Leah Wittenberg
Leah Wittenberg is a mental health counselor who lives in Burlington and was one of the founders of CommonWomon. She is also a cartoonist.
Well, you know, this is my favorite part of the story, really, because I came to Burlington in 1975 and came out kind of shortly thereafter. And so let's see, that was eight years before the march and was involved with the women's community and doing rape crisis work and different things, but also involved in the what we would have called the lesbian/feminist movement thing, really burgeoning movement. And we always went out of Vermont to do what whatever we had to do. We would make these crazy mad dashes to Boston, to New Words, women's bookstore there, that we would just be like, oh, my God, we couldn't wait till we got there to read what people were talking about. It's like this explosion of of both the feminist stuff and the lesbian stuff. It was just an unbelievable time. And similarly, we would go on Pride Day, which was, you know, since 1969. We would go—I'd gone to Boston, I went to New York, I went to Montreal, to all the cities to march and feel be part of that that. So we knew about Pride marches and, but honestly, I can't remember what was happening in that moment in 1983. I know we were in, I think we were in Laurie Larson's apartment. Me, Lucy and Laurie and the three of us, you know, saying what are you going to do for Pride Day this year or whatever we said, you know, “why don't we have a pride day here?” Was that, you know, spontaneous moment of combustion really of a - why not? And that wasn't that, I think was probably part of, like a collective consciousness. I think it was also probably happening in towns, you know, all over the place.
All of the people who were trying to work to make this happen, we, it was just like. I mean, I know we got Peggy and we got Howdy involved, and then Jim Nelson, those are the main people I remember. And it just seemed like. We said, “OK, what has to be done?” You know, and which we had wrote that letter to the, that ended up being the infamous, infamous letter that we wrote to the city council thinking, saying we want to get endorsements and, and I think that was - I wrote that, so that was kind of one of the things I got involved in and, I think I might have maybe said this to you, but, when the, the killings happened in, in Florida, in Orlando, two years ago now at that club and there was a rally and I went to this rally at City Hall Park and there on the same steps we had stood for the first Pride march were the clergy. They were—you know, all the clergy out there. The police chief, the mayor, I mean—and you know what was so interesting to me to feel that difference, to feel like nobody stood with us on that first pride march. I mean, even though we had better not say in here other than, say, certain mayors.
Those times would just this burgeoning of self-expression, because, you know, we, we hadn't realized or some of us hadn't realized that we hadn't been expressed or expressing ourselves. And so when it started to come out, it took us everywhere, you know, was both, both as the lesbian part, but also just the power of being a woman. I was an English major in college, but and I was straight, and, and I got out of college in 1971. I realized it was all men. It was all men I'd been reading and I had my you know, my head kind of blew off with when I realized that. And, you know, I started. And that's why we started running to New Words to the bookstore because they were reprinting, you know, things that had been written eons ago. And it was just an amazing time.