1972: The first officially proclaimed “Gay Pride Week”—decreed by the city council several weeks earlier—gets under way in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 1975: The American Medical Association approves a resolution recommending the repeal of state laws against consensual same-sex acts between adults. 1995: In Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston the United States … Read More
1981: The so-called McDonald Amendment-prohibiting Legal Services Corporation from assisting in “any case which seeks to promote, defend or protect homosexuality”-is passed by the U.S. House of Rcpresentatives, 281 to 124. The measure was introduced by ardently homophobic congressman Larry McDonald, a conservative Dcmocrat from Georgia. 1992: The soap opera One Life to Live introduces the … 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
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.
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