On July 4, 1965, 40 people gathered outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia for what became the first “annual reminder” demonstration on behalf of civil rights for gays.
For this year’s 50-year commemoration, thousands attended a ceremony that included a re-enactment of the initial protest.
The milestone, which came barely a week after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling affirming same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, was marked by several Philadelphia museums, including the National Museum of American Jewish History across the street from Independence Hall. When the ruling was announced on the morning of June 26, the museum waived all admission fees in celebration.
“Mazel tov,” proclaimed a sign on the building’s facade.
A placard expressing a similar sentiment is among the items featured in the museum’s new exhibition, “The Pursuit of Happiness: Jewish Voices for LGBT Rights,” which highlights the contributions of Jews to the gay rights movement.
“Jews, who are only a very small percentage of the American public, have been very engaged in [all] civil rights struggles in this country,” said Marc Silber, creator of the Stonewall National Museum and Archives, a museum of gay history in Florida.
In 2013, a poster with the words “Mazel tov (to everyone),” in the six hues of the gay pride flag, was held aloft by Cody Owen Pomeranz outside the Supreme Court on the day the justices struck down a key provision of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages.
It appeared in news photographs and caught the attention of Philadelphia museum officials, who tracked down Pomeranz and secured his donation of the poster.
“We thought it was a joyous and culturally relevant expression of the role Jews have been able to play in the LGBT rights movement,” said Yael Eytan, the museum’s director of marketing.
The exhibition, which runs through October, focuses on three Jewish pioneers of the American gay rights movement: Frank Kameny, an astronomer who unsuccessfully appealed his firing from a federal job in 1957 because he was gay; Clark Polak, a Philadelphia businessman whose magazine, Drum, advocated for gay rights; and Martha Shelley, the president of a New York City lesbian organization, Daughters of Bilitis, who in 1970 fought the National Organization of Women’s exclusion of lesbians from prominence in the feminist movement.
Among the items featured is a 1971 poster for Kameny’s failed congressional campaign and a photograph of him at the 1965 demonstration. There’s also a copy of the 1985 issue of “A New Haggadah: A Jewish Lesbian Seder”; and a 1970 issue of Gay Youth’s Gay Journal published by Mark Segal, the present-day publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News.
The museum also set up a Tumblr site to encourage the sharing of perspectives about being an LGBT Jew in America and, on July 2, hosted a panel discussion that included Douglas Hallward-Driemeier, the attorney who successfully argued the marriage equality case before the Supreme Court.