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Influential People Who Made a Difference In The Gay Rights Movement.


Steve

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June is Pride Month, and while many people are openly able to celebrate in massive colorful parades and other fun festivities, the LGBT movement wouldn't be where it is today without the icons, trailblazers, activists, lawmakers, artists and more who paved the way in the last century. Here are 23 people to know for their important role in the LGBT rights movement.

Brenda Howard

A month after the 1969 Stonewall Riots, Brenda Howard, a bisexual woman, organized the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, the first Pride parade. The next year, she coordinated another march on the one-year anniversary of the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade. Her passion and gift for organizing LGBT events sparked the Pride parade movement and earned Howard the nickname "the mother of pride."

Gilbert Baker

Gilbert Baker was an activist and artist who designed the iconic Rainbow Flag. A self-described "gay Betsy Ross," Baker was often called on by others in the gay rights movement to make banners for protests and marches, and in 1978, Harvey Milk asked him to make flags for a gay pride event in San Francisco. He assembled eight strips of hand-dyed fabric into rainbow flags, and his design, now reduced to six colors, has become a universal symbol for LGBT pride, love and acceptance.

Sylvia Rivera

Latina transgender activist Sylvia Rivera was a participant in the 1969 Stonewall Riot and fought to keep the concerns and voices of transgender people, LGBT people of color and low-income queer people in the gay rights movement that evolved from the incident. Rivera was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance and co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), an organization to help homeless queer homeless youth.

Dan Choi

Former Army officer and West Point graduate Dan Choi became an activist and face of the movement to end the U.S. government's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy, which banned LGBT people from serving in the military openly. Choi came out during an appearance on "The Rachel Maddow Show" in 2009 and later attended a rally at the White House where he handcuffed himself to a fence while in uniform. He was then discharged from the National Guard for "homosexual conduct," one of more than 12,500 servicemen and women who were dismissed since 1993 under DADT, according to ABC News. He appealed his termination directly to President Obama in an open letter and appeared at events and on television discussing DADT, which Obama finally repealed in 2011.

RuPaul Charles

Performer, singer and TV host RuPaul Charles is considered the most successful drag queen in the U.S. and brought drag into the mainstream in 2009 with his hit reality competition series "RuPaul's Drag Race." He's won two Primetime Emmys for the series and was named to 2017's Time 100 list of the most influential people. Before building a "Drag Race" empire, RuPaul hosted his own VH1 talk show, the first to have a drag queen as host. Through the show and its international spinoffs, Mama Ru and other queens have been able to raise awareness about issues facing the LGBT community and people of color around the world.

Laverne Cox

As a breakout star on the Netflix series "Orange Is the New Black," Laverne Cox became the first transgender person to ever be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award as well as the first to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. She also became the first transgender woman to win a Daytime Emmy for producing the documentary "Laverne Cox: The T Word." Cox describes herself as "an actress first and activist second," and she has used her fame to advocate for trans and LGBT rights, collaborating with organizations like the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign.

Christine Jorgensen

Former G.I. Christine Jorgensen became a celebrity in the U.S. long before Laverne Cox. Jorgensen underwent hormone treatment and sex reassignment surgery in Denmark in 1953 and became front page news upon her return stateside. She became the first nationally known transgender individual and used this visibility to be an advocate and spark discussions among both the general population and medical professionals about gender, sex and identity. As a trailblazer, Jorgensen still faced ridicule and discrimination. For example, Jorgensen was denied a marriage license in 1959 as her birth certificate listed her as male, and her fiance lost his job when news of their engagement was published.

Edith Windsor

Edith Windsor became a gay rights icon when she sued the federal government to recognize her same-sex marriage, which eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court in United States v. Windsor. The decision in her favor struck down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which had defined marriage for federal purposes as between a man and woman, thus barring married same-sex couples from receiving federal benefits. Windsor married her partner of more than 40 years in Canada in 2007 because it still wasn't legal in their home state of New York. When her wife died two years later, the IRS slapped her with a bill for more than $300,000 in estate taxes, which she would not have owed had the U.S. government recognized their marriage, according to The Guardian. Windsor died in 2017, a hero of the LGBT rights movement.

Anthony Kennedy

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has authored three key pro-gay-rights Court decisions, making him, according to The New York Times, "the most important judicial champion of gay rights in the nation's history." Kennedy was nominated by Republican president Ronald Reagan in 1987 and came into the role with a track record of ruling against gay rights claims. Despite initial misgivings from the LGBT community, his 2013 opinion in the United States v. Windsor case struck down DOMA.

Barney Frank

Barney Frank was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a member from Massachusetts in 1980, and seven years later, he became the first U.S. politician to voluntarily come out as gay. In 2012, when he married his long-time partner, he became the first member of Congress to marry someone of the same sex while in office. Perhaps the most prominent gay politician in the United States, Frank retired in 2013 after a career marked by voting for, promoting and proposing pro-civil rights and gay-rights legislation.

Harvey Milk

In 1978, Harvey Milk became the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. Milk encouraged LGBT people to "come out of the closet" during his speeches and passed a gay rights ordinance in the city of San Francisco. But 11 months after his election, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated. Despite his short time in office, Milk was hailed as a martyr and gay icon. In 2009, Milk was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. His life was the subject of a biographical film called "Milk" starring Sean Penn. Penn won an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role, while openly gay screenwriter Dustin Lance Black won for Best Original Screenplay.

Henry Gerber

In 1924, Henry Gerber founded America's first gay rights group, the Society for Human Rights, in Chicago. The group's newsletter, "Friendship and Freedom," was also the country's first recorded gay rights publication. As a German-American gay man, Gerber was sent to a prisoner-of-war internment camp during World War I because German immigrants were considered enemy aliens. He was also briefly admitted to a mental institution for his homosexuality. The society was short-lived, as police arrested Gerber and other members in a raid, causing Gerber to lose his job and spend his life savings to defend himself in court. Though Gerber cooled his activist efforts after this, the Henry Gerber House, where Gerber lived when he founded SHR, was designated a Chicago Landmark and then a National Historic Landmark for the ripple effect his bold risk created.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was a German writer who is considered the first modern gay activist and the first person to publicly "come out." Ulrichs was a lawyer and writer who attempted to coin a new term for men attracted to other men before the terms gay or homosexual existed. He wrote a series of essays, first under a pseudonym then under his real name, about his sexual identity and became the first LGBT person to publicly defend gay rights. He appeared before the Congress of German Jurists calling for the repeal of anti-homosexual laws. Ulrichs later inspired his friend Magnus Hirschfeld to create the world's first gay rights organization, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee.

Jason Collins

Jason Collins became a pioneer for LGBT men in professional sports when he announced he was gay in 2013. That's because Collins became the first openly gay active player in the NBA and openly gay active athlete in any of the four major American pro sports leagues. He revealed the news in a first-person piece in Sports Illustrated that began: "I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay." According to Outsports, Major League Soccer signed openly gay player Robbie Rogers a month later, and less than a year later, Michael Sam came out as gay and was drafted by the St. Louis Rams. Collins retired in 2014 after 13 seasons in the NBA.

Martina Navratilova

Living tennis legend Martina Navratilova holds the record for career titles and Grand Slam titles for both men and women and is one of the world's most prominent lesbian athletes. After defecting from Czechoslovakia, Navratilova came out voluntarily in 1981, the first sports superstar to do so. Navratilova told Outsports that she believes this move cost her tens of millions of dollars in endorsement and sponsorship deals during the 1980s. Navratilova has used her visibility to be an advocate, participating in a lawsuit against the anti-gay Amendment 2 in 1992 and attending and speaking at LGBT events.

Ellen DeGeneres

In 1997, comedian Ellen DeGeneres was at a career high, starring in the successful ABC sitcom "Ellen." DeGeneres risked it all by appearing on the cover of Time magazine under the headline, "Yep, I'm Gay." Degeneres later appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," then hours later, her character on "Ellen," Ellen Morgan, also came out as a lesbian to her therapist, played by Winfrey. The episode was a ratings hit and earned DeGeneres and its writers an Emmy, but there was also extreme backlash against her, Winfrey, ABC and more. But a year and half later, "Will & Grace" premiere on NBC. Then in 2001, DeGeneres got her own talk show, ushering in a new era of LGBT visibility on TV. DeGeneres has since won numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

George Takei

Best known as Lt. Hikaru Sulu from the original cast of "Star Trek," George Takei parlayed his Hollywood fame and nerd cred into a position of influence for the Asian-American and LGBT communities. Though he was involved in the community for years, he officially came out in 2005 in Frontiers magazine in response to then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's veto of California's same-sex marriage legislation. Takei often uses humor on his large social media platforms to address hateful rhetoric from other celebrities and politicians and promote equality.

Janet Mock

Writer, TV host and transgender activist Janet Mock began her transition in high school and was living and working in media as a woman before coming out publicly as trans in a 2011 Marie Claire article. She became a go-to voice writing about trans issues for Marie Claire, Elle and the Huffington Post and appearing on television news and talk shows. She penned her own book about her experiences in 2014, the first book written by a trans person who transitioned as a teen. Mock appeared in and produced the HBO documentary "The Trans List," and became the first trans woman of color to be hired as a TV writer for Ryan Murphy's 2018 show "Pose."

Bayard Rustin

A civil rights activist who served as an adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and who organized the 1963 March on Washington, Bayard Rustin also lived as an openly gay man, a liability that forced him to be a more behind-the-scenes figure in the movement. It wasn't until the 1980s that he began working as an LGBT activist. He attempted to bring the AIDS crisis and gay discrimination to the attention of the NAACP as the next big civil rights issue. Rustin's legacy was celebrated in the 2002 documentary "Brother Outsider," and he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2013.

Barbara Gittings

Barbara Gittings is considered to be the mother of the LGBT civil rights movement because of her work organizing some of the first public demonstrations for gay and lesbian equality in the 1950s and '60s. In 1965, she took part in one of the first gay rights pickets of the White House to draw attention to the government's ban on employing gay men and lesbians. Although the Austrian-born Gittings lived in Philadelphia, she started the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the USA's first lesbian civil rights organization. In the '70s, Gittings successfully campaigned for the the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders. Gittings also worked to promote gay literature in libraries around the country.

Dan Savage

Writer and activist Dan Savage is known for his nationally syndicated sex advice column "Savage Love," as well as for co-founding the It Gets Better Project to help prevent suicide among LGBT youth in 2010 with his husband, Terry Miller. He and Miller were among the first group of couples to get married in Washington after the the 2012 legalization of same-sex marriage in the state. Savage has used his column to address many political LGBT issues, including famously slamming anti-gay remarks made by then-Senator Rick Santorum.

Audre Lorde

A self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Audre Lorde worked as a librarian for years before publishing her first works, which address issues of race, gender and sexuality. She also documented her decade-long battle with breast cancer. Lorde co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher by, for, and about women of color. She also started Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa to help black women under apartheid. Her 1989 essay collection won an American Book Award, and Lorde was poet laureate of New York from 1991-92.

Larry Kramer

Author and provocative AIDS activist Larry Kramer penned the play "The Normal Heart," a piece of the literary canon for gay America, according to Time, which was adapted into a 2014 movie by Ryan Murphy. In the 1980s, Kramer co-founded GMHC (originally known as the Gay Men's Health Crisis) and ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), two of the main organizations that responded to the AIDS crisis.

 

 


 

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Thanks for this historic look at the pride movement and the pivotal figures who changed the world for us.  

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 6/21/2018 at 12:31 PM, Steve said:

Larry Kramer

Author and provocative AIDS activist Larry Kramer penned the play "The Normal Heart," a piece of the literary canon for gay America, according to Time, which was adapted into a 2014 movie by Ryan Murphy.

The movie “The Normal Heart” richly deserves its place in the gay literary canon.  If you haven’t seen it yet, put it very high in your queue on Netflix/Amazon Prime/etc.  (Caveat:  Not necessarily recommended viewing when you’re feeling down.)

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