CHRISTOPHER ST. LIBERATION DAY, JUNE 28, 1970

Poem by Fran Winant

with our banners and our smiles
we're being photographed
by tourists police and leering men
we fill their cameras
with 10,000 faces
bearing witness
to our own existence
in sunlight
from Washington Maryland
Massachusetts Pennsylvania
Connecticut Ohio
Iowa Minnesota
from Harlem and the suburbs
the universities
and the world
we are women who love women
we are men who love men
we are lesbians and homosexuals
we cannot apologize
for knowing
what others refuse to know
for affirming
what they deny
we might have been
the women and men
who watched us and waved
and made fists
and gave us victory signs
and stood. there after we had passed
thinking of all they had to lose
and of how society punishes
its victims
who are all of us
in the end
but we are sisters and sisters
brothers and brothers
workers and lovers
we are together
we are marching
past the crumbling old world.
that leans toward us
in anguish from the pavement
our banners are sails
pulling us through the streets
where we have always been
as ghosts
now we are shouting our own words
we are a community
we are society
we are everyone

we are inside you
remember
all you were taught to forget
we are part of the new world
photographers
grim ·behind precise machines
wait to record
our blood and sorrow
and revolutionaries beside them
remark
love is not political
when we stand against our pain
they say
we are not standing against anything when we demand our total lives
they wonder
what we are demanding
cant you lie
cant you lie
they whisper they hiss

like fire in grass
cant you lie
and get on with the real work
our line winds
into Central Park
and doubles itself
in a snakedance
to the top of a hill
we cover the Sheep Mead ow
shouting
lifting our arms
we are marching into ourselves like a body
gathering its cells
creating itself
in sunlight
we turn to look back
on the thousands behind us
it seems we will converge
until we explode
sisters and sisters
brothers and brothers
together