This story originally published online at The 9th Street Journal.
As Durham prepares for the city’s annual Pride parade on September 27, an official commemoration of the very first gay rights march in the state is in the works.
The new historical marker will recognize a 1981 Durham protest called Our Day Out that is considered North Carolina’s first Pride March. It will be the first N.C. historical marker to recognize the roots of the state’s Pride celebrations.
“This would be the first marker to use the LGBTQ letters on the marker, and the first one that’s overtly about North Carolina Pride, but I don’t suspect it’ll be the last one,” said Leslie Leonard, administrator of the North Carolina Highway Historical Markers Program.
The Our Day Out marker will read, “First LGBTQ Pride March in N.C., June 27, 1981. Advocated for rights & visibility. Sparked by deadly assault at Little River, 10 miles North.”
Now in production, the sign will be installed downtown in 2026, the exact location to be determined by state Department of Transportation.
A brutal attack
The 1981 march was spurred by a hate crime that killed a Mebane man. On April 12, 1981, men wielding large sticks attacked sunbathers at a stretch of Little River known to be frequented by gay men. Four men were injured. Mark DeMarais, Darrel Jones and Jerry Michael Penny recovered, while Ronald Antonevitch succumbed to his injuries and died on April 15, 1981.
Penny has long been active in Durham’s LGBT community, including owning a gay nightclub called Boxer’s for many years. He survived the attacks and remembers them vividly.
“It was thrust upon me, this assault,” Penny said. “But yet, still, it’s kind of astonishing to think that something that you were involved in, there’s a historical marker for. I’d much rather be remembered for my clubs or something like that, but I’ll take what I get.”
In addition to running Boxer’s, Penny also sponsored gay sports teams and events for HIV and AIDS victims.
“I contributed a lot,” he said “The flags you walk under during gay Pride—if they’re still the same ones— purchased those and donated those to gay Pride and all kinds of stuff like that. So it’s much nicer to be remembered for something like that than having your teeth knocked out, you know?”
Even so, Penny helped keep the story of Little River alive.
“On my Facebook page, for the past 10 years or so, on the anniversary of the event, I generally post the event and all the clippings and stuff that I saved from the papers. And so eventually it got to be known again. And that’s a really good thing, because, I mean, truly, no one even remembered it after about 15 years.”
Remembering Ronald Antonevitch
When Rougemont resident Whitney Barkley-Denney read online about the attacks at Little River and the death of Ronald Antonevitch, she didn’t want him to be forgotten again.
“This guy died, and we still know not a ton about him, in this horrific way,” said Barkley-Denney. “And then there just really is not much remembrance of him …. and so I thought, ‘Well, what can I do?’”
Barkley-Denney decided to apply for a historical marker recognizing the Little River attacks and the subsequent Our Day Out march. She compiled all the historical documentation she could find, reaching out to those who lived through the events such as Penny and Wendy Jacobs, now a Durham County Commissioner.
“You might not have time to go find a book about the history of Pride in Durham …,” Barkley-Denney said. “But if you’re just walking down the street and you see this historic marker, and you stop and you read it, you know that’s going to stick with you, that something important happened there.”
NC’s first Pride March
Hooper Schultz, a history Ph.D. candidate at UNC-Chapel Hill, stressed that the 260-some people who gathered for the 1981 march did so under different circumstances than Durham Pride today.
“A lot of activists who were involved in Our Day Out, were not thinking of it as a Pride Parade, they were thinking of it as a parade against brutality … it had a much sharper edge,” said Schultz, who worked on a Museum of Durham History project focused on Our Day Out and gay rights organization in Durham throughout the 1980s.
“There were many of them that were wearing paper bags over their heads,” said Schultz.
LGBTQ rights have come under renewed assault in much of the country of late—and even in Durham, the county commissioners recently withdrew sponsorship from this year’s Durham Pride parade for fear of losing federal funding, WUNC reports. Nevertheless, Durham Pride is now a community fixture, with many corporate sponsors.
For local advocates like Schultz and Barkley-Denney, both the history immortalized by the marker and the public representation of the LGBT community are significant.
“I think that it’s really important we remember where we came from, particularly in this time when there are so many attacks on the LGBT community, particularly trans folks,” Barkley-Denney said. “That we remember that we came a long way, and we still have a long way to go.”
For those interested in learning more about the history of Durham Pride, Durham Parks and Recreation has announced two special events this September. The Little River Pride Paddle, a two-hour kayak and canoe tour down the river, will be on September 20. In addition, a Durham Pride walking tour will be held every Saturday until the end of the month.
The Durham Pride Parade takes place September 27 from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m.
Comment on this story at [email protected].