COLUMBUS, Ohio — Columbus Pride is a huge celebration that draws people from across the Midwest, but the first time marchers took to the city’s streets, it was a radical act.
"We were celebrating the idea that we were homosexuals, and we were not going to stay in the closet any longer,” Douglas Whaley said.
Whaley was a founding member of Stonewall Columbus and helped organize the first Pride March in 1981. The organization was formed in response to Jerry Falwell’s attempt to establish a Moral Majority headquarters in the city. Although a national movement was underway to secure equal rights for LGBTQ+ people, they still faced a lot of discrimination across the country – including in Columbus.
“We were fueled by anger,” Whaley said. “You just get tired of being discriminated against over something you have no control.”
Although Columbus Stonewall aimed to get the entire state involved in the first Pride March, the organizers had no idea how many people would show up. Whaley was shocked when several hundred people came to participate.
"We were thrilled. The greatest high I’ve ever had, natural high, in my life was after the parade,” he said. “We all just gathered and walked down the street. We were dumbfounded by what we had done. Just this sense of joy.”
The steps taken by the first few hundred Pride marchers paved the way for hundreds of thousands of people after them. The Columbus Pride March now welcomes more than 750,000 people to the city each year.
It’s a legacy that Whaley and his fellow organizers didn’t know they’d leave behind.
“We were just celebrating the fact that we existed, and we were a force in Columbus,” he said.