1292: In Ghent (in present-day Belgium): John, a knife maker, is sentenced to be burned at the stake for having sex with another man. This is the first documented execution for sodomy in Western Europe. 1973: W.H. Auden dies in Vienna at age 63. 2011: The European Parliament in Strasburg passes a resolution against discrimination … Read More
1958: In New York City, lesbians, including Barbara Gittings, hold the first Daughters of Bilitis New York meeting at the offices of the Mattachine Society of New York. The chapter is the first lesbian organization on the East Coast. 1973: In Houston, Billie Jean King defeats “male chauvinist” Bobby Riggs in tennis’ “Battle of the Sexes” … Read More
1973: Infuriated and disgusted by “all those young punks who have been beating up” gay men in San Francisco, a gay Pentecostal Evangelist, the Rev. Ray Broshears, founds the so-called Lavender Panthers, a group of street vigilantes who patrol the city’s gay meeting areas to ward off potential attacks from “fag-bashers.” Shortly after their founding, the … Read More
1855: Walt Whitman publishes the first edition of his Leaves of Grass. 1965: At Independence Hall in Philadelphia, picketers begin staging the first Reminder Day to call public attention to the lack of civil rights for LGBT people. The gatherings continue annually for five years. 1969: Daughters of Bilitis and Mattachine society members picket Independence Hall in Philadelphia … Read More
1970: New York City: Police arrest Gay Activists Alliance members Tom Doerr, Arthur Evans, Jim Owles, Phil Raia, and Marty Robinson for staging a sit-in at the headquarters of the Republican State Committee. The men, who wanted to present their demands for “fair employment” practices to New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller, become known as … Read More
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
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
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
1965: Following the previous day’s protest in Washington, D.C., twenty-nine ECHO (East Coast Homophile Organization) demonstrators picket the United Nations in New York City. 1973: The Minnesota State House of Representatives votes 69 to 46 to retain the state’s sodomy laws. 1976: Michael Bennett’s “A Chorus Line” sweeps the Tony Awards, winning nine in all, including one for Best … Read More
1973: Gay playwright, Noel Coward, dies in Jamaica at the age of 73. 1975: After the local district attorney’s office rules that there are no county laws preventing two people of the same-sex from getting married, Boulder, Colorado county clerk Clela Rorex issues a marriage license to two gay men. It is the first same-sex marriage … Read More