National Coming Out Day – March in Washington
More than 500,000 people marched in Washington, D.C. in support of Lesbian and Gay rights on this day. The march is commemorated by National Coming Out Day, which is now an annual event.
See also the earlier lesbian and gay rights march on Washington, on October 14, 1979, which brought out up to 125,000 demonstrators; and a later march, on April 25, 1993, which drew up to a million people.
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).
Learn more about National Coming Out Day: http://www.hrc.org/resources/entry/national-coming-out-day
Watch a Coming Out Day testimony: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CWehd9PgLM
Read more first-hand accounts: Eric Marcus, Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, An Oral History, 1945–1990 (1992)
Learn more about the history of marching on Washington: Lucy Barber, Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition (2002)
Read about the history of sex -and homosexuality– and the U.S. Constitution: Geoffrey R. Stone, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century (2017)
Visit the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco: http://www.glbthistory.org/museum/