1966: A coalition of homophile organizations across the country organizes simultaneous demonstrations for Armed Forces Day. The Los Angeles group holds a 15-car motorcade (which has been identified as the nation’s first gay pride parade) and activists hold pickets in the other cities. 1970: Bella Abzug-running for the 19th District congressional seat in New York City-addresses … Read More
1979: David Kloss of San Francisco wins the first annual Mr. International Leather title in Chicago. 1988: The first-ever Conference on Homophobia Education convenes in Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the Campaign to End Homophobia and cosponsored by a number of church groups and national gay rights organizations, the symposium is held to work out strategies … Read More
1973: An officially sanctioned gay student dance at Princeton University draws three hundred participants. 1975: Gay porn phenomenon “Jack Wrangler” is born when a sometimes struggling twenty-eight-year-old actor, Jack Stillman, steps onstage between porn films at the Paris Theater in Los Angeles and performs a live striptease in Western drag. The son of an established … Read More
1921: Patrick Dennis, author of Auntie Mame, is born. 1934: Artist and Christopher Isherwood’s muse and partner, Don Bachardy, is born. 1981: Lawrence Mass, a gay physician and writer, publishes the first media mention of AIDS in an article in the New York Native, “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded”.
2004: Same-sex marriages become legal in Massachusetts. World does not end. 2007: Ted Strickland, governor of the U.S. state of Ohio, issues an executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in the public sector.
1981: More than twenty people marching in a gay rights demonstration in Helsinki, Finland, are arrested by the police and charged with “encouraging lewd behavior.” 1986: Top Gun opens nationwide in the U.S. and is applauded for years as a homoerotic fantasy.
1981: In the midst of Lesbian/Gay Awareness Week, at the University of Florida, a fraternity-circulated petition asserting, “Homosexuals need bullets-not acceptance” draws the signatures of almost fifty people. “We don’t have anything else to do,” says one of the petition’s organizers. “We’re just out here having a good time. I don’t believe in queers.” 1988: … Read More
1897: In Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld founds the Scientific Humanitarian Committee to organize for homosexual rights and the repeal of Paragraph 175. 1969: Canada decriminalizes homosexual acts between consenting adults with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968-69. 1974: The first federal gay civil rights bill, extending antidiscrimination protection to gay men and lesbians under the … Read More
1986: Vanessa Redgrave stars as Renee Richards in the CBS made-for-TV movie, Second Serve.