After the Stonewall Riots of 1969, he was among the group that founded the Gay Activists Alliance along with Arthur Bell, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Marty Robinson, and others, and Skir was a proud participant in the first Pride march—the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade, on June 28, 1970. In a report that he published three months later, Skir recalls meeting a friend of his, a former yeshiva student from the Lubavitcher Hasidic community, whom he had persuaded to join them: Two weeks ago, I had said to him, “You can cure yourself. In a day, a minute, a second, with three words, with six. I’m-not-sick—three words. Three words more: I-love-myself.” And now he’s beside me (magic!) though he told me two weeks ago that he couldn’t, just couldn’t, come out in the open. And now he can and he is SO happy. He’s clutching his book of poems (Anna Akhmatova, translated), marching along. Alone now, but not for long. Now we are together.
