The movement eventually became what is known as the Center on Colfax today. In 1974, a civil court in Denver ruled that police could not enforce laws in a discriminatory matter or arrest gay community members for hugging, kissing, or holding hands in public. After three hours of testimony from 35 different speakers (with another 300 in attendance to offer support), four laws that unfairly impacted gay men were repealed, including the one that allowed police entrapment through solicitation. The GCD took this information to Denver’s City Council in October 1973. The group, called the Gay Coalition of Denver (GCD), found that 98 percent of those arrested in the early 1970s for “offer of lewd conduct” were gay men-arrests that were frequently made after a gay man unwittingly accepted a proposition from an undercover officer. In fact, the Center on Colfax was founded when a group of five people came together in 1972 to create a grassroots movement meant to expose the unjust treatment of gay men by Denver police.
Stonewall isn’t the only historical event that Fuller is talking about. I feel for individual police officers who have worked for years to gain acceptance on the force, but it ultimately came down to looking at the origins of pride.”
“The Black Lives Matter movements from last summer caused a lot of soul searching for us,” Fuller says.
