1985: The Times of Harvey Milk wins the Oscar for Best Feature Length Documentary. Accepting the award, producer Richard Schmeichen thanks his male lover. 1988: Robert Joffrey, founder and artistic director of the Joffrey Ballet, dies in New York City at the age of fifty-seven, of what is reported to have been “liver, renal, and respiratory … Read More
1971: In defiance of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, a federal judge grants U.S. citizenship to a 24-year old gay man from Cuba, ruling that an applicant’s homosexuality cannot, in itself, bar a person from becoming a citizen. 1986: William Hurt wins the Best Actor Oscar for his role as an imprisoned homosexual window … Read More
1988: Israel legalizes homosexual acts between consenting adults.
1972: The Equal Rights Amendment, banning discrimination on the basis of sex, passes the U.S. Senate. Opponents of the amendment claim it will destroy the nuclear family, give broad civil rights to homosexuals, and even mandate unisex rest rooms in public. Though by the end of 1972 twenty-two of the required thirty-eight states had ratified … Read More
1961: The United States Supreme Court denies certiorari to Frank Kameny’s petition to review the legality of his firing by the United States Army’s Map Service in 1957, bringing his four-year legal battle to a close. 1970: Twenty-three year old David Bowie marries nineteen year old American Mary Angela Barnett. A few years later, Bowie … Read More
1982: Victor Victoria opens nationwide to generally rave reviews. Blake Edward’s farce, based on a 1933 German film, Viktor und Viktoria features Robert Preston as perhaps the most relaxed and affable homosexual ever scripted into a major Hollywood motion picture. The movie becomes a box office hit and accomplishes what many years of gay liberation … Read More
1971: Idaho decriminalizes homosexual acts between consenting adults, but before the law can take effect, the legislature – under pressure from conservative and religious groups – reverses itself and votes to make them a felony again. 1982: Police raid a Washington, D.C. male escort service, “Friendly Models,” and cart away more than a dozen boxes … Read More
1970: The film version of Matt Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band opens in New York, directed by William Friedkin. The director remarks, “I hope there are happy homosexuals. There just don’t happen to be any in my film.” 1977: Two years after having repealed its state sodomy laws, Arkansas’s state legislature votes to … Read More
1680: Legislators of New Hampshire pass the colony’s first capital laws, copied almost word for word from the Plymouth laws of 1671: If any man lie with mankind as he lies with a woman; both of them have committed abomination; They both shall surely be put to death: unless one party were forced, or were under … Read More
1977: The ABC sitcom, Three’s Company, premieres. The “sit” in the sitcom is that an unemployed straight chef (John Ritter‘s Jack Tripper) moves in with two female roommates, but in order to satisfy the landlord’s suspicions that there might be sexual impropriety, pretends he is gay. The show stays in the Nielsen Top Ten for … Read More