Brenda Howard wore a bright pink button that perhaps said it all: “Bi, Poly, Switch — I know what I want.”

A ferocious and radical activist, Howard, who was bisexual, vehemently supported and participated in the antiwar and feminist movements, as well as the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists’ Alliance (she was the chair for several years). And Howard never went quietly. “Though she was humble, she could be loud when needed,” wrote bi activist and author Tom Limoncelli. Friends with many inside the Stonewall Inn the night of the uprising, Howard created a one-month Stonewall anniversary rally in July 1969. Then, one year after Stonewall, she and a committee planned Gay Pride Week and the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade. Often called “The Mother of Pride,” Howard’s week and parade evolved into the annual New York City Pride march and Pride celebrations we now know around the world.

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To assemble the parade and the first gay pride week, Howard and the committee met at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first gay and lesbian bookstore in America, at 15 Christopher Street. With the bookstore’s mailing list, they got word out about the parade. Committee member L. Craig Schoonmaker suggested the word “Pride” for the event. “A lot of people were very repressed, they were conflicted internally, and didn’t know how to come out and be proud. That’s how the movement was most useful, because they thought, ‘Maybe I should be proud,’” Schoonmaker said in 2015.

The parade was scheduled for June 28, 1970. At first, only a relative few showed up for the parade’s 2 PM start time, set to travel 51 blocks, from Greenwich Village to Central Park. Police, there to protect the marchers, had to urge those who did show up to begin at ten after two. As if waiting to see if others would go first, people first trickled into the parade and then showed up in droves, growing louder and louder, eventually forming a thousands-strong mass of people 20 blocks long.

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It was, to say the least, a success.

“[If] you needed some kind of help organizing some type of protest or something in social justice?” said Larry Nelson, Howard’s partner from 2000 until her death in 2005, who also gave her that aforementioned button. “All you had to do was call her and she’ll just say when and where.”

Throughout her lifetime, Howard was unapologetic about her sexuality, which included kink and polyamory, and worked for decades to increase understanding and visibility related to them. She also worked as a phone sex operator in the 1980s, praised by her boss Lisa Verruso for “how much fun Brenda had with phone fantasy. She was able to voice what people wanted,” and was “always up for something creative.” Howard co-chaired the leather contingent of the Second National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights in 1987. That year she also founded the New York Area Bisexual Network (NYABN), which sought to establish community and visibility for bisexual people in the New York area, and still exists today.

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