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
1894: Alfred Kinsey, biologist and pioneer in the study of human sexuality, is born. 1912: Alan Turing, the father of modern computing and breaker of the Nazi Enigma code is born. 40 years later he is convicted of “gross indecency” by the very government he loyally served and dies by suicide two years after that. 1952: … Read More
1980: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence make their debut in the San Francisco’s annual Gay Freedom Day Parade. 1980: Can’t Stop the Music – a sanitized film “biography” of the Village People, directed by Nancy Walker, opens nationwide. The Advocate calls it “thunderingly bad,” while The New York Times dismisses it as “mostly dead air … … 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
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
1974: The Lambda Rising Bookstore opens its doors in Washington, D.C., with a stock of three hundred titles and average sales of about $25 a day. By 1987, it has opened a second store, established a thriving mail-order business, offers more than twenty thousand titles, and has annual sales of $1.5 million. 2011: Cambridge, Massachusetts announces … Read More
2011: The Wyoming Supreme Court reverses a lower court ruling and allows a LGBT couple married in Canada to divorce. The ruling recognized same-sex marriage in Wyoming only in the context of divorce.
1610: The Virginia Colony passes the first anti-sodomy law of the American colonial period. 1919: Anders als die Andern (“Different from the Others“), the first pro gay film, premieres in Berlin. Magnus Hirschfeld is a producer and makes a cameo appearance. The movie stars Conrad Veidt. 1953: A Mattachine Foundation circular estimates total membership in the society at … Read More