1977: After a television producer cancels plans to develop a weekly series around her, Anita Bryant complains to the press that she is being “blacklisted” in Hollywood because of her crusade against homosexuals.

1892: Popular openly bisexual poet Edna St. Vincent Millay is born. 1979: Studio 54 throws a gala fifty-second birthday party for closeted gay attorney and former McCarthyite Roy Cohn. The event draws several hundreds of the city’s luminaries – including Donald Trump, Barbara Walters, members of both Democratic and Republican parties and most of the city’s … Read More

1903: New York City police conduct the first United States recorded raid on a gay bathhouse, the Ariston Hotel Baths. 26 men were arrested and 12 brought to trial on sodomy charges; 7 men received sentences ranging from 4 to 20 years in prison. 1976: A Detroit jury awards more than $200,000 in damages to a … Read More

1974: The Pat Collins Show, a morning program on New York’s WCBS, broadcasts live from the Continental Baths.  The station only receives one complaint about the episode.

1966: The first meeting of the coalition of gay rights groups that will become the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations takes place in Kansas City, Missouri.

1989: Chicago’s new gay rights ordinance takes effect.  It mandates fines up to $500 for discrimination based on sexual orientation.

1990: Famed pop artist Keith Haring dies from AIDS at 31.  Six months earlier he had been quoted as saying, “The hardest thing is just knowing that there’s so much more stuff to do.”

1980: William Friedkin’s Cruising opens nationwide and is blasted by critics (gay and straight) for its depiction of homosexuality, but also, as one critic puts it, “[its] narrative loopholes [and] unconvincing plot twists.” 1983: Lesbian playwright Jane Chambers (A Late Snow, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove) dies of a brain tumor at the age of … Read More