We went to the cops, and the cops were like, ‘They were here first.’ And I was like, ‘But they don’t have a permit to be here!’”
“I was so angry that I had gone through all these hoops to get a permit and they just showed up. “They’d taken over the premises, and they had not gotten permits to be there,” O’Donovan says. O’Donovan led marchers on a new route from the state capitol down to the city council building, where the Utah Pride Festival is held today.Īnd this time, they arrived to find a handful of neo-Nazis waiting. At the second march, in 1991, turnout roughly doubled. And the drivers and the police had approved the route, but then they said, ‘Oh, shoot, this wasn’t a good idea, was it.’”īut aside from the horse encounters, it was, in fact, a pretty good idea. “That actually got really dangerous,” O’Donovan continues. “We were marching by, chanting and screaming,” says Connell “Rocky” O’Donovan, the march’s founder and a man introduced to me as “the local gay historian.” The horses, naturally, were startled - presumably at the sight of a vocal gay march in Salt Lake City, or perhaps at the ruckus itself. The biggest issue it ran into was that the route took marchers past a bunch of parked horse carriages, the sort tourists ride around the downtown.
Utah’s first Gay and Lesbian Pride March, in 1990, drew maybe 250 people.
