"Sing if you're glad to be gay" belted out of the lead truck's PA system as the street parade made its way down Oxford Street, Sydney's "gay mile". Close to 2000 people joined in, singing along and chanting "out of the bars and into the streets, join us" as they headed for Kings Cross.

It was well into the night, June 24, 1978 and Sydney's gays were determined to finish off a day of political action with a Mardi Gras, a celebration of lesbian and gay pride with music, fancy dress, dancing and singing. Earlier, 400-strong, they'd marched through Sydney's CBD, banners held high, demanding the repeal of anti-gay laws and solidarity with gay struggles around the world. Then it was off to a public meeting on gay rights and finally the Mardi Gras.

The Mardi Gras lived up to its name - dressed up or dressed down, everyone was singing and dancing and having a ball. All the way through to Hyde Park.

And then the trouble started. Low level harassment at first, with the cops hassling the driver of the lead truck as he read out messages of support. When he wouldn't stop, they pulled him out of the truck, then confiscated it and the PA system.

Angrier, arms linked, the parade continued to Kings Cross, all the time the police pushing, telling the crowd to go one way, closing off streets - and someone reported seeing paddy wagons.

Finally reaching the Cross's El Alamein fountain, the mood was uglier as the police continued to crowd the parade. Unsure what would happen next, people started turning to go back along the parade route. As they did the paddy wagons appeared, police poured out and started laying into the crowd.

However, just like at Stonewall - the fightback after a police raid that launched the gay liberation movement in 1969, and the event Sydney marchers were commemorating - lesbians and gays had had enough. They weren't going to be pushed around any more. As the demonstrators fought back, throwing garbage bin lids and bottles at the cops, 53 were arrested. One lesbian vividly recalls "I was just wild, ecstatic and screaming up and down the street, ‘Up the lezzos!' I did get arrested for saying that".

The angry crowd wasn't about to let the cops go unchallenged. They followed the paddy wagons to the police station, chanting "Let them go!" to let those inside know they were there. One protester recalled the bail money pouring in "flowing in from pockets, from household kitties, from next week's rent".

By early Sunday morning all 53 had been charged and released and that day the June 24 activist group, Gay Solidarity Group, met to plan future protests, adding "drop the charges" to their earlier list of demands for gay rights.

The protests - and arrests - continued. Monday morning demonstrators gathered again as the 53 were brought before the courts. With the cops barricading the entrances few could get in, and as scuffles broke out another seven were arrested.

"The police were trying to break our spirit", recalled one of those at the Mardi Gras. But it only made people angrier - and stronger. It was "horrific and traumatic" but for many it was also "exhilarating...great and exciting". As one lesbian explained, "I felt I belonged to something and I was going somewhere... I was beginning to get an understanding of what politics and power were all about".

There were protest demonstrations in other major cities, with 600 marching in Melbourne on June 30. In Sydney 300 met on July 1 to organise the next protest. Two weeks after Mardi Gras, 2000 demonstrators retraced the June 24 route, carrying banners with slogans like "Lesbians Ignite!" The protests showed "we couldn't be put back in the closet".

However the police weren't finished. Hundreds of police had been mobilised and as the march reached the police station there was another confrontation and 13 more were arrested.

Six weeks later, hundreds of lesbians and gay men from all round Australia met in Sydney for that year's National Homosexual Conference. Again gays decided to march, this time with the added goal of confronting the anti-abortion Right to Life who were rallying in the city. Police were out in their hundreds and surrounded the gay activists halfway along the route, arresting another 74!

But many escaped, regrouped and headed off to confront the Right to Life. Again the police attacked, arresting another 30 lesbians and gays.

And because of their determined fightback, in the end the marchers were victorious. In April 1979 the police dropped the charges, claiming they'd lost the files. More importantly the actions regained the right to march for everyone - gay or straight. The campaign had forced the NSW government to repeal the hated Summary Offences Act, the law that the police had used to try to stop the June 24 and later protests.

No wonder one of the lesbians at Sydney's first Mardi Gras could say "1978 changed my whole life!" Nor that another marcher felt that Mardi Gras was "like being in a revolutionary situation".

However it hadn't looked like that at the beginning of the year.

From the mid-70s the right was on the attack - and winning. During 1977 American gays had been fighting right-wing bigots who'd campaigned to get pro-gay rights provisions off the books. Another battle was looming over the right to work in California, while in Australia similar groups, including Fred Nile and his followers, were organising. At the same time homosexual law reform had stalled. Only in South Australia and the ACT was gay male sex semi-legal, anywhere else you could still be jailed. In NSW gays were incensed that Labor Premier Neville Wran had reneged on promised law reform, bowing to pressure from the religious right.

But what the right hadn't counted on was that once "out of the closet", gays weren't prepared to be shut back in. And that door had been opened wide in 1969, the year gays turned the table on the cops after years of police raids on gay bars. The Stonewall riots, named after the bar involved, were celebrated in Gay Pride marches every year in the US - and often overseas.

In one of the biggest shows of strength since the right's offensive, San Francisco's gay community mobilised 375,000 at the 1977 Gay Pride Day Parade. San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day Committee planned an even bigger turnout for 1978 and called on the international gay community for solidarity action.

In Sydney, the call fell on very receptive ears. Activists were facing their own anti-gay mobilisations, with Fred Nile's Festival of Light touring English "morals" campaigner Mary Whitehouse in September. Whitehouse had chalked up successes against gays in the UK and her Australian supporters were keen to do likewise.

And it was answering this call for international solidarity that saw Sydney gays out in the streets on June 24 and over the rest of that year. So Mary Whitehouse was met with noisy rallies wherever she appeared, ensuring the tour was a flop. And crucially the right was forced to pull back.

Since that radical start, Mardi Gras has changed dates from mid-winter to a summer festival and become a spectacular glitzy affair, attracting hundreds of thousands of spectators along the route.

But for all the glitter and partying, Mardi Gras still delivers a more serious message.

Every year the Parade highlights the continuing discrimination - whether at work, as parents, partners or as the target of the religious right. Often humorous, such as a float with Fred Nile's head on a plate or a send up of the Liberal Party's Bronwyn Bishop, there have been serious contingents protesting government inaction or attacks, Gays for Conservation, Lesbians and Gays for Land Rights, Parents of Gays, lesbian and gay parents and their kids, Indigenous, Asian, Greek and Italian gay groups.

And of course, just the fact that we are still marching - whether it's about Gay Pride, AIDS or gay marriage - is an indication that we still have battles to fight.

Because for all the freedoms we have won - and there's no doubt we have - homophobia is still a feature of today's world, a capitalist society based on exploitation, oppression and division. Lesbians and gays continue to face discrimination, homophobic violence and prejudice. Just witness the furore over IVF rights for lesbians, suicide rates for young gays and the fact that there are 53 pieces of federal legislation that openly discriminate against lesbians and gays.

Homophobia, however, isn't just about individual discrimination. Like sexism and racism, it's institutionalised oppression used to divide the working class and stop us from organising together against our common enemy, the ruling class.

It is the battles we fight for reforms that begin to shake the world up, that build the alliances that unite the working class in struggle and lay the basis for the kind of revolutionary change we'll need to rid the world of capitalism for good.

Lesbians and gays in Australia have a proud history of fighting for reforms, building those alliances, demanding liberation. After the NSW Builders Labourers Federation backed victimised students in the 1970s, gays supported the BLF when it came under attack in the 1980s. More recently lesbians and gays joined the anti-globalisation protests, while union contingents march at Mardi Gras and Gay Pride protests.

As one of the badges at the time put it: "Mardi Gras was a riot - now we need a revolution!"

"It was a riot! Sydney's first Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras" 1998 Mardi Gras Committee [All quotes from the marchers from this booklet]

Graham Carbery, Mardi Gras. A history of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras

Pride History www.pridehistorygroup.org.au

Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives www.alga.org.au

Writings from Australia's gay left www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/gayleft