A Brief History of Gay Liberation in the U.S.
Gay liberation was built through local organizing, public resistance, and people making room for each other. Follow the timeline from early groups through Stonewall and the work that...
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LGBTQ+ History Timeline: 10 Moments That Matter
LGBTQ+ history is not one clean march forward. This timeline covers 10 moments that shaped Pride, visibility, rights, grief, and community memory.
Barbara Gittings: The Mother of LGBTQ+ Rights
Barbara Gittings spent more than fifty years on the work and never took a salary. She got homosexuality removed from the list of mental illnesses in 1973, edited...
Gilbert Baker: The Veteran Who Sewed the First Rainbow Flag
Gilbert Baker made the first rainbow Pride flag with volunteers in San Francisco in 1978. Learn why it started with eight stripes, became six, and still matters.
Anita Bryant: The Beauty Queen Who Tried to End Gay Rights
In 1977 Florida orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant launched Save Our Children, a campaign that overturned Miami-Dade's gay rights ordinance in a landslide. The backlash she sparked built...
Don't Ask Don't Tell: The 18-Year LGBTQ+ Military Ban
From 1993 to 2011, Don't Ask Don't Tell forced LGBTQ+ servicemembers to lie about who they were or lose their careers. Roughly 14,000 were discharged. Here is the...
Obergefell v. Hodges: The Day Marriage Equality Became Law
The 5-4 ruling on June 26, 2015 made same-sex marriage legal in every state. Here is who Jim Obergefell was, what the decision actually says, and why it...
The AIDS Memorial Quilt: How One Cloth Made America Mourn
Cleve Jones taped names to a federal building in 1985 and the AIDS Memorial Quilt was born. Today it holds 50,000 panels for 110,000 lives lost. Here is...
The Daughters of Bilitis: The First Lesbian Rights Group in America
Eight women met in a San Francisco living room in September 1955 and built the first lesbian rights organization in America. Here is the story of the Daughters...
The Mattachine Society: How Gay Rights Started in Secret
Nineteen years before Stonewall, five gay men in Los Angeles started a secret society to fight for their lives. The Mattachine Society became the first lasting gay rights...
Christine Jorgensen at 100: How a GI Became a Trans Icon
Christine Jorgensen would have turned 100 on May 30, 2026. In 1952, the former Army clerk from the Bronx became the first trans woman whose story landed on...
Keith Haring: The Gay Pop Artist Who Made AIDS Visible
Keith Haring drew the radiant baby, the barking dog, and the dancing figures that became pop icons. Then he was diagnosed with HIV in 1988 and turned his...
Larry Kramer: The Playwright Who Made America Face AIDS
Larry Kramer co-founded GMHC, started ACT UP, wrote The Normal Heart, and refused to let America ignore AIDS. The real story of the playwright who built two of...
Alan Turing: The Codebreaker Who Won the War and Was Punished for Being Gay
Britain's greatest scientist broke the Enigma code, founded computer science, and imagined the first thinking machine. Then the country he saved arrested him for being gay. The real...
Harvey Milk: The Camera Shop Owner Who Changed Gay Politics Forever
The story of Harvey Milk: how a Wall Street stockbroker turned camera shop owner became California's most famous openly gay elected official, defeated Prop 6, and was assassinated...
Billie Jean King: The Tennis Icon Who Beat Bobby Riggs and Came Out the Hard Way
The full story of Billie Jean King: 39 Grand Slam titles, the 1973 Battle of the Sexes win that changed women's sports forever, the 1981 outing that cost...
Pauli Murray: The Lawyer Who Beat Jim Crow and Jane Crow
Pauli Murray was rejected from UNC for being Black and from Harvard for being a woman. They went on to shape Brown v. Board, mentor Ruth Bader Ginsburg,...
Edie Windsor: The 83-Year-Old Widow Who Took Down DOMA
Edie Windsor was 83 when she sued the U.S. government over a $363,053 estate tax bill. Her case ended DOMA and made nationwide marriage equality possible. Here is...
Frank Kameny: The Astronomer Who Started Gay Rights
The Harvard astronomer who got fired by the federal government in 1957 spent the next five decades inventing the modern gay rights movement. Here is the full story...
Stormé DeLarverie: The Black Lesbian Who Sparked Stonewall
A Black butch lesbian in a tuxedo, a Jewel Box Revue star, and the woman whose arrest outside the Stonewall Inn in 1969 sparked the riot that built...
Brenda Howard: The Bisexual Activist Who Created Pride Month
Pride Month exists because a 23-year-old bisexual woman from the Bronx made it happen. Meet Brenda Howard, the activist who organized the first Pride march in 1970 and...
ACT UP: How AIDS Activists Forced America to Listen
ACT UP took shape in March 1987 because the people dying refused to die quietly. Six years of die-ins, takeovers, and Silence Equals Death posters rewired American medicine....
The Lavender Scare: How the U.S. Hunted Gay Federal Workers
In 1953 the U.S. government had two enemies. The Soviets, and gay people. Inside the quiet purge that fired more federal workers than McCarthy ever did, and the...
The First Pride Parade: Christopher Street Liberation Day, 1970
On June 28, 1970, exactly one year after Stonewall, a few thousand people walked 51 blocks up Sixth Avenue and held the first Pride parade. It was called...