Chris Cooper: The Closeted March on Washington

“Back when I was at Wake Forest it was right during a very transitional time in gay and lesbian civil rights in fact one of the seminal moments in the movement and in my life was the 1993 march on Washington where there was over a million gay and lesbian people present. You know a small contingent of Wake Forest students most of them who were actually closeted uh, not me, but went up there and it was transformative for us but it was also transformative for the movement where it became you know sort of the gay and lesbian movement sort of came… for a lack of a better word sort of righteous. So it was very identity politics focused um so I started out, that was ‘93 so It was very much it was very important then to identify yourself as gay and be sort of adamantly so and you know those structures, those identity structures, were very important then because we were fighting for fundamental civil rights.”

-Chris Cooper