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.
1967: The U.S. Suprme Court strikes down Loving v. Virginia, a Virginia law against interracial marriages declaring that marriage is a “fundamental civil right” and that decisions in this arena are not those with which the State can interfere unless they have good cause. 1970: In what is described as “the first marriage in the nation … Read More
1973: Haworth Press announces plans to publish the Journal of Homosexuality, an academic quarterly devoted to scholarly research on the subject. The first issue-featuring articles on gender identity, transsexualism, and public attitudes toward homosexuality, as well as a review of the 1815 Africaine courts-martial, in which four British seamen were hanged for “buggery”-premieres a year later, in … Read More
1976: West Virginia becomes the sixteenth state to repeal its sodomy statutes. Two weeks later, Iowa becomes the seventeenth. 1982: German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, thirty-six, dies of an overdose of cocaine and tranquilizers in Munich. 2003: Michael Stark and Michael Leshner are wed in Ontario, becoming the first legal same-sex marriage in Canada. … Read More
1983: Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli comes out in an interview with The Advocate, saying, “I’m gay…. This is the first time I’ve talked about it openly. I don’t like to talk about my sexual inclinations. People are not special because they like one thing better than another in bed.” 1990: John Brownell, deputy managing editor … Read More