1981: Larry Kramer and two friends put up a banner at the Fire Island dock that says “Give to Gay Cancer”. They make only $124. 2011: The United States Department of Health and Human Services issues a finalized guidance memorandum that creates an enforcement mechanism for the policy announced last year by the Obama administration … Read More
1956: American psychologist Evelyn Hooker shares her paper “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual” at the American Psychological Association Convention in Chicago. After administering psychological tests, such as the Rorschach, to groups of homosexual and heterosexual males, Hooker’s research concludes homosexuality is not a clinical entity and that heterosexuals and homosexuals do not differ … Read More
1904: Christopher Isherwood is born in Wyberslegh Hall, United Kingdom. 1981: In California, Governor Jerry Brown appoints Mary Morgan to the San Francisco Municipal Court. She is the first openly lesbian judge in the U.S. 1986: Jerry Smith, former Washington Redskins tight end, is the first celebrity to voluntarily acknowledge that he has AIDS. He … Read More
1981: Larry Kramer, whose 1978 novel Faggots took gay men to task for promiscuity in pre-AIDS New York, calls a meeting of concerned men in his Greenwich Village apartment. It is a precursor to the organization that will become Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York. 1995: South Korea marks its first Pride Celebration with … Read More
1940: The Rev. Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, is born. 1967: In the United Kingdom, nearly ten years after the publication of the Wolfenden Report, the Sexual Offenses Act takes effect, decriminalizing private homosexual acts in England and Wales. The age of consent for homosexual acts is set at 21, compared to 16 … Read More
1980: Thirty-two-year-old Italian Enso Francone, in Moscow for the summer Olympics, chains himself to a fence in Red Square to protest Soviet persecution of homosexuals. With Western journalists looking on, a group of KGB officers moves in and drags Francone away. 1981: George Hamilton plays the twin roles of Don Diego Vega and his look-alike gay brother … Read More
1962: In New York City, Randy Wicker talks listener-supported radio station WBAI into broadcasting a taped program in which seven gay people discuss homosexuality. Widely publicized in the local press, the program is believed to be the first favorable broadcast on the subject in the U.S. 1975: Santa Cruz County, California, is the first US county to … 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
1975: The US Civil Service Commission decides to consider applications by lesbians and gay men on a case-by-case basis. Previously, homosexuality was grounds for automatic disqualification. 1978: Actor James Daly, father of actors Tyne Daly and Timothy Daly, dies at the age of 59. His live-in lover, male model Randal G. Jones, files a “palimony” suit … Read More
1971: E. M. Forster-famous for such novels as Maurice, Howard’s End, A Passage to India, and A Room with a View-dies at the age of ninety-one in Coventry, England. 1985: A New Orleans man, Johnny Greene, writes an article for People magazine about his personal struggle with AIDS-Related Complex, and is rewarded for his honesty … Read More