, but they both never forgot their roots and passion for activism.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But King knew, Holmes and Garner both agreed, that the arc “doesn’t bend on its own.”

“We have to continue to apply pressure to help it bend,” Holmes said.

“There are many paths to justice,” Garner added. “It doesn’t really matter what path you’re walking on, but you gotta get on the road.”

‘It starts with the hearts and minds of individuals’

Not too long ago, Cleve Jones said he was grabbing drinks with friends at a gay bar in San Francisco when the conversation turned toward a tragic part of their shared history: the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

They tried to estimate the number of friends, neighbors and loved ones they’d lost – in San Francisco alone – as the virus tore through the gay community during the decade before treatment became available.

“We were talking about the horror days,” Jones said, “and we came up with a figure of somewhere around (20,000) to 25,000 people.”

They weren’t far off the mark. One study estimates nearly half of the gay men in the city had been diagnosed with AIDS by 1995.

At the bar that night, a younger man who was seated nearby overheard the conversation and cut in.

“He said, ‘You know, I know you old folks had a rough time of it, but really, you don’t need to exaggerate,’” Jones recalled.

The remark left him stunned – and angry. Jones, who himself is HIV-positive and is the founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, a community art project, has dedicated his life to memorializing those who died from AIDS during a pandemic that the government seemed all too eager to ignore, he said.

In 1987, during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, Jones displayed the memorial quilt on the National Mall for the first time, with each panel dedicated to someone who died from the disease.

In the decade before HIV treatment became widely available, the quilt returned to the mall nearly every year, forcing the country to reckon with the sheer number of lives lost to AIDS.

“I don’t think the younger generation in my community really quite understands their history,” Jones said. “They’ve never watched someone die of AIDS … They don’t have that visceral, deep understanding that comes when you witness it.”

If they did, Jones said, they would be just as outraged as he is by recent moves from the Trump administration to slash funding for HIV/AIDS research and services both at home and abroad – and moved to action.

Jones, who remains a lifelong activist and advocate for gay rights, said “misinformation and mythic legends” have been built up around leaders and locations that became central to LGBTQ history in the US.

But distilling their lives down to bullet points does them a disservice, Jones said, because it obscures the fact that gay rights pioneers like Harvey Milk were also just regular people who were bold enough to take a stand.

“Harvey was this kind of odd guy, you know, this skinny, gay, Jewish guy from New York,” Jones recalled of the man who became his mentor and friend.

“I would go with him on campaign stops and he could talk to anybody. I would watch the way he changed his tone and his vocabulary and focused on finding common ground.”

Milk, Jones said, forced people to discover their shared humanity, and in doing so, he was able to make change. Milk was assassinated in 1978. Jones said he’s tried to infuse Milk’s values into his lifelong career of activism.

But lately, he said, his work has been guided by the mantra, “If you take it for granted, they will take it away.”

“If you’re going to change the world, it starts with the hearts and minds of individuals,” he said. But, he added, people don’t need permission or a permit to challenge prejudice.

“You’ve got a permit. It’s called the Constitution.”

LGBTQ pioneer optimistic amid looming threats

Kuntzler joined a group called Mattachine Society at the height of the “Lavender Scare” – a period of intense, government-led, anti-gay discrimination that grew out of the witch hunt for “communists” during the McCarthy era.

In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order that banned homosexuals from working for the federal government and the military. Those who were outed would not only lose their jobs, but their names were often published in newspapers, which could cost them their families and their livelihoods.

“It was not unusual to come home from work and find two members of Naval Intelligence on your doorstep asking you to come down to the Navy Yard for questioning,” Kuntzler recalled.

His longtime partner, Stephen Brent Miller, was once interrogated for information about one of their friends, he said.

The Mattachine Society was initially founded in secret in 1950 to fight for the rights of “homophiles,” but it would go on to become one of the earliest and more consequential gay rights groups in the nation. By the time Kuntzler joined its Washington, DC, chapter in 1962, the organization was gearing up to take a more visible stand against the government’s treatment of gays.

Frank Kameny, the society’s co-founder, organized the first picket line for gay rights in front of the White House.

“When I got there, I looked across the street to see that there were like 30 news photographers waiting for the light to change,” Kuntzler recalled. “I was so unnerved by that, I kept hiding my face behind my picket.”

Inspired by the fight for civil rights, Kuntzler said the group continued to protest throughout the year in front of the Pentagon and Independence Hall in Philadelphia. They later filed several lawsuits challenging the government’s blatant discrimination against homosexual federal employees.

Kuntzler would go on to play a quiet but critical role in key moments of the gay rights movement for decades to come. Kameny, who was fired from his job in the US Army because he was gay, campaigned to become the first openly gay member of Congress. Kuntzler was his campaign manager.

Kuntzler also co-founded what became the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance and was the founding member of the Human Rights Campaign.

But by far his greatest achievement, Kuntzler said, was loving his partner, Stephen, openly for more than 40 years before he died.

Despite the looming threats from the Trump administration, Kuntzler said he remains optimistic.

“I’ve seen all this,” he said of the attacks by the government. “We couldn’t conceive back in the ‘60s that we’d make so much progress – that we’d be able to work in government, there would be elected officials who were openly gay, and we couldn’t conceive of the idea of marriage equality.”

They couldn’t imagine it, he said, but they fought for it anyway.

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