March 23 in LGBTQ History
1988: Israel legalizes homosexual acts between consenting adults.
Category: Today in LGBTQ History
March 22 in LGBTQ History
1972: The Equal Rights Amendment, banning discrimination on the basis of sex, passes the U.S. Senate. Opponents of the amendment claim it will destroy the nuclear family, give broad civil rights to homosexuals, and even mandate unisex rest rooms in public. Though by the end of 1972 twenty-two of the required thirty-eight states had ratified … Read More
March 20 in LGBTQ History
1961: The United States Supreme Court denies certiorari to Frank Kameny’s petition to review the legality of his firing by the United States Army’s Map Service in 1957, bringing his four-year legal battle to a close. 1970: Twenty-three year old David Bowie marries nineteen year old American Mary Angela Barnett. A few years later, Bowie … Read More
March 19 in LGBTQ History
1982: Victor Victoria opens nationwide to generally rave reviews. Blake Edward’s farce, based on a 1933 German film, Viktor und Viktoria features Robert Preston as perhaps the most relaxed and affable homosexual ever scripted into a major Hollywood motion picture. The movie becomes a box office hit and accomplishes what many years of gay liberation … Read More
March 18 in LGBTQ History
1971: Idaho decriminalizes homosexual acts between consenting adults, but before the law can take effect, the legislature – under pressure from conservative and religious groups – reverses itself and votes to make them a felony again. 1982: Police raid a Washington, D.C. male escort service, “Friendly Models,” and cart away more than a dozen boxes … Read More
March 17 in LGBTQ History
1970: The film version of Matt Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band opens in New York, directed by William Friedkin. The director remarks, “I hope there are happy homosexuals. There just don’t happen to be any in my film.” 1977: Two years after having repealed its state sodomy laws, Arkansas’s state legislature votes to … Read More
March 16 in LGBTQ History
1680: Legislators of New Hampshire pass the colony’s first capital laws, copied almost word for word from the Plymouth laws of 1671: If any man lie with mankind as he lies with a woman; both of them have committed abomination; They both shall surely be put to death: unless one party were forced, or were under … Read More
March 15 in LGBTQ History
1977: The ABC sitcom, Three’s Company, premieres. The “sit” in the sitcom is that an unemployed straight chef (John Ritter‘s Jack Tripper) moves in with two female roommates, but in order to satisfy the landlord’s suspicions that there might be sexual impropriety, pretends he is gay. The show stays in the Nielsen Top Ten for … Read More
March 14 in LGBTQ History
1971: More than two thousand protesters march on the steps of the Albany capitol building demanding an end to laws that discriminate against gays and lesbians.
March 13 in LGBTQ History
1984: Claiming an “absence of compelling need” for such legislation, California governor George Deukmejian vetoes a gay rights bill that would have prohibited job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.