1969: Gay icon Judy Garland dies of an overdose at the age of 47. Four days later, on June 26, 1969, her remains are taken (by her fifth husband, Mickey Deans) to New York City, where an estimated 20,000 people lined up for hours at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in Manhattan to pay … Read More
2004: Maine Governor John Baldacci issues an executive order requiring businesses contracting with the state not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
1980: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence make their debut in the San Francisco’s annual Gay Freedom Day Parade. 1980: Can’t Stop the Music – a sanitized film “biography” of the Village People, directed by Nancy Walker, opens nationwide. The Advocate calls it “thunderingly bad,” while The New York Times dismisses it as “mostly dead air … … Read More
1972: The first officially proclaimed “Gay Pride Week”—decreed by the city council several weeks earlier—gets under way in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 1975: The American Medical Association approves a resolution recommending the repeal of state laws against consensual same-sex acts between adults. 1995: In Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston the United States … Read More
1981: The so-called McDonald Amendment-prohibiting Legal Services Corporation from assisting in “any case which seeks to promote, defend or protect homosexuality”-is passed by the U.S. House of Rcpresentatives, 281 to 124. The measure was introduced by ardently homophobic congressman Larry McDonald, a conservative Dcmocrat from Georgia. 1992: The soap opera One Life to Live introduces the … Read More
1971: E. M. Forster-famous for such novels as Maurice, Howard’s End, A Passage to India, and A Room with a View-dies at the age of ninety-one in Coventry, England. 1985: A New Orleans man, Johnny Greene, writes an article for People magazine about his personal struggle with AIDS-Related Complex, and is rewarded for his honesty … Read More
1983: The Gray Lady, the NYT, publishes its first front page story on AIDS. 1988: In San Antonio, Texas, the Southern Baptist Convention passes a resolution calling homosexuality “an abomination” and blaming AIDS on gay men. 1992: Just months after her Grammy nominated album, ingenue, is released, singer k.d. lang comes out in a cover … Read More
1987: The New York Times decides to allow its writers to use the word “gay” as an adjectival synonym for “homosexual.” 2011: The United States Department of Health and Human Services announces its first-ever grant in the amount of $250,000 to create a resource center for LGBT political refugees.
1950: After months of controversy, the United States Senate authorizes a wide-ranging investigation of homosexuals “and other moral perverts” working in national government. 1973: The Rocky Horror Picture Show (originally titled They Came from Denton High), opens at London’s experimental Theatre Upstairs, where it becomes such a hit that it soon has to be moved … Read More
1995: Less than a week after the Justice Department declined to join a legal battle against a Colorado constitutional amendment that bans the enactment of civil rights protections for homosexuals, the Clinton Administration announces the first-ever White House liaison to the gay and lesbian communities.