Nation’s First Gay Rights Demonstration Held
The New York League for Sexual Freedom and The Homosexual League of New York conducted a demonstration on this day at the Whitehall Army Induction Center in New York City to protest the military’s anti-gay policies.
This event was one of the earliest gay rights demonstration in the U.S. The first may have been the Annual Reminder Day in Philadelphia, which first occurred on July 4, 1965 and continued through 1969.
The campaign for lesbian and gay rights became a national movement after the Stonewall Inn riots on June 28, 1969. The next year, lesbian and gay rights activists organized the first Gay Pride marches, which became annual events. See June 27, 1970 and June 28, 1970.
Among many important milestones in the fight for lesbian and gay rights, the U. S. government finally dropped the ban on homosexuals serving in the military on September 20, 2011.
The first lesbian and gay rights movement in the world originated in Berlin, Germany, in the 1860s. This included the invention of the word “homosexuality.” Read Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (2014).
Listen to people talk about coming out in the 1960s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuTKpVug_ss
Learn more: Vern Bullough, Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context (2002)
Visit the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco: http://www.glbthistory.org/museum/
Read: Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out For Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (1999)
Learn more at a valuable documentary history: Jonathan Katz, ed., Gay American History: Lesbian and Gay Men in American History, A Documentary (1976)