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Women & the American Story: Marsha P. Johnson, Transgender Activist

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Toilets, bowties, gender and me | Audrey Mason-Hyde | TEDxAdelaide

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Why was Pink for Boys and Blue for Girls?

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The Daughters of Bilitis was formed in 1955 in San Francisco by Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. It was named after poet Pierre Louÿs's The Songs of Bilitis, in which Bilitis was said to be a female lover of Greek poet Sappho. The Daughters of Bilitis was one of the first lesbian organizations ever established in the U.S. Chapters spread across the country and even Australia as the 50s went on. Originally assembled as a meeting place for lesbians, the group also held public forums to teach people about homosexuality and provided support to single and married lesbians as well as lesbian mothers. The group eventually evolved to promoting lesbian rights and lesbian feminist politics. The Daughters of Bilitis shut down in the early 1970s, but is known for its commitment to fostering understanding in and out of the lesbian community and setting a successful example for countless lesbian organizations to come.
1960s: Compton's Cafeteria Riot
The riot at Gene Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood happened in August 1966. A policeman grabbed a drag queen in an attempt to arrest her and she threw a cup of coffee in his face. A riot began almost immediately, with glass windows smashed by thrown sugar shakers, tables flipped and cutlery thrown. These particular Compton's customers had had enough. It was by no means unprovoked, either: cops had been arresting drag queens, gay hustlers, and transgender women at the 24-hour eatery regularly for cross-dressing, for obstructing the sidewalk, for any reason they could find to throw them in jail. It didn't help that Compton's owners preferred the queens, hustlers, and trans women leave and would call the cops to have them removed. After the incident, the diner banned trans women and the Tenderloin's largely queer community rebelled, picketing the establishment and breaking its new windows. The Compton's riot received no coverage at all in any of San Francisco's publications, but today is recognized for its importance as one of the first queer uprisings against police brutality.
1970s: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence first emerged in 1979 when four gay men bored with the sameness of San Francisco's Castro district put on retired nuns' habits. Realizing their presence could bring joy and initiate social change, they formed an order of queer nuns, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Today, donning drag versions of nuns' habits, they draw attention to queer discrimination and religious hypocrisy, promote safe sex and educate against the dangerous effects of drug use, all the while raising money for AIDS, LGBTQ+, and community-related causes. Chapters have since expanded across the globe.
1970s: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR)
Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or STAR, was organized by queer historical icons and self-described drag queens Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Both had been present at Stonewall and active in the GLF, and decided to organize homeless trans youth, drag queens, sex workers, immigrants, and low-income people in New York. Rivera and Johnson were homeless themselves, and saw STAR as a way to help and provide shelter for the people they knew as their children. They bought a building, fixed it up, provided shelter and clothes for the people who came through. STAR grew from New York to Chicago, California, and even England and lasted for approximately three years before it shut down.

While the riots at Stonewall are of course important, their story starts decades before and continues today. Thanks to people like Henry Gerber, Phyllis Lyon, Sylvia Rivera, Larry Kramer, and countless others, queer activism still has a loud and forceful voice in and out of the community. We owe so much to their legacy. We'll continue to to speak out in honor of the strides they made for us, and the lives we hope to change in the future.
Illustrated by Amit Greenberg. Get the best of what's queer. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.

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6 Major Moments in Queer History BEYOND the Stonewall Riots

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The Daughters of Bilitis was formed in 1955 in San Francisco by Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. It was named after poet Pierre Louÿs's The Songs of Bilitis, in which Bilitis was said to be a female lover of Greek poet Sappho. The Daughters of Bilitis was one of the first lesbian organizations ever established in the U.S.

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In the summer of 1985, Mike Petrelis was savoring life as young, openly gay man in New York City. He'd landed a cool job working for a film publicist who mostly handled foreign art films. He'd found an affordable apartment - not far from the gay mecca of Greenwich Village.

Then one day, Petrelis noticed a sort of blotch on his arm.

He went to a doctor, who ran a new kind of test, and gave Petrelis the verdict: "You have AIDS."

"He was saying that if I was going to be lucky I'd have six months to maybe two years of life left," recalls Petrelis.

He was 26 years old.

Petrelis says he broke down crying. The doctor said he'd give Petrelis a moment to be alone, pull himself together.

And sitting in that pristine exam room, Petrelis made his first act of protest: "I took out a cigarette."

He did it precisely because he knew it was forbidden.

"I was so mad with hearing this news - so angry at the doctor - I thought the one best way to protest would be to light up a cigarette and just smoke it with as much pleasure as I could find," he says.

But in the months that followed Petrelis soon shifted the focus of his rage, as he began to learn just how little the government and medical establishment had done to address a crisis that, at the time, mostly afflicted gay men. This was four years after AIDS first made headlines. More than 6,000 Americans had already died. Yet the budget for AIDS research was a fraction of what the U.S. government spent on diseases that were far less threatening. President Ronald Reagan had yet to even say the word AIDS in public. And only one private pharmaceutical company was seriously pursuing a treatment.

"I mean, my anger just knew no limits," says Petrelis.

Over the next decade, this rage would drive not just Petrelis but thousands of gay men and their supporters to form one of the most influential patient advocacy groups in history.

They called themselves AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power - or ACT UP. And they ultimately forced the government and the scientific community to fundamentally change the way medical research is conducted - paving the way for the discovery of a treatment that today keeps alive an estimated half-million HIV-positive Americans and millions more worldwide.

But as central as anger was to ACT UP's success, it would also prove a force for division.
"It was a war zone"
All this was unimaginable to Petrelis back in 1985. As furious as he was with the government, he was just as indignant that so few other gay men around him seemed to echo his rage.

"I just thought because I was so angry that there should have been more angry people," he recalls.

The gay and lesbian community had created a dynamic network of self-help groups in response to the crisis. But their focus was on providing comfort to the sick: buddies to take you to hospital, lawyers to help you write your will.

Petrelis remembers exploding at one of them: "I don't want to write my will! I want a cure!"

One of the recruits to those self-help groups was a young lawyer named David Barr. Back then he felt too overwhelmed to give much thought to asserting his anger.

All around him fellow gay men were suddenly falling sick with horrific symptoms - skin cancer, extreme weight loss, incontinence. Hospitals were turning them away. Employers were denying them benefits.

"It was a war zone," Barr recalls. So at first his overriding feeling was, "I don't have time to go yell at politicians. I've got to diaper somebody. I've got to create a legal services program to keep people from being evicted."

But Barr was also starting to grow restless. The work he was doing to set up support systems felt vital.

"But it was never satisfying," he says. "Because whatever help we were providing was really temporary. We lost everybody."
Boiling over
By early 1987, with the U.S. death toll topping 40,000 and worldwide HIV infections reaching 5 to 10 million, the threat was starting to feel apocalyptic. The gay community's mounting frustration finally boiled over in an explosive show of anger.

Hundreds of gay men and their supporters took to New York City's streets to vent their fury - first with a demonstration on Wall Street. Then a protest at city hall. Then an even bigger showdown on Wall Street.

Barr and Petrelis had been to gay rights demonstrations before - pride rallies, candlelight vigils for people who had died of AIDS. But this time, says Petrelis, "something felt different."

People weren't just chanting or carrying signs. They were blocking traffic with their bodies.

At the second Wall Street action, "over a hundred people got arrested," Barr says. Many of them were people who had never contemplated civil disobedience before.

"It was such a terrific feeling to be arrested with my yoga teacher," Petrelis recalls with a chuckle.

And it was profoundly affirming. "All those men and women screaming at the top of their lungs - I felt they were taking my anger and putting it out there to the world."

For Barr, participating in the outpouring was galvanizing.

"Rallying together and expressing our anger was a really good replacement for just feeling scared all the time," he says.

"It felt powerful. And it gave us a way of saying, 'OK, we've got to do something more than just buy people groceries, and take them to the hospital, and plan memorial services.' The anger is what helped us fight of a sense of hopelessness."

Soon the group - which the New York demonstrators named ACT UP at an early planning meeting - was going national, with thousands of people across the country staging similar actions.
Getting strategic
ACT UP quickly made its name with tactics that were unapologetically confrontational, says David France, the author of a history of AIDS activism called How to Survive a Plague, as well as a 2012 documentary by the same name.

"ACT UP's ethos was that they had united in anger," he says.

"They would storm people's offices with fake blood and cover people's computers with [it]," he says. "They locked themselves to politicians' desks. At one point, they barged into a meeting of a pharmaceutical company and turned over the shrimp cocktail tables."

This made them extremely intimidating. "They were no longer invisible sufferers of a disease. They were terrifying sufferers of a disease," says France.

But initially, says France, "the actions had the air of purposeless anger."

That changed when ACT UP began to deploy its anger strategically.

Barr says the demonstrations started off as a simple release: "We were angry and we needed to express ourselves."

But in doing so, he says, "we began to realize, 'Oh, this is a tactic that we can put to good use.' "

So they took it upon themselves to figure out the specific roadblocks in government policy and clinical trials that stood in the way of what ACT UP wanted most: a cure. Then they unleashed their rage to force the decision-makers to hear ACT UP's solutions.

They kicked off the approach at a government building in suburban Maryland.

"Our goal was to seize control of the FDA," says Barr.

ACT UP wanted the Food and Drug Administration to give AIDS patients access to an experimental drug. The FDA wouldn't even discuss it.

So hundreds of activists converged on the FDA's headquarters.

"One group were wearing lab coats that were stained with bloody hands," recalls Barr. "Other people brought tombstones that they made and lied down in front of the building and held up the tombstones: 'Dead from FDA red tape.' "

The activists advanced in rows, blocking the entrances. The demonstration made national news.

Within days the FDA agreed to meet. In a couple months, officials opened up the policy on access to experimental drugs.

France says the two prongs of ACT UP's strategy were equally important. The aggressive protests got them a foot in the door, but it wouldn't have made a difference if they hadn't done the homework needed to offer insightful and viable proposals once they did get a meeting.

"What made this work was not just the anger. But the anger coupled with the intelligence," says France.

ACT UP came to call this approach its "inside-outside strategy." And they deployed it over and over again - with the National Institutes of Health, and then with pharmaceutical companies, eventually becoming full partners with key scientists.

The upshot of all this: "What they were able to revolutionize was really the very way that drugs are identified and tested," says France.

This included scrapping the prevailing practice of testing drugs on a small number of people over a long period of time in favor of testing a huge sample of people over a much shorter period - significantly speeding up the time it took to conduct drug trials.

Similarly, ACT UP insisted that the researchers and pharmaceutical companies that were searching for a cure for AIDS also research treatments for the opportunistic infections that were killing off AIDS patients while they waited for a cure.

In the process, says France, "ACT UP created a model for patient advocacy within the research system that never existed before."

Today it seems natural that people suffering from a disease - whether that's breast cancer or diabetes - should have a voice in how it is researched and treated. But France says this was decidedly not the norm before ACT UP.

In 1996, scientists finally did find the treatment that would keep people alive. France says while scientists would probably have made the discovery eventually, there's "no question" ACT UP made it happen sooner.

But an organization that uses anger as a tool also faces a challenge. Once you get people to tap into their rage - it's hard to control it.
"Stop killing us!"
That contradiction came to a head for ACT UP one Sunday in December of 1989 at Manhattan's St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Outside the church, ACT UP was staging a massive demonstration to call out Archbishop John O'Connor for opposing the use of condoms.

Petrelis was part of a smaller group that decided to take the protest inside - to the mass.

He'd been raised Roman Catholic and had a lot of unresolved feelings toward the church.

"You know condemning me as gay, just all that Catholic guilt I had been raised with," he says.

They didn't want to disrespect parishioners, so the plan was to wait for O'Connor to begin his sermon, interrupt by reading a quick statement, then turn their backs on him in silent protest.

But as Petrelis watched his fellow activists begin, he says something inside of him stirred: "I felt there was just not enough anger that could be heard."

Petrelis had a whistle with him - the kind for calling for help when you're being attacked. He started blowing it.

"Loudly," he recalls, "I stood up on the pew literally blowing the whistle on centuries of horrible treatment by the church toward gays and towards women."

Even that didn't feel like enough. Petrelis pointed his finger at the archbishop: "I started screaming, 'Stop killing us! Archbishop O'Connor, Stop killing us!' "

France's documentary includes footage of the moment - Petrelis standing on the pew, other activists taking up the chant "Stop it! Stop it!" Still more leaping into the aisle and laying on the floor as police march in to cart them off.

O'Connor continued the service. An activist lined up for communion, then took the wafer the priest had given him, and crumpled it.
The aftermath
David Barr had opposed this protest. The result confirmed his fears.

"The next day the story on the front pages of the newspapers was not, 'Look at all these horrible HIV policies the church is promoting.' It was, 'Gay guy spits body of Christ out on the floor.' "

Barr was part of a contingent within ACT UP that felt the time had come for a new phase. He believed ACT UP's inside-outside strategy had largely succeeded. Top policy makers and scientists were now giving ACT UP's proposals a respectful hearing.

But AIDS activists had not yet convinced the political class to mobilize the full resources of the federal government behind the search for a cure. For that, ACT UP would need to build this into a movement of not thousands but hundreds of thousands - the kind that sways elections. And this would require reaching out to all sorts of other groups affected by AIDS, such as Latinos - who are Catholic.

"I just remember my first thought being, well that's the end of our coalition building with the Latino community," Barr says. "That's it. Nobody's going to talk to us."

ACT UP continued to mount demonstrations - there are active chapters of the organization to this day. But to Barr it marked the beginning of the end of ACT UP's effectiveness.

"It was a turning point where venting one's anger took precedent over political strategy," he says.

Within a year Barr and many others who had been central to the organization's meetings with top researchers had parted ways - splitting off into groups with a more traditional style of lobbying and politicking.

As for Petrelis, he has no regrets.

In general, he disputes the notion that ACT UP became less strategic and effective from that point on. And while he concedes, what happened at St. Patrick's Cathedral was unplanned and not in service of any tactical objective, he argues in the broader scheme it was deeply necessary.

"It was a catharsis finally happening," he says.

And not just for the activists in the cathedral, he says. Petrelis has been in movie theaters when David France's documentary has been shown.

When that scene comes on - of his younger self screaming at the archbishop - "people stand up," he says, "and they applaud me."

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How To Demand A Medical Breakthrough: Lessons From The AIDS Fight

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In the summer of 1985, Mike Petrelis was savoring life as young, openly gay man in New York City. He'd landed a cool job working for a film publicist who mostly handled foreign art films. He'd found an affordable apartment - not far from the gay mecca of Greenwich Village.

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Shea Diamond - I Am Her (Official Music Video)

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Join the 2020 #LGBTQHistorychallenge. See the calendar of events for LGBTQ History Month activities around the state.

This website is dedicated to "Teaching LGBTQ History" which primarily focuses on providing resources and materials that fulfill the requirements put forth by the FAIR Education Act with regards to LGBTQ history.

As Tom Adams, Deputy Superintendent of the California Department of Education once stated, "These standards are the floor, not the ceiling, for what we want to teach." As the website and resources develop, we will be including lesson plans and materials that educators in California, and beyond, can use to teach about LGBTQ history in every time period.

This site serves as a comprehensive reference hub for information regarding the FAIR Education Act, as well as for History Framework Lesson Plans and General LGBTQ Lesson Plans, and resources to support teachers as they work with the new content required by the FAIR Education Act. We are honored to work together with you to help California's history and social sciences education be more Fair, Accurate, Inclusive and Respectful for all K-12 students.

The dozens of lesson plans, books, and video resources are sorted into Elementary School ( Framework and General), Middle School ( Framework and General), and High School ( Framework and General) grade-levels. Once you've used a lesson plan or a resource, please consider providing feedback, to help fellow educators benefit from your experience. Our Resources page list additional sources for LGBTQ history materials.

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FAIR - ACCURATE - INCLUSIVE - RESPECTFUL Join the 2020 #LGBTQHistorychallenge. See the calendar of events for LGBTQ History Month activities around the state. This website is dedicated to "Teaching LGBTQ History" which primarily focuses on providing resources and materials that fulfill the requirements put forth by the FAIR Education Act with regards to LGBTQ ...

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The National Archives holds extensive records created or received by the U.S. Government on issues of sexual identity and rights. We not only hold these records, we provide access to them.

Videos

Online Resources

"Records in the Eisenhower Library Relating to Homosexuals in the Federal Government and Personnel Security" (2012)

Baker v. Nelson, Case # 71-1027 (Appellate case file, 1972, Records of the Supreme Court of the United States)

Gay Students Organization of the University of New Hampshire, et al. v. Thomas N. Bonner, et al. (Case file, Records of District Courts of the United States)

Aaron Fricke v. Richard B. Lynch (Case file, Records of District Courts of the United States)

United States v. Edith Windsor (Appellate case file, 2013, Records of the Supreme Court of the United States)

(Audio files of Obergefell v. Hodges argument and opinion, Records of the Supreme Court of the United States)
Archived WhiteHouse.gov Web Pages President Barack Obama and the LGBT Community
Presidential Proclamation-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month, 2011

Fact sheet: Obama Administration's Record and the LGBT Community

Presidential Memorandum-International Initiatives to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons

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The National Archives holds extensive records created or received by the U.S. Government on issues of sexual identity and rights. We not only hold these records, we provide access to them. The Stonewall Riots On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Riots began following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, one of New York City's best known LGBTQ clubs.

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If you think we live in an open-minded, sex-positive society now, just wait until you hear what may have been going on down the Yorkshire mines in the 1950s.

There's a lot of LGBT history many of us don't know. Partly because it wasn't covered in school, partly because so much of it happened in secret.

"Even in the 19th century, it's very difficult to talk about gay or lesbian identity," says Harry Cocks, associate history professor at the University of Nottingham.

"It didn't really exist, there wasn't really any such thing."

"People have always challenged gender norms and sexual norms," Prof Cocks adds.

"The idea that you can organise the world around the kinds of desires that you have, I think, is a very recent idea."

Justin Bengry, senior lecturer in queer history at Goldsmiths University of London, says it's important to present LGBT history as "being part of the ordinary fabric of modern - and not so modern - life".

Because so much LGBT history took place behind closed doors, Justin says new stories are being uncovered all the time.

Which means there's plenty that could make its way into mainstream education.

The secret gay mag

Film & Filming magazine - doesn't sound very sexy, does it? When it was launched in 1954, gay magazines were a strictly "under the counter" affair.

"If you go through it, for many of us, it will tweak our gaydar looking at those 1950s issues - because there seems to be more bare-chested men than you'd expect," says Dr Bengry.

"Then you get to the personal ads at the back and you start seeing all of these ads for young bachelors looking to meet other young bachelors interested in things like physiques and photography and wrestling and it starts to all come together."

"Prior to that, in the 50s and 60s, you were just interested in film - oh, and there's a lot of men in that film."

Grossly indecent women

But this didn't get very far in the House of Lords, partly because they didn't want to discuss the matter and partly because they believed women were so impressionable, if they heard about women having sex with other women, they might want to try it for themselves.

"They were concerned that all of these innocent-minded women who would never have considered the possibility of any kind of erotic activity between women would now have it suggested to them and would now have opened up to them," says Dr Bengry.

"We think of children as still forming or impressionable, and certainly, they thought in the 20s of women as being of weaker intellect and impressionable in similar ways."

Sex in Yorkshire

"I don't know who said this, but it seems very true that every generation figures they invented everything about sex," says Dr Bengry. "And that's not the case at all."

"This is the height of the ideal of monogamous, heterosexual bliss."

"What Helen found was that this was acceptable within their communities.

"Many of these men were married, many of them had children, and their partners knew they were having sex with other men in the industrial workplace."

The research concluded that if their actions at work didn't affect the status of the family, this sort of thing was all ok.

"As long as their shenanigans at work didn't disrupt the family, as long as they didn't leave their wives, as long as they didn't leave their children hungry, this could be accommodated within normal heterosexuality in the north in the mid-20th century."

Gender fluid in 1394

"Gender bender, cis-tem offender," rapped Bimini Bon Boulash in the 2021 season of RuPaul's Drag Race UK.

Eleanor was arrested near St Pauls Cathedral in London in 1394, caught having sex in an alley with a man called John Rigby. But it was only when they were arrested and the police took testimony from the pair, that they discovered Eleanor was also called John.

"They discovered that Eleanor - or John - Rykenor lived this absolutely fantastical life," says Dr Bengry.

"Sometimes living as a man, sometimes living as a woman, sometimes having sex with men, sometimes having sex with women, sometimes being paid for it sometimes not - and just living this completely gender fluid life."

"That was the better part of 1,000 years ago, and this is someone that was jumping between gender positions and discussing a wide range of sexual partners."

He says Eleanor/John's "fantastical life" could "fit into a conversation today in London".

The trans microchip mastermind

What are you reading this article on right now? Chances are, it's powered by some of the technology that Lynn Conway pioneered in the 1960s, when she worked as a computer scientist for IBM.

Lynn's work for IBM was some of the earliest into microchips, but she was sacked when the company found out Lynn was transgender and planned to transition - and her work on the project ended.

"Her life's work has made the fact that we're having this conversation on tiny little computers possible," says Christine Burns MBE, activist and author of Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows, tells Newsbeat.

"It's because I think it's such a story of human spirit, against the worst of all odds."

Lynn, now 83, was forced to start her career from scratch after her transition, and in 2020, IBM issued an official apology for how she was treated 50 years ago.

Christine says Lynn is "a real role model to all of us.

"Lots of people who've been discriminated against over the aeons are recognized posthumously," Christine adds.

"That's all well and good, but it's much nicer actually, if we can be alive to see it."

'Understand where we've come from'

Prof Cocks says if there was to be more LGBT history taught in British schools, it should also include landmark moments where laws changed - and where lives changed.

Moments like the 1957 Wolfenden Report, which recommended decriminalised of gay sex and suggested homosexuality should no longer be considered a disease, or the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, when gay sex was decriminalised in England and Wales.

With knowledge of events like these, Christine says we'd have a better understanding of how society works.

"This goes for all minorities - and it goes for women, too, who aren't a minority," she says.

"We cannot understand our place as a community of similar experiences in culture, unless we understand where we've come from."

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.

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Pride month: The LGBT history you probably didn't learn in school

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If you think we live in an open-minded, sex-positive society now, just wait until you hear what may have been going on down the Yorkshire mines in the 1950s. There's a lot of LGBT history many of us don't know. Partly because it wasn't covered in school, partly because so much of it happened in secret.

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The sun isn't the only thing that comes out in June. Rainbow flags also start appearing in corporate office windows, coffee shops, and your neighbor's front yard.June has been an unofficial month of celebratory queerness for decades. Though the origins of Pride Month span back to the '50s, President Bill Clinton officially made it "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month" in 2000. President Barack Obama made it more inclusive in 2011, calling it Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. No matter what you call it, Pride Month has a rich history that informs how it's observed today.

Pride Honors The Gay Rights Protests Of The '60s

When asked about when the gay rights movement in this country began, people tend to point to June 28, 1969: the night of the Stonewall Riots. But Caitlin McCarthy, the archivist for The Center, an LGBTQ community center in New York City, explains that the Stonewall riot was one of many. "QTPOC-led uprisings like those at Stonewall and The Haven in New York, Cooper Donuts and the Black Cat Tavern in LA, and Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco were all responses to police harassment and brutality," McCarthy says.

At the time, people that cops perceived as men could be legally arrested for doing drag, and people that cops perceived as women could also be arrested if they were found wearing less than three pieces of "feminine clothing." Police often raided bars to search for these alleged violations. On the June night that most people cite as the origin of Pride, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn bar in New York City - led by trans women and femmes of color - fought back against another police raid.

The first Pride March - a rally in NYC on the last Saturday in June - was dubbed Christopher Street Liberation Day in honor of the Stonewall riot. (Christopher Street is the physical home of the Stonewall Inn.) "The Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee was formed to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising of June 1969 with a march from the West Village followed by a 'gay be-in' gathering in Central Park," McCarthy says. This helped cement Stonewall as the most culturally recognized foundation of Pride.

Trans & Gender Non-conforming Folks Of Color Started Pride

Many people are familiar with the transformative activism of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, McCarthy says. Johnson and Rivera co-founded STAR, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, which organized direct actions like sit-ins as well as providedshelter for trans sex workers and other LGBTQ homeless youth. Both activists were also members of the anti-capitalist, internationalist group the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), which organized marches, held dances to raise funds for queer people in need, and published a gay newspaper called Come Out!.

McCarthy tell Bustle that Johnson and Rivera's lesser-known (but not less important) siblings include Zazu Nova, a member of the GLF and STAR; Stormé Delarverie, a drag king and emcee for trans and drag-centered touring company Jewel Box Revue; and Lani Ka'ahumanu, who founded the Bay Area Bisexual Network.

"Gay Pride" Replaced "Gay Power" In The 1970s

According to a 2006 article published in the journal American Sociological Review, "gay power" was a common slogan used in queer publications and at protests in the '60s and early '70s. Many local groups from Black Power movement and radical queer organizing were able to unite against police brutality in the '70s. This collaboration makes the use of "gay power" at this time perhaps unsurprising.

"Radical organizing, influenced by and in concert with the antiracist and antiwar movement, followed [Stonewall]," McCarthy says. "The protests, sit-ins and direct actions conducted and participated in by early gay liberation groups such as Gay Liberation Front, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Dyketactics and Combahee River Collective demanded radical structural change in the face of continued oppression."

The National Historic Landmark Nomination for the Stonewall Inn, drawn up in 1999 for the United States Department of the Interior, also noted that "gay power" was used rather than "gay pride" in most settings. Though the activist Craig Schoonmaker is often credited with popularizing the phrase "gay pride" (as opposed to power) in 1970, it's worth noting that his organizing vision was exclusionary to lesbians. Today, "pride" is used as a shorthand to refer to LGBTQ celebrations and protests alike.

What Pride Month Looks Like Today

Despite these radical roots, corporate-sponsored Pride sunglasses and temporarily rainbow-splashed company logos are hallmarks of modern Pride Months. Many people consider having big corporations sponsor commercialized Pride marches disrespectful to the history of Pride. To wit: The Stonewall riot that most people cite as the origin of Pride was a direct response to police raids and brutality, but Pride marches today tend to be accompanied by police escorts. In light of 2020's Black Lives Matter protests, however, Pride organizations are reconsidering their positions on police at Pride, with some deciding to ban police officers from marching at Pride until certain racial justice reform requirements are met.

Many LGBTQ+ people note that one month of visibility out of 12 is not enough to ensure queer folks' safety and equity, while others argue that even a month of rainbow flags flying in your local Target is better than silence. (The radical founders of the Pride movement likely wouldn't have approved of silence, either.) Regardless of how you celebrate Pride, knowing its history can give you a fuller experience of the month - and a deeper appreciation for how it was made possible.
Studies Referenced: Armstrong, E.A. (2006) Movements and memory: The making of the Stonewall myth. American Sociological Review, https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~hoganr/Soc%20525/Armstrong_and_Crage_2006_Stonewall.pdf. Caitlin McCarthy, archivist for The Center in New York City
This article was originally published on

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An Archivist Explains The Deeply Radical Origins Of Pride

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The sun isn't the only thing that comes out in June. Rainbow flags also start appearing in corporate office windows, coffee shops, and your neighbor's front yard.June has been an unofficial month of celebratory queerness for decades. Though the origins of Pride Month span back to the '50s, President Bill Clinton officially made it "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month" in 2000.

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What Is Pride Month and the History of Pride?

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Around the world, Pride celebrations take a variety of forms, from parades to parties to protests and proms. Since the start of the modern LGBTQ+ liberation movement in the 1970s, hundreds of independent Pride events have sprung up in cities worldwide, each distinctly local and generally tied in some way to the foundational Stonewall Riots in June.

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What's Changed-and What Hasn't-in 50 Years of Pride Parades

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2020 marks 50 years since the first Pride parade in New York City. Here's what to know about how Pride has changed and grown over time.

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This tumultuous year has proven the essential nature of nonpartisan local news. Every day we bring you news critical to staying informed and active in the community. Join us with a tax-deductible donation .

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the 1969 New York City uprising that was a historic turning point for the LGBTQ rights movement in the United States. The Stonewall riots were the first Pride - not a parade - but a rebellion against the societal persecution and police brutality of LGBTQ people.

In 1969, in large and small cities across the country, hidden and sometimes illegal gay bars were both the centers of gay life and the targets of routine police raids where LGBTQ folks were intimidated, harassed, clubbed, beaten and jailed. Unjust policies that criminalized LGBTQ people were carried out by police.

The civil servants who were being paid to protect people were often the biggest threat to the safety of the LGBTQ community.

The riots began at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City during a "routine" police raid. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black transgender activist is widely credited with igniting the rebellion by throwing a shot glass at a window (or a brick, the history is piecemeal) as officers took patrons into the back of the club to "check their sex".

Among that vanguard of activists was also Stormé DeLarverie, a Black biracial butch lesbian and drag king, who punched a cop as she was being arrested and screamed to bystanders "Why don't you guys do something?"

Whether it was Marsha P. Johnson or Stormé DeLarverie or Sylvia Rivera hurling the first one, shot glasses, bricks and punches were thrown and six days of spontaneous uprisings ensued.

The Stonewall riots were physical acts of resistance to the routine raids and violent mistreatment of LGBTQ people by police and a major catalyst in generating our modern fight for LGBTQ rights.

The first Pride parade came after the riots, as people began to organize and demand the freedom to be themselves without fear of being arrested and beaten and killed. Since then, Pride parades have commemorated the power of LGBTQ people to rise up against oppression and have been a unique space where we can celebrate our true selves.

How far we have come!

Now we have LGBTQ and allied police officers who want to march in Pride in their uniforms.

But in cities across the world, the topic of having uniformed police marching in Pride is a controversial one.

It is unfortunate, therefore, that the Executive Board and Director of the LGBT Center OC have invited uniformed police to march with their Pride contingent, without any staff or community input.

Having uniformed police at Pride is not taking the high road. People will feel threatened and dismissed - people who do not have the option of removing their uniform for the day as an act of true solidarity.

There are a number of reasons why so many people are opposed to having uniformed police march in Pride. The fact that the first Pride was a protest of police brutality might make a case either way - it can be argued that by being present in uniform, police show solidarity with the community and perhaps begin to build bridges. Sadly, though, there are way too many problems locally and across the country. For some of us, police presence makes us feel safer and for others it is the exact opposite. Police mistreatment of LGBTQ+ People of Color especially, is not just a thing of the past. Too often Black, Brown, transgender, nonbinary, immigrants, and youth are dismissed, misgendered, harassed and abused by police. For many members of the LGBTQ+ community, police are a symbol of power that can trigger anxiety and fear. And knowing that not all cops are bad does not make people feel less afraid.

The Pride parade is symbolic, not only of resistance to police abuse, but also of resistance to the historic, systemic oppression of diverse sexualities and genders. It is about trans and queer freedom from oppressive forces. For many older LGBTQ+ folks, some who have suffered at the whim of homophobic and transphobic cops, seeing uniformed police march in Pride feels like a smack in the face. When police choose to march they are trying to show that they are part of the community and not against it. They have every right to do so. But when they march in uniform, many people feel they are whitewashing the history of Pride.

Why must off-duty police wear uniforms when marching at Pride?

It is a remarkable statement in many ways, to say that the communities who feel most threatened by the police need to buck up and be okay with it.

In social work, there is a saying that you "start where the client is."

First, you need to determine who is the client. Is it a white cisgender man who sits on a non-profit board or is it a transgender Latina who lacks access to resources and healthcare, a Black African gay man from Uganda seeking asylum, a nonbinary teenager who has been mistreated by local police, or a 25 year old lesbian DACA recipient whose father or cousins were hauled off by ICE and deported?

When police insist on marching in their uniforms, dismissing the overwhelming fears of the most marginalized among us, are they not suggesting that some people just don't matter? Or are they trying to prove that they care by forcing people to overcome histories of abuse.

There is a need for many in the community to have law enforcement show up as equals first, and not in an authoritative capacity. A bridge is ineffective if people are too afraid to cross it. This is an opportunity to start on the side of the bridge where the people are. Show us we matter and then, maybe, we can take a walk across the bridge together.

There are options.

The police could pay for their own contingent to be part of Pride, allowing the LGBT Center OC to represent all of the community.

Wear t-shirts.

Design a logo that says "Police Pride."

Wear a patch.

But leave your holsters and weapons and brass at home.

Acknowledging the historical and systemic problems in law enforcement and the deep wounds this has created is not being anti-police.

It is being pro-community.

On this, the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, we should remember the lives of the LGBTQ+ pioneers who fought against systemic oppression and state sanctioned police brutality.

Given the widespread feelings of opposition across the world to uniformed police marching in Pride, I would hope that our law enforcement partners would understand and act from a place of humble solidarity.

Let's honor those who paved the way for police to be out in their departments. The opposite is to use power to force something on those without it - exactly what we are trying to change.
Laura Kanter is a Queer and Trans Rights Advocate and the co-founder of the Orange County LGBTQ+ Policing Partnership and the Orange County Equality Coalition.

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Kanter: LGBT Center OC Marches With Police But Leave Community Behind

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Laura Kanter, a Queer and Trans Rights Advocate and co-founder of the Orange County LGBTQ+ Policing Partnership and the Orange County Equality Coalition, questions the decision by the Center OC to have police march in uniform at this weekend's Pride Parade in Orange County, arguing T-Shirts are better than gun belts to show support.

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This tumultuous year has proven the essential nature of nonpartisan local news. Every day we bring you news critical to staying informed and active in the community. Join us with a tax-deductible donation .

A vanguard of Black and Brown transgender and gender non-conforming activists - Marsha P. Johnson, Stormé DeLarverie, Sylvia Rivera to name a few - ignited the Stonewall Uprising 50 years ago in response to a police raid of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village of New York City. At that time in the 1960s, police raids of gay bars and gatherings were commonplace.

While the Stonewall Inn remains and serves as the birthplace for Pride - a marker of radical queer resistance against heterosexism, queerphobia, and racism - many of the local gay bars and communities here in Orange County, California faced a different situation.

Orange County witnessed a spring in gay bars 55 years ago, mostly concentrated in Garden Grove city - Rumour Hazzit, the Tiki Hut, the Mug, the Iron Spur, the Old Bavarian Inn, the Knotty Keg, the Hound's Tooth, the Ranger, the Saddle Club, DOK West, and the Happy Hour.

According to the OC Weekly, police harassment shut down most of these bars. For example, in 1974, nearly 500 demonstrators marched 1.5 miles down Garden Grove Blvd to protest 43 arrests of queer people hugging, kissing, and hand-holding in gay bars in Garden Grove. Even 10 years after that march, the gay bar, Mac's Landing, filed a $2.7 million lawsuit against the city because Garden Grove police had regularly positioned themselves outside of the bar at night, taking pictures of patrons going in and out and employed intimidation tactics.

Constant harassment from the police has dwindled the number of gay bars in Orange County. Today, the Frat House is the last gay bar in Garden Grove.

Despite the violent history between police departments and the LGBTQ+ community, the LGBT Center OC has decided to invite uniformed police officers to march in their contingent at the OC Pride Parade.

We, the undersigned, express profound and deep disappointment in this decision to include police officers without consulting the broader LGBTQ+ community in Orange County. We are disappointed that the LGBT Center OC, an organization that is supposed to serve the LGBTQ+ community, would make a unilateral decision without asking for the input of other queer groups. As a queer community that has a mixed, tense relationship with the police institutions, we are deeply concerned about police presence at the OC Pride Parade.

While we understand that this is an attempt to build bridges between police and the LGBTQ+ community, we hold some reservations. Uniformed police presence can be a triggering and traumatic presence for many of the LGBTQ+ community, especially people of color.

Using restorative justice as a framework, we contend that healing is a two-way street. Healing does not happen when the police show up to a Pride Parade without consultation from the LGBTQ+ community. Healing is about giving space, instead of occupying that space, especially when supporting the LGBTQ+ community. Healing does not happen when police claim to be "culturally competent" in LGBT issues by taking part in the LGBT Policing Partnership, a group that has not met in over a year and has only conducted a few trainings.

Restorative justice is about restoring the humanity and liveliness of the LGBTQ+ community. It is about confronting and healing the pain that police departments have inflicted onto queer bodies over and over.

Healing involves police officers being critical of their positions of authority. Healing happens when LGBTQ+, Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous, immigrants, refugees, disabled, and poor people can hold law enforcement accountable for their actions. It involves listening to our community needs without imposing an agenda onto us.

We demand a Pride that centers LGBTQ+ voices, needs, and power. We demand a Pride where LGBTQ+ people - especially those who have been marginalized based on race, class, immigration status, ability - feel safe and can be their whole selves. Pride is not only about radical queer resistance, but it is about envisioning and enacting a radical queer future where we all are liberated from the shackles of oppression. Until then, police presence within our presumed safe spaces will continue to be seen as violent, hostile, and traumatic.

To reach that future, we demand that the LGBT Center OC reconsider inviting uniformed police officers to this year's Pride Parade and to proactively serve the LGBTQ+ community. We demand that the LGBT Center OC host open dialogue and community town halls about how to bridge relationships between law enforcement and the LGBTQ+ community.

Signed,

Viet Rainbow of Orange County (VROC)

VietRISE

APAIT, a division of Special Service for Groups

Orange County Communities Organized for Responsible Development (OCCORD)

Chicanxs Unidxs

Resilience OC

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Huynh & Nguyen: Demanding Pride That is Safe For All LGBTQ+ People

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James Huynh and My Nguyen write that the LGBT Center OC should reconsider inviting uniformed police officers to this year's Pride Parade and host open dialogue and community town halls about how to bridge relationships between law enforcement and the LGBTQ+ community.

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This tumultuous year has proven the essential nature of nonpartisan local news. Every day we bring you news critical to staying informed and active in the community. Join us with a tax-deductible donation .

In an effort to silence our voices, last week The LGBT Center of Orange County walked over members of the LGBTQ+ community by refusing to engage in thoughtful, community-centered dialogue. The Center OC has forgotten its mission, "to advocate on behalf of the Orange County Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer/Questioning communities." We demand The Center OC hold community forums to listen to community members and leaders. We demand The Center OC reconsider its decision-making processes to include community voices and advocates before making decisions that affect the entire community. We demand The Center OC actively engage community partners, especially minority and marginalized groups, to ensure full representation in decision making processes.

Last week was the 30th Annual Orange County Pride Parade. As groups, organizations, and members of the LGBTQ+ community prepared to march and honor our right to exist without fear or persecution and our right to be heard, The Center OC leadership made a secretive, executive decision without consulting community members. The Center OC leadership invited armed and uniformed law enforcement officers to march with The Center OC contingent.

This decision raises serious concerns within our community-concerns we want to deliberate publicly. Let's be clear: we have tried to dialogue with The Center OC. Multiple organizations, such as the ACLU of Southern California, Santa Ana Building Communities, Invest in Youth, VietRISE, and Resilience OC, publicly voiced their dissent and called for dialogue within the little time they were given. We continue to ask that The Center OC dialogue with local LGBTQ+ communities and organizations.

We continue to be dismissed. When we asked The Center OC to reconsider their decision, The Center OC leadership demanded that we provide concrete, specific, and recent examples of police brutality against LGBTQ+ people that warrant concern.

We did.

The community-largely LGBTQ+ youth, queer people of color, and The Center OC youth leaders-demonstrated a "die in" at OC Pride. Community members wore signage naming those who have been brutally abused at the hands of law enforcement, with cases as recent as 2019. In silence, we lay on the asphalt to honor those that the Center chooses to ignore. Our bodies were literally walked over. Our signs were walked on and run over.

Anyone willing to listen to the community understands that trauma is still alive and deeply rooted in the everyday lives of LGBTQ+ people. If healing is a priority to The Center OC leadership and to law enforcement, then they must listen to those who are hurting and those whose traumas continue to haunt them. Wounds do not heal by forcing them to reopen. The Center OC leadership cannot help in healing wounds if they refuse to recognize their existence.

The Center OC stated in a press release that they welcome dialogue. However, when community members attempted to engage in dialogue online and in person, the Center responded by expunging community members' online comments, ignored messages, blocked social media accounts, and literally walked over our bodies.

We have seen other organizations respond in much more empathetic and constructive ways where they brought community leaders together. Earlier this year, Pride Toronto opened a dialogue about armed and uniformed police presence at their parade. The organization held an open vote to make its decision by consensus. Democratic consensus is possible, but The Center OC chooses to eschew democratic dialogue. As one of the oldest gay and lesbian community centers in the United States, The Center OC must confront our community's tumultuous relationship with being silenced at the hands of a "democratic" government. At the very least, they must take great care to not repeat history. Still, We find ourselves silenced, our voices ignored, and our bodies disregarded.

As community members, we placed our trust in the LGBT Center of OC. We regarded it as a safe space where marginalized people were heard and all identities were represented. The actions of The Center OC leadership demonstrate a willful disregard of the larger LGBTQ+ community when making decisions that concern the entire community. The Center OC leadership sends a clear message. Our voices are unimportant, unrecognized, and silenced. The echo-chamber of The Center OC leadership are the only voices that seemingly matter. As supposed representatives of the LGBTQ+ community, The Center OC shows that their priority is advocating for themselves not the community.
OUR DEMANDS
First, The Center OC must listen to the LGBTQ+ community before advocating on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community.

Second, through open, democratic and direct community engagement, The Center OC must remedy the harm caused by disregarding minority and marginalized groups.

Third, The Center OC must practice community engagement in good faith before making organizational decisions that affect the entire LGBTQ+ community.

As Orange County watches, The Center OC exercises their own personal decision-making, the LGBTQ+ community asks:

Has the LGBT Center of Orange County forgotten its mission?

Going forward, we again invite the LGBT Center of Orange County to have a conversation with us about how they intend to engage with the community. We ask: what are the Center's plans to remedy the harm that they've caused and what does advocacy mean to them?
Stevie Vu is a nationally recognized public speaker and queer activist in Orange County. She is a Youth Organizing intern at VietRISE and is also in charge of Communications and Public Relations at the Viet Rainbow of Orange County. My Nguyen was born in Vietnam and grew up in Kansas City. He began organizing since 2011 advocating for undocumented students rights for instate tuition, racial equity, youth homelessness awareness in public schools, youth leadership training, and a speaker on the topic of transforming trauma to organizing. His mission is to build strong communities and to continue the work of sustainable advocacy by empowering marginalized communities. James Huynh is a PhD student at UCLA studying LGBTQ Asian/American health inequities. He is the gay son of Vietnamese refugees. He serves on the board of the Viet Rainbow of Orange County. Opinions expressed in editorials belong to the authors and not Voice of OC. Voice of OC is interested in hearing different perspectives and voices. If you want to weigh in on this issue or others please contact Voice of OC Involvement Editor Theresa Sears at TSears@voiceofoc.org

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Vu, Nguyen, Huynh: LGBT Center Orange County, Do you Hear Us Now?

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This tumultuous year has proven the essential nature of nonpartisan local news. Every day we bring you news critical to staying informed and active in the community. Join us with a tax-deductible donation . In an effort to silence our voices, last week The LGBT Center of Orange County walked over members of the LGBTQ+ community by refusing to engage in thoughtful, community-centered dialogue.

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The post was written by Dr. Tina Ligon, Archivist at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland
Bayard Rustin was a believer in non-violence, a socialist, a civil rights organizer, and an openly gay black man. He was born on March 17, 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania and raised by his maternal grandparents, who exposed him to the Quaker Religion and civil rights activities and organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Rustin attended Wilberforce University in Ohio and Cheyney State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. He was involved with several student organizations, including the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity.

Rustin played a major role in the civil rights and equality movements of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. He was active in the Young Communist League, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Rustin was instrumental in organizing, coordinating, and marketing the 1963 March on Washington, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.

In 1944, Rustin was sentenced to three years in federal prison for failing to report for the physical examination under the Selective Service Act during World War II. Rustin, who strongly believed in nonviolence, was a conscientious objector against the war. The Bureau of Federal Prisons, RG 129, Notorious Offenders Files, 1919-1975 (NAID 580698) contains records related to Rustin's time in Ashland Federal Correctional Institute in Kentucky. The file unit Rustin, Bayard (NAID 18558235) relates to his various activities in federal prison. Included in the file unit are letters and telegrams sent by fellow activists and religious mentor A. J. Muste. The file unit also contains allegations of homosexual behavior, defiance, and attempts to organize other inmates around the issues of racial discrimination and segregation, as seen in the many disciplinary reports filed by prison officials.

Bayard Rustin passed away on August 24, 1987. He received numerous awards and accolades for his work in the civil rights and gay communities. Some of these honors include several buildings and LGBT organizations named after him. Rustin was posthumously given honorary membership in Delta Phi Upsilon, a fraternity for gay and bisexual men of color and in 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Other file units and items at the National Archives and Presidential Libraries related to Bayard Rustin include:

Focus on Bayard Rustin (NAID 2812560) from the series Sound Recordings of Historical Radio Broadcasts, World War II Government Documentaries, and Popular Radio Shows, 1906-1993 (NAID 1487762)

Rustin, Bayard (NAID 6095297) from the series Janet McMahon's Newspaper Columnist Files, 1977-1981 (NAID 6094325)

Black Photographs- Martin Luther King, Sr., Coretta Scott King and Bayard Rustin (NAID 6119543) from the series Marc Henderson's Subject Files, 1977-1981 (NAID 609638)

Chicago, [Illinois] - 157-717-Sub A-v.4 [Classification - Civil Unrest] - Bayard Rustin (NAID 5575056) from the series Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957-1978 (NAID 1487609)

Schoolhouse: Bayard Rustin (NAID 107741) from the series Audio Recordings of the "Forum" Radio Program, 1940-1982 (NAID 106531)

On Thursday, June 25, 2015, the Stonewall Employee Affinity Group and the Afro-American History Society at the National Archives will show the film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin at 11:30 am in Lecture Room D at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.

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Record of the Week: Bayard Rustin, Civil Rights and Gay Rights Activist

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In Celebration of LGBT Pride Month The post was written by Dr. Tina Ligon, Archivist at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland Bayard Rustin was a believer in non-violence, a socialist, a civil rights organizer, and an openly gay black man. He was born on March 17, 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania and raised...

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Filed to: alexandra

Illustration: Vicky Leta

There are as many paths to exploring queer history as there are people who have lived it, and many legends we've nearly forgotten about who, in a more just world, would be household names. History can provide inspiration, and can also help us to avoid making the same damn mistakes again and again - mistakes like forgetting that trans people of colour were at the vanguard of gay liberation.

Pride is a time to celebrate, honour, and remember all of it, whether you're trans, bi, ace, poly, pan, intersex, nonbinary, or anywhere else on the gender and sexual identity and expression spectrum... or just proud to support your queer friends.

These 30 movies reflect elements of modern queer (LBGTQ) history - sometimes dramatized, sometimes documentary, and sometimes because the film itself made history. They reflect decades of love, sex, activism, and artistry. Some call for tolerance, while others throw up a middle finger in response to narrow-minded bigotry. Many ask us to love one another, but others demand that we take up the battle cry: Be gay, do crimes.

Or just put on your cha-cha heels and watch some good movies. You do you. (And feel free to let us know your own favourites in the comments.)

Salomé (1923)

In the roaring '20s, the rules governing depicting queerness in film were a bit looser than they would be later on. Germany produced a handful of queer-positive films, even as several American movies played fast and loose with gender and sexual roles. Case in point: Salome, a biblical epic produced by, and starring, queer provocateur Alla Nazimova.

Nazimova (usually referred to as just "Nazimova," like "Cher") was one of Hollywood's early power players, and an accomplished artist with a take on Oscar Wilde's play that included female characters played by men in drag, overt sexuality, and silver lamé loincloths. It's all wonderfully campy and stylised, and it didn't make a penny, but it's a reminder that there were queer folx making movies that your great-grandparents may have enjoyed.

With the rise of the Hays Production Code in America, and the Nazi party in Germany, it would be decades before movies could again do much more than hint about unsanctioned relationships.

Victim (1961)

It was sometimes called the "blackmailer's charter." Since 1885, English law had allowed for the criminal prosecution of homosexual acts, though by the 1960s, it was little enforced. Still, the mere threat of arrest, and the very public proceedings that would follow, made it distressingly common for blackmailers (gay and straight) to take advantage of well-off marks - in this case, a married London lawyer played by Dirk Bogarde. Approaching the social issue by way of neo noir thriller, Victim was an early instance of a major director and star taking a sympathetic approach to portraying gay characters, inevitably shocking audiences and censors by even acknowledging that such people even existed. It wasn't a huge hit, but it came at a crucial moment: the '60s were well and truly underway, and attitudes were beginning to change.

Before Stonewall (1984)

If Stonewall sometimes seems like ancient history, it's important to remember that queer history didn't begin there - not even remotely. Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg's 1984 documentary looks at the earlier part of the 20th century by interviewing activists and writers who help chart the evolution of what would become a movement among people who were fighting to live their lives authentically at a time when the broader culture preferred to pretend they weren't there.

The film is an important document, having captured so many important voices while they were still with us, but it's also inspiring, and often joyous. It's hard not to smile thinking about what these legends were getting up to while the rest of America was sleeping. (It underwent an HD restoration a couple of years ago, so it's a particularly good time to check it out.)

Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (2005)

Stonewall had been building for a long, long time. It might have been the explosion of the modern queer liberation movement, but there were sparks for decades - one of which was the Compton's Cafeteria Riot in 1966. Transgender people in San Francisco had been largely barred from gay bars (transphobia has never been an exclusively cis, straight phenomenon), and the all-night Compton's Cafeteria had been a gathering place, a cheap coffee stop, especially for trans sex workers. Their very presence, of course, also made it a convenient for the local police, who found ready targets of harassment among the cafeteria's trans and cross-dressing patrons. The iconic image of Stonewall remains a brick through a window, and the Compton's Riot has a similar bit of iconography: a cup of coffee in the face of a cop who grabbed and tried to arrest a patron. What followed was one of the first public queer protests in US history, and the beginning of trans activism in San Francisco.

Some of My Best Friends Are...(1971)

A fascinating time capsule, and frequently entertaining soap opera about a gay bar on Christmas Eve, filmed and set just a few years after Stonewall. A huge cast of characters wander through, some affecting, some just loosely sketched character types, but representing broad swathes of the community. It was made at a transitional time, when queer activism and visibility were on the rise, but hadn't yet had the impact that was to come, and so the film gives off a vibe that alternates between joyous and terrified of what's outside the door of the welcoming space of the bar.

(If all that weren't enough to secure the movie's place in queer history, it also features an early screen appearance from Rue McClanahan herself, just a year before she teamed up with Bea Arthur on Maude.)

Female Trouble (1974)

A lot of early queer-positive movies were aimed squarely at a straight audience - depicting gays as angelic figures or as poor victims of society's cruelty. John Waters skipped all of that well-intentioned nonsense by creating films in which there's no greater crime than being dull. Though Pink Flamingos (with its memorable climax set to the tune of "How Much Is That Doggy in the Window") is more famous, Female Trouble refines the Waters style with its story of high school reprobate Dawn Davenport (played by the drag queen Divine), who turns to a life of crime when her totally square parents won't get her what she really wants for Christmas: "Nice girls don't wear cha-cha heels!" Their cruel denial of such an essential accessory sends Dawn on a spree of sex and crime that plays a bit like a tribute to Mildred Pierce - if Joan Crawford had conceived her daughter on camera.

On a rotted old mattress.

At the dump.

It's all appropriately outrageous, and audiences were outraged - but only the dull ones.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

I've seen Rocky at least a dozen times, and can recite every line, but I still couldn't tell you a thing about the plot. (That might have less to do with the movie itself than the state in which one traditionally watches it... but let's say it's both.)

On one level, it's a celebration of many, many forms of queerness. It's weird, and a little sloppy, and doesn't make a ton of sense... and more fun for all of that.

Desert Hearts (1985)

By the mid-1980s, the tropes were already beginning to solidify: We were beginning a long run of movies (many of them brilliant) about HIV/AIDS, and square in the middle of an era of major films ( Dressed to Kill, Cruising, Silence of the Lambs, Basic Instinct) that associated queer identity with extreme violence. In the middle of all that, Desert Hearts was an absolute breath of fresh air: Vivian, an English professor in the middle of a divorce, meets Cay, an uninhibited sculptor, at a ranch in Reno. The course of true love never did run smooth (or, in this case, straight), and so Vivian struggles a bit with the unexpected lesbian attraction. This romantic drama never veers toward tragedy, and is all the better for it.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

The best queer-themed movies understand that nobody is all one thing, and that any type of queer identity intersects with all of the other labels that we choose for ourselves (or that others choose for us). That's why My Beautiful Laundrette isn's just a great gay film, it's also a great film about class, racism, and provides a vivid portrait of live in the Thatcher/Reagan-era 1980s.

Paris is Burning (1990)

Like Faulkner said: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." It's especially true when it comes to queer history, as Paris is Burning makes plain. Exploring New York's drag ball culture in the late 1980s, director Jennie Livingston's documentary shines a particular spotlight on the black and latino gay, trans, and genderqueer experience, with aspects both joyous and heartbreaking. So much of what was transgressive here has worked its way into pop culture, for better and for worse: Madonna gets credit for voguing, but the style has roots in Harlem ballrooms. Much of the language and culture here will make perfect sense to RuPaul or Pose fans, and many of the doc's darker elements will also be familiar: racism, poverty, and anti-trans violence are all still very real parts of the queer BIPOC experience. All the more reason to appreciate authenticity and self-expression, and to throw up a middle finger to gender expectations.

Edward II (1991)

You want queer history? Fine. Let's take it back to England in the fourteenth century for the story of Edward II, famously infatuated with courtier Piers Gaveston. Gay filmmaker, provocateur, and activist Derek Jarman removes any historical ambiguity from the relationship between the two and imagines medieval Europe as a postmodern fantasia, rife with intentional anachronisms and Annie Lennox on the soundtrack. Think Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, but much, much gayer. It also made a star of Tilda Swinton, who followed this up as the title character of another queer classic, Orlando.

The Birdcage (1996)

A slick, funny, charming, and quotable bit of Hollywood entertainment starring some of the biggest names of the era, The Birdcage made real money selling a message of acceptance (in spite of a weird and entirely unnecessary R-rating). Unlike many of the earnest queer-adjacent films of the '90s, this one actually made it look like being gay could be kinda fun. And funny. And generally not tragic. Though the characters play into particular stereotypes, the movie makes clear that it's way better (and totally OK) to be an outsized drama queen à la Robin Williams' Armand than to be tedious and narrow-minded like the senator played by Gene Hackman. It's all so scrupulously good-natured that it couldn't help but draw in a broad audience, and thereby help pave the long, winding road to future queer-positive movies.

The Watermelon Woman (1996)

The mid-'90s saw a string of gay-themed Hollywood movies. Movies with good intentions and big-name stars, even if they were largely male, straight, and white: the aforementioned The Birdcage, plus Philadelphia and In & Out, to name the biggies. But, even more significantly, it was a golden age for indie filmmakers who were beginning to make more personal, authentic, and idiosyncratic movies that move rejected heteronormativity - what came to be known as New Queer Cinema. Director/actor Cheryl Dunye plays Cheryl, who goes on the hunt for a fictional Black actress from old Hollywood, exploring the life of someone who lived on the margins.

Bound (1996)

Bound announced major new directorial talents in Lily and Lana Wachowski, a pair of siblings who would go on to create The Matrix and other imaginative successes (along with some equally imaginative flops). The noir-inspired thriller mixes violence and humour in a story that also presents a lesbian relationship that feels real, and an unashamed sexuality that never feels gratuitous - the chemistry between leads Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly is off the freaking charts.

The directors remain among Hollywood's highest-profile transgender filmmakers, and it all started with this instant classic.

All About My Mother (1999)

It's not the queerest film in Pedro Almodóvar's very queer filmography - that's probably 1987's Law of Desire, involving a complex love triangle between two cis gay characters and a trans woman. But All About My Mother solidified Almodóvar's status as one of the world's top filmmakers, blending his earlier, campier sensibilities with more dramatic material. When Manuela's son is killed in a car accident, she sets out on a quest to find his other parent, a transgender woman named Lola whose identity Manuela had kept secret. On the way, she gets involved in the lives of other women, including scene-stealing trans sex worker Agrado and Rosa, and HIV+ nun also carrying Lola's child. The movie was way, way ahead of its time in depicting queer themes, and it's still a wildly entertaining and thoughtful movie about motherhood in all its forms.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)

Look, we've all had those nights. You get down. You feel had. So why not put on some makeup, turn up the tape deck, and pull that wig down from the shelf? There's a fair chance you're already singing along, but, if not, Hedwig 's about a musical about a genderqueer German rock singer whose botched gender reassignment surgery left them with the titular angry inch. Anticipating a much-needed cultural conversation about gender binaries by over two decades, it is also an old school rock opera par excellence, of the kind they just don't make anymore. Based on the stage musical of the same name, the movie made no money whatsoever, but has earned a well-deserved status as a cult classic.

Saving Face (2004)

The success of The Joy Luck Club in 1993 lead to a huge boom in movies with Chinese-American themes. And by "huge boom," I mean that Hollywood only waited 11 years for the next movie to centre Chinese Americans.

(Sighs audibly.)

But! On the bright side, Alice Wu's Saving Face is a charming triumph, telling a love story between a closeted surgeon and her boss's daughter. The backdrop is the traditional families and community of the two women, but ultimately it's one of those romantic comedies where you can't help but cheer on the leads.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

There are several films on this list that involve a bunch of straight people making queer-themed movies... with mixed results. While Brokeback Mountain leans a bit too heavily on tragic tropes (by 2005, we'd seen more than enough movies about gays doomed to die), there's an undeniable well of talent both behind and in front of the camera - more than enough to make for an affecting experience. The movie's place in queer history, though, rests as much on the backlash it inspired as on the acclaim it received. By the time the movie lost Best Picture at the Oscars to Crash (her?), the discussion was more about homophobia in Hollywood's old guard and among movie audiences in general than about either film's virtues. Brokeback started a discussion, and, just as significantly, reminded studio bosses that queer content could get mainstream attention and make major bank.

Pariah (2011)

It didn't break out in a big big way, but Pariah still feels like the start of a new, more assured era in queer cinema. For one thing, it's absolutely gorgeous, with stunning, expressionistic cinematography and confident, assured direction from Dee Rees. It's a world you can get lost in. Pariah manages to tell a coming-of-age, coming out story that's so deeply personal that it never feels like a queer message movie, even though it has plenty to say about identity through the journey of its young, black, lesbian lead Alike.

Pride (2014)

During the British mineworkers strike in the '80s, activist Mark Ashton and others realised that there existed a real opportunity to forge an alliance between the miners and the queer community, both of which had found themselves shafted (ahem) by Margaret Thatcher's government. Pride reworks the story of the resulting movement (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) into a genuinely delightful comedy-drama (think The Full Monty) about the personalities behind the unlikely team-up that would ultimately bring queer issues to the forefront of British politics.

Drunktown's Finest (2014)

There's much about Drunktown's Finest that we've seen before: Set around a Navajo community near Gallup, New Mexico, it foregrounds poverty, alcoholism, and clashes between tradition and modern life. Rather than do away with those stereotypical themes, trans Navajo filmmaker Sydney Freeland explores their reality as part of the broader scope of the lives of three young Native Americans, including a transgender woman who dreams of becoming a model. It's one of several successful films of the last few years to approach characters at the intersection of queer and Native identities.

Out in the Night (2014)

In 2006, seven out black lesbian women were harassed and violently threatened in Greenwich Village. When they fought back, the ensuing brawl led to years-long prison sentences for four of the women, who were charged as though they were gang members. The press called them the "New Jersey Four," and a "lesbian wolf pack." One headline warned of an "Attack of the Killer Lesbians," though, of course, no one was killed. The queer community has always had a fraught relationship with the American judicial system, as have women and people of colour. The documentary speaks to the ways in which that long history lives on, especially where identities intersect.

Tab Hunter Confidential (2015)

He was the absolute epitome of mid-century, mid-American ideals of masculinity and good looks: a slightly bland but undeniable hotness. With his blond hair, killer smile, and chiselled features (as well as a voice that landed him a couple of hit pop singles), he was a movie star deliberately branded to make suburban teenage girls go nuts. His public romances with stars like Debbie Reynolds and Natalie Wood gave fans something to fantasize about when they weren't actively swooning. Of course, even then there was gossip about Hunter's sexuality, and he confirmed those rumours in the 2005 memoir upon which this award-winning doc is based. It's a very personal look into the actor's life in Hollywood, and at the lengths to which the studio system went to keep some of its biggest stars hidden in the closet.

Tangerine (2015)

Modern tech has opened up opportunities for filmmakers that they could only dream of back in the day. Imagine if queer directors of earlier generations had been able to shoot a movie on their phones with professional-looking results? The stories that could have been told? Director Sean Baker and company make a virtue of the intimacy and immediacy of that shooting on a couple of iPhones brings, and the results don't feel shoddy nor cheap. It's a girlfriend/buddy/revenge comedy about Sin-Dee Rella and Alexandra, two trans sex workers on the hunt for the man who did Sin-Dee wrong. It's a ton of fun.

Moonlight (2014)

Two words: Best Picture. Moonlight actually won a ton of awards, but the most groundbreaking by far was that Oscar. And, yes, they did accidentally read the wrong card and make everyone think that La La Land won... but after 89 years of Academy Awards, it was worth an extra few seconds to learn that the first film with a lead queer character (as well as an all-black cast) had claimed Hollywood's biggest prize. Good movies don't always make history (and this is a great one), but Oscar winners sure do.

Kiki (2016)

Picking up where Paris is Burning left off, Kiki looks at the current state of the drag ball scene. It's not a sequel, but in examining kiki culture in New York City more than a quarter century after that earlier doc, it provides a fascinating glimpse of everything that has, and hasn't, changed for a community whose influence has only grown. Many of the same struggles remain: HIV/AIDS hasn't gone away, especially for those without the money to pay for treatment, nor have over-policing and discrimination. But a broader cultural acceptance of queerness and the mainstreaming (to some extent) of drag have opened doors for many of the young, often trans people of colour the film focuses on, who also manifest a fierce and inspiring strain of activism.

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017)

There are as many perspectives on the Stonewall uprising as there were people who were there, but if you're looking to educate yourself on those events, you could do worse than to start with a close look at Marsha P. Johnson. Coming into the spotlight during an era when labels were very much in flux, Johnson self-identified as gay and as a transvestite who generally used female pronouns. She was also a sex worker and a drag queen, as well as an activist, model, and mentor - a generally fascinating person who was on the frontline when Stonewall went up in flames in 1969. Director David France's film explores not just Johnson's life, but also a recent investigation into her tragic and mysterious death in 1992, which the NYPD ruled a suicide without much examination.

120 Beats per Minute (2017)

Director and screenwriter Robin Campillo, alongside co-screenwriter Philippe Mangeot, used some of their own experiences with the grassroots ACT UP organisation in crafting this 2017 film. It's a fictionalized exploration of an era of activism that's alternately joyous and harrowing, capturing some of the electric energy of the members of a movement who were literally fighting for their lives.

Happiest Season (2020)

They crank these things out by the dozens. There's an entire, year-round industry dedicated to feeding an entire nation's insatiable appetite for schmaltzy, made-for-TV holiday movies, very frequently involving a hard-driving career woman who discovers the true meaning of the season while visiting her hometown for Christmas. There's comfort in conformity, and so there's been surprisingly little variety to the form in spite of the sheer volume of these movies - at least until the last couple of years. Non-white faces have become just a bit more common, and 2020 saw the sudden appearance of not just one, but at least seven holiday movies centering queer romances (and queer actors). Which only makes sense - is there a better audience for campy, cheesy, over-the-top love stories than gay people? Hulu's Happiest Season had better marketing, slightly bigger stars, and an overall better pedigree than some of the others, and therefore became the biggest focus of attention. If you're asking if it's any good, you're missing the point entirely: It's dorky TV comfort food, sure, but it's dorky TV comfort food with and about lesbians - and damned if that doesn't feel like progress.

Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen (2020)

Representation on screen isn't everything... but it matters. For most Americans, everything they know about transgender people comes from media representations, and that's also true for trans youth, who may have no other role models than those they get from TV. Disclosure takes a look at over a century of transgender stories in film and on TV (going way back to A Florida Enchantment in 1914), an era of very, very, very slow progress that's taken a giant leap forward in just the last few years with the rise of popular trans celebrities, many of whom are interviewed here. While focusing on celebrities, the film also acknowledges that added visibility carries dangers as well, and that the spotlight hasn't necessarily made life safer. Disclosure investigates those generally problematic, often quite hurtful old movies and shows to figure out how they've tracked with the realities of trans lives, and how far we've come.

About the Author

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30 Movies That Explore the Spectrum Queer History

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Filed to: alexandra Illustration: Vicky Leta There are as many paths to exploring queer history as there are people who have lived it, and many legends we've nearly forgotten about who, in a more just world, would be household names.

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In 2007, six-year-old Jazz Jennings went on national television to tell Barbara Walters the same thing she'd been telling her parents, siblings and anyone else who would listen: She was, despite her birth certificate's insistence otherwise, a girl.

Shy and sweet, Jennings answered Walters' probing questions with the clarity and patience of someone used to explaining herself over and over again. "She was so charismatic, so charming and so clearly herself," Laverne Cox says of first seeing that "20/20" interview. "Her humanity was so on display that you couldn't deny she had the right to be who she was." It was a watershed moment for transgender visibility in media, not least because it made Jennings one of the youngest documented trans people to speak her truth for millions of viewers to hear.

It'd be easy for Jennings to say she always knew that moment would be life-changing. Looking back, though, she mostly just remembers it as something she got to brag about at recess. "I think there was like, one kid from school who recognized me from TV," Jennings, now 20, recalls over a recent Zoom call from her home in South Florida. "Maybe my confidence increased a bit because I was like, 'I'm on TV!' like any little kid would think about it."

Jennings' awareness of how seismic the interview was would change soon enough. In the years after "20/20," she appeared on "The Rosie Show," won a GLAAD Media Award and sat down with Oprah Winfrey for an OWN special (" I Am Jazz: A Family in Transition"). Jennings spoke around the country, co-wrote a children's book (also called "I Am Jazz") and became a Johnson & Johnson spokesmodel. She led the New York City Pride parade as its youngest grand marshal ever, beaming at the crowds with a rainbow flag tied around her shoulders like a superhero cape. She launched her own TLC reality show (again titled "I Am Jazz" - her brand is strong). When she met President Obama in 2015, he smiled at her and said, as she recalls with an Obama-esque twang, "I'm proud of ya."

The swell of interest in Jennings' story was overwhelming if understandable. "20/20" tackling the story of her transition, not to mention showing her family's unequivocal support, was unprecedented. "In 2007, there were almost no media stories about children who are trans," says Nick Adams, GLAAD's director of transgender representation. "Seeing Barbara Walters' interview with Jazz and her family, in which Jazz was a happy, well-adjusted child, allowed so many other families to understand how to love and support their own trans children."

* * *

Since then, trans visibility and representation has undergone a massive shift.

For decades, Hollywood allowed trans people on-screen only as toxic punchlines ("Ace Ventura: Pet Detective") or as tragic figures played by cisgender men ("Dallas Buyers Club," "The Danish Girl"). Now, trans people are getting to tell their own stories like never before. This past December, "Juno" and "The Umbrella Academy" star Elliot Page came out as trans by telling his many millions of social media followers, "I love that I am trans. And I love that I am queer." In March, he became the first trans man to appear on the cover of Time; in April, he had his first on-camera interview with Winfrey, who'd gained a whole new trans-inclusive vocabulary since she interviewed Jazz a decade earlier.

Trans actors are also getting to play more thoughtful, authentic trans characters informed by their own experiences. This has been especially true for trans youth, who were practically invisible on TV before Jennings' landmark interview. Young trans actors such as Hunter Schafer ("Euphoria"), Ian Alexander ("Star Trek: Discovery"), Indya Moore ("Pose"), Isaiah Stannard ("Good Girls") and Nicole Maines ("Supergirl") are paving a new path.

"For a long time we were seeing trans people where their transness was the end-all, be-all of their story," Maines says. "Now we're starting to see trans people portrayed as three-dimensional characters who make good choices and bad choices, who have wants and needs, who make mistakes and are people."

Cox understands the argument that representation has its limits. "It doesn't necessarily change the material conditions of working-class trans people," she acknowledges. "But what representation does do that's beautiful, for young people and people of all ages, is that they can just see themselves. They can just have a sense of existing, and a sense of possibility."

The media's ability to not just reflect but transform is a cornerstone of Jennings' approach to her life and work. "Our goal is always to help people, and to share a message of positivity, love and acceptance," she says. "I think we're continuing to do that by sharing our story."

Hollywood's embrace of more nuanced portrayals of marginalized communities can engender sympathy in and evolve the perspectives of people who might not have thought twice before. (See President Biden crediting "Will & Grace" for inspiring him to support gay marriage.) As someone who plays a bona fide trans superhero on a broadcast network show, Maines thinks about this a lot. "Anti-trans sentiment is an issue of not seeing humanity in trans people," she says. "So one of our best weapons against that is visibility, saying, 'This is who we are. This is how we exist.'"

But with increased visibility comes increased scrutiny and reactionary discrimination, which is playing out across the country to devastating effect. Since Biden's inauguration, conservative state legislators have introduced more than 100 anti-trans bills, some of which would outright criminalize gender-affirming health care for trans youth. For those who did get the support and medical expertise to transition before "the wrong puberty" hit, the idea of that possibility disappearing is chilling. As Maines says of that health care: "It didn't change my life. It saved my life."

Jennings is horrified by the discriminatory hatred behind the new bills, including the one signed into law the day before this story went live in her home state of Florida, which bans trans girls from playing on girls' sports teams in public schools. After this interview, Jazz posted a message on Instagram for her 1.1 million followers. "As someone who has experienced discrimination in sports, it makes me feel terrible about the message that laws like this send out to transgender youth," she wrote. "They may try to take away our sports, our healthcare, and our rights, but they can't take away our PRIDE!"

Still, Jennings has been fighting similar measures for most of her life, and isn't entirely surprised by their recent resurgence. "There's been a lot of progress, but I think with the abundance of love and acceptance, there's also that contrast of hatred and cruelty," she says. "People are more outspoken. People feel empowered to share their loving, and empowered to share their hatred."

* * *

In July 2015, as 14-year-old Jennings was about to enter high school, her family launched "I Am Jazz." It premiered the same month as Caitlyn Jenner's "I Am Cait," though Jazz is quick to say that their show came first ("She stole [the title] from us") and has far outlasted it. Over six seasons, viewers watched Jennings make friends, go to school, play sports and date. The series explained what gender-affirming health care actually means as Jennings maintained her hormone blockers and estrogen levels. In so doing, "I Am Jazz" taught a broad audience what it meant for a trans girl to grow up, and how important it is that she be loved for who she is.

One of TLC's most consistently performing shows, with more than 1 million viewers an episode, "I Am Jazz" details the everyday realities of being a trans teen in ways unlike any other program on television before or since. Jennings is remarkably open about her highs, her lows and somewhat controversially, the detailed specifics of her gender-confirmation surgeries. Many trans people have made a point of not discussing the specifics of their bodies, as seen when Cox and trans model Carmen Carrera refused to in a 2014 interview with Katie Couric, to discourage sensationalizing their transitions.

"It was hard to decide how open I should be just because so many large-profile transgender people don't talk about their surgeries," Jennings acknowledges. "But for me, I just think I wanted to educate as many people as possible on the experience and what it's like to go through it firsthand."

Though "I Am Jazz" took an extended hiatus after its sixth season, it will officially go into production on a seventh season this summer, Variety has exclusively learned. "I think it's gonna keep me busy," Jennings says, "and I'm always happy to share my story and help as many people as possible."

For 19-year-old "Saved by the Bell" star Josie Totah, seeing a trans girl her age put everything in perspective in ways she couldn't quite articulate herself. "I distinctly remember feeling so connected to someone that felt so far away and yet very, very close to me," says Totah. She'd later watch "I Am Jazz" with her mother and best friend as she embarked on her own transition, calling it "a touch point and a resource." Totah had understood she was trans since she was 5, but by the time she saw Jennings in real life when both were 18, Jennings was the first trans person she ever met.

"Trans people sometimes don't know trans people themselves, and it can be really isolating," Totah says. "Meeting Jazz was just reaffirming, and so loving. She just felt like family."

For Jennings, realizing the impact she had on trans kids like Totah was what convinced her she was doing something important. "I was learning that there were a lot of other kids like me out there who can relate to me, and who saw me, and learned more about themselves through seeing me and my experience," she remembers. "Once I learned about it in that way, I was like, 'OK, that's pretty cool.'"

Jennings is startlingly casual about her influence and all that she's accomplished. She's often described as a fierce LGBTQ+ activist, a responsibility she accepts and takes very seriously. But both on "I Am Jazz" and throughout our interview, Jennings is not exactly trying to be a polished Hollywood ambassador. She's a 20-year-old who loves roller coasters, "RuPaul's Drag Race" and playing pickleball with her dad. She has a dreamy pink-and-blue tattoo of a mermaid on her biceps to honor a lifelong obsession she's shared and bonded over with other trans girls ever since she could swim. She stages goofy TikTok dances with her older brother Sander for their combined 1.2 million followers. Now taking a break before starting her studies at Harvard University, she lives in Florida with her family, whom she considers her best friends.

"Just having my family support me, that's all I need to boost my spirits," Jennings says, lighting up. "Not everyone has that family support, and when I think about my family, I just feel, like, giddy inside."

For a trans woman like Cox, who was 34 when the "20/20" interview aired, Jennings and her family represented both a hopeful future and an impossible past. "I remember just being so jealous," Cox says. "I went back in my own life to think about what my childhood was like, and how difficult it was, and how it might have been different if I had supportive parents or even just some sort of critical framework to be able to say that I was trans and accepted and could live authentically."

The image and reality of Jennings' unconditionally encouraging support system has made her story stand out. "Watching the Jennings family rally around, support and uplift Jazz in such a loving and beautiful way is exactly what I wish for all trans and gender-expansive youth," says Peppermint, the trans "RuPaul's Drag Race" finalist who is considered a family friend.

Despite its title, "I Am Jazz" is just as much about how the Jennings learned to embrace their transgender daughter, granddaughter and sister, and fight for her rights and those of every other trans kid. "It really is not just about the child who's transitioning, but the family that's transitioning," Jazz explains. "You have to learn new pronouns. You have to learn to stick up for your transgender family member when they're going through difficult situations or when someone's not treating them correctly. There's so many new things that you have to learn."

Jazz's family has always backed her unequivocally, believing that no trans kid deserves any less. "The transition really requires everybody to have additional love and support for each other, because it's not easy," says Jazz's father, Greg. "But it's important to work together."

* * *

Despite the Jennings' best and most public efforts, the road hasn't always been smooth for their daughter. When she was 8, Jennings was barred from playing girls' travel soccer and forced to play with the boys. "I was told that I was going to hurt the other kids," she says with palpable frustration. "I had friends on the team. Those were my girls and my teammates." Having to be on the boys' team reminded her of how much she didn't belong there. "Soccer was my favorite sport, my pride and joy," she sighs. "It was just a way for me to release, have fun and just be myself."

The Jennings successfully sued the United States Soccer Federation to adopt a trans-inclusive policy. And yet 2021 has seen an unprecedented wave of anti-trans bills across the country, many aimed at keeping trans girls out of girls' sports. Even Jenner, the most famous trans Olympian in the world, recently made headlines for not siding with the trans community on the issue. But according to Dr. Jack Turban, a child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine, these bills are "unnecessary and unscientific."

"One major problem is that people repeatedly cite research about cisgender men to argue that transgender women shouldn't be allowed to compete in female sports," Turban says. "The problem with this is that transgender women are not cisgender men."

Other legislation could be even more harmful. Some of the bills, including one recently passed in Arkansas, bar trans youth from accessing gender-affirming health care altogether, which could quite literally be a matter of life and death. Ask any trans person who got that care what it meant to them and the most consistently used word is "life-saving." That's how Jennings describes the hormone blockers that stopped her nightmares of beards and mustaches chasing her, and how Maines thinks about her ability to transition before she aged like her identical twin brother. "If I didn't have access to that care, I would look just like him," she says, "and I wouldn't be able to live with myself."

According to Turban, being able to safely transition in consult with medical professionals can lower the alarmingly high rate of suicidal thoughts in trans youth, and removing that possibility altogether could prove catastrophic. "Nearly every major medical organization - from the American Medical Assn. to the American Psychiatric Assn. and the American Academy of Pediatrics - has voiced explicit opposition to this kind of legislation," he says. "This kind of national transphobic rhetoric dramatically impacts kids, resulting in worsening self-esteem, anxiety and depression. ... These bills truly represent a public mental health crisis."

Jennings, for her part, is "very, very frustrated" at the resurgence of anti-trans action, particularly after spending so much time showing in intimate detail how trans kids can understand themselves better than anyone. "Never underestimate the power of kids. They're smart!" she exclaims. "So often people are like, 'Kids don't know better.' But the kids do know, and we should be listening to them, because they're more connected to their spirit and to their soul than a lot of adults are."

In Cox's estimation, the bills represent an existential threat to trans people, period. "These battles are not necessarily new, but the way in which conservative lawmakers are painting trans youth is so dehumanizing," she says. "Passing all these laws to stigmatize children is basically trying to stigmatize the entire trans community."

Jennings appreciates hearing President Biden tell trans youth that he "has your back," as he did in his first joint address to Congress in April. But she's more interested in politicians backing up their supportive comments with supportive action. "I'm hopeful that the bills will be dismissed, or something will be passed at the federal level that prevents these bills from being able to be passed," she says. "It's discrimination, you know?"

* * *

In the early days of trying to understand her daughter, Jeanette Jennings would go on message boards to talk to other parents of trans children. None had any as young as Jazz. It would be almost another 20 years before 12 year-old Zaya Wade would come out with the full support of her parents, Dwayne Wade and Gabrielle Union, quite as publicly as Jazz eventually did. "With this tiny little kid, I felt very alone," Jeanette recalls.

Now, she says with wonder and more than a little relief, it's completely different. She constantly hears from other families with tiny little trans kids who are grateful for their example. "When I talk to a parent that says to me, 'My child would not be alive today if it wasn't for you,' that makes it all worthwhile," she says. "To save a child's life, there's nothing greater than that."

Still, being a role model and chronicling your life on reality TV can be exhausting. Two years ago, Jennings hit a wall and found herself in need of a real break. Since "I Am Jazz" last filmed in 2019, she's been taking some necessary time for herself, stepping back to sort through her burnout, depression and anxiety at home without having to broadcast it all to the world.

"I needed that break for my mental health and wellness, honestly," she admits. "But I have had that time to really use self-care to boost myself up and evolve and grow as a person. I still have so much more to go, but I just feel like I'm moving in the right direction."

One crucial thing Jennings has learned is that she doesn't have to bear the burden of representing trans youth by herself - or maybe more accurately, that she no longer has to. "Definitely in the past I was the only kid or teenager who was transgender and so public," she says. "But now there's a lot of different transgender teenagers out there who are sharing their stories. It's really cool to see that shift, that there's some new people out there."

For her next chapter, Jennings may not know exactly what she wants to study or how she wants to continue carrying the torch of trans advocacy. But she does know that she is, finally, not alone. "I'm not the only one who's trying to make a difference in the world," she says. "I'm just one person doing what I can to make a difference.

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How Jazz Jennings Changed the World for Trans Youth Simply by Being Herself

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In 2007, six-year-old Jazz Jennings went on national television to tell Barbara Walters the same thing she'd been telling her parents, siblings and anyone else who would listen: She was, despite her birth certificate's insistence otherwise, a girl. Shy and sweet, Jennings answered Walters' probing questions with the clarity and patience of someone used to explaining herself over and over again.

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It's pride month, which means corporations are tripping over themselves to come out as allies of the LGBT community - even those corporations that are actively standing in the way of legislation that would expand protections for the members of that community. But a growing number of activists and lawmakers are calling those companies out for talking out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to gay rights.

Even as polling shows more Americans than ever - 76% according to PRRI - favor laws that would protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans from discrimination, 2021 is shaping up to be a record-breaking year for anti-LGBT legislation at the state level. The organization Corporate Accountability Action has launched a campaign to highlight corporate donations to anti-LGBTQ legislators in Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi and Tennessee.

AT&T is among the worst offenders. The telecom giant, whose social media pages are presently bedazzled with rainbow banners and badges, has boldly claimed it "believe[s] we have a moral and business obligation to engage on the fundamental issues of equality and fairness." But, according to data gathered by the National Institute on Money in Politics and compiled by Corporate Accountability Action, AT&T has made at least 327 donations totaling $204,350 to 133 anti-LGBTQ legislators. (AT&T declined to comment on the report.)

AT&T isn't alone. General Motors - which boasts of being "first automaker to run an LGBTQ-specific ad" - made 63 donations totaling $51,000 to 35 anti-LGBTQ legislators, according to Corporate Accountability Action's research. (GM did not respond to a request for comment.) The Coca-Cola Company claims to show its support for the gay community by doing everything "from supporting LGBTQI pride parades to running rainbow-colored billboards." Meanwhile, Corporate Accountability Action found Coke and its affiliated PAC have made 28 donations totaling $9,550 to 23 anti-LGBTQ legislators. Asked about the gifts, a representative for Coca-Cola noted that the donations in question occurred before the company "updated our political contributions criteria" in the fall of 2020, declaring explicitly that "candidates will not be eligible for a political contribution from The Coca-Cola Company or the Coca-Cola PAC if they have made egregious remarks" on a range of topics that including the "LGBT community." (Coke "paused" political giving in response to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.)

The beer giant Anheuser-Busch professes a commitment to "promoting inclusion and diversity across our business and supporting the communities we stand by whether through impactful partnerships or empowering our teams." But the company has made 48 donations totaling $35,350 to 29 anti-LGBTQ legislators, according to the group. (Anheuser-Busch did not respond to a request for comment.) NBCUniversal - celebrating Pride Month with oodles of queer content on its platforms and channels - made 16 donations totaling $24,000 to 11 anti-LGBTQ legislators. (NBC Universal did not respond to a request for comment either.)

But it's not just local lawmakers standing in the way of progress for the gay community. The U.S. Senate has the opportunity this month to pass the Equality Act, a law that would federally prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation - if enough Republicans get on board to pass it. The Equality Act first passed the House back in 2019, but then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to bring it to the Senate floor for a vote.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) has been highlighting the hypocrisy of those corporations offering lip service in support of gay rights, while also offering material support to McConnell. "AT&T donated $56,295 to Mitch McConnell's 2020 campaign - while he was actively blocking the Equality Act. But what a great Pride Twitter banner," Jayapal tweeted last week. She went on to call out American Airlines (which donated $46,617 to Mitch McConnell's 2020 campaign), Walmart ($150,000 to McConnell and other GOP senators), and the defense contractor Raytheon (whose PAC gave $18,500 to McConnell's campaign).

Jayapal and the others have a good reason to speak up: because it works. As Sasha Issenberg, author of "The Engagement: America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage," has written, gay marriage is legal today because of similar pressure activists applied more than a decade ago. "They demonstrated that shaming and shunning could amount to more than an online pile-on and serve as a potent tactic for political change," Issenberg wrote recently.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has vowed to have a vote on the Equality Act this month. If all 50 Democrats support the bill - and it's not a sure thing, as Sen. Joe Manchin, the lone Democrat who has not signed on as a co-sponsor of the bill, expressed reservations about the legislation when it passed the house two years ago - 10 Republicans would still need to sign on for the measure to pass.

The best way that Congress can celebrate #Pride is by passing the Equality Act. It's time.

- Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) June 8, 2021

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Companies Tout Gay Rights During Pride, Give to Anti-LGBT Politicians

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It's pride month, which means corporations are tripping over themselves to come out as allies of the LGBT community - even those corporations that are actively standing in the way of legislation that would expand protections for the members of that community.

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As more corporations celebrate LGBTQ people each June, pride and profit are mixed - and so are the consequences

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The end of this month marks 50 years since New York police raided the Stonewall Inn gay bar, prompting patrons and LGBTQ residents to fight back in a series of riots that ultimately kicked off what was then called the gay liberation movement. A year later, marches to commemorate the riots and celebrate the identities of the agitators inaugurated the annual festivities that became known as "gay pride." Half a century on, as Pride has evolved into a party-focused, heavily branded affair, the celebration sometimes seems more retail than riot. Rainbow merchandise abounds, and companies often boast the splashiest floats in the parade. For some in the community, that's a sign of mainstream acceptance. For others, it's a betrayal of the movement's radical roots. However revelers feel about the relationship, Pride celebrations and the corporations that sponsor - and profit off them - are at this point deeply intertwined, with far-reaching consequences. Five decades after New Yorkers had to fight to keep a single gay bar open, it's time to ask: What happens when Pride is for sale?

Purchase politics

Priced out

Corporate allies

Woven in

Rainbow police

Purchase politics

Priced out

When I came out of the closet in Oklahoma in 2012, the Oklahoma City Pride Parade seemed like the pinnacle of gay culture. My first time attending that spring saw drag queens in undecorated truck beds screaming at us to get to shelter ahead of an impending tornado. Sure, it was a little rough around the edges. But it was democratic in that it was free for the entire community and the tornado was coming for us all.

Over time, however, and since moving to New York, I've noticed a trend: The more corporate entities enter Pride, the more expensive celebrating it becomes. That means that more people, especially those from vulnerable communities, are excluded.

Every year, debate erupts anew over the corporatization of Pride. It's become its own tradition, in a way. That debate tends to center the battle over the soul of Pride: Should it be a protest, or a party? Should we really let a weapons manufacturer slap a rainbow over their logo and march in the parade? We question whether it's ethical, and we wonder what the criteria ought to be for corporate allyship.

But that element of the conversation is just the rainbow veneer on the Wells Fargo float. Beneath that, the intrusion of businesses into our annual events has recontextualized what celebrating Pride means even within the community. Pride is becoming a more expensive affair across the board, and the folks who need it most are getting priced out.

In 2016, a Pride festival in Los Angeles that at first promised inclusivity for women and seniors shocked one attendee with the elimination of its free ticket option. It was revealed that a day ticket would be $35. The story is much the same for New York. This year, PrideFest VIP tickets will run you $50, though the parade is still free. NYC Pride, meanwhile, offers T-shirts at a cool $55 and a hoodie at $90. Don't get caught without an overpriced Pride-branded beer in your hand, either! Merchandise at Pride isn't new, necessarily, but it is the byproduct of Pride growing into a more commercial space where being nickel-and-dimed is the norm rather than the exception.

These events tell a story about where Pride is and who can and can't go. It's a story that seems to take as its narrative center the myth of LGBTQ affluence: The notion that LGBTQ people - and gay men specifically - have a lot of money to spend on Pride festivities.

This is true for a few gay men, but it's a myth for most. A 2016 report from the Williams Institute noted that LGBTQ people face "a risk of being poor that is at best equal" to non-LGBTQ people and "at worst, much higher." It's not even true for most cisgender gay men. As The Post reported, gay men, especially gay men of color, hit a glass ceiling when it comes to upper management positions.

The statistics only get more dire the more we look at race and gender identity within the LGBTQ community. But that is perhaps the gist of the problem: Corporations, by their nature, want to make money, so they center the affluent minority of LGBTQ people, who skew white, gay and male. No matter where Pride proceeds go, and even if paid events are mostly by and for LGBTQ people, they are inherently exclusionary, and the people most in need of resources are the ones who get left at the gate.

I've been to a few of these parties, and I've enjoyed myself. But nothing has come close to the community I felt at Oklahoma City's parade, seeking shelter together from that twister. Back then, I wouldn't have been able to afford to attend a fancy Pride party. So as the celebration marches onward to ticketed festivities, it's worth asking: Who can afford to be proud?

John Paul Brammer is the writer of the advice column and forthcoming book "¡Hola Papi!"

Corporate allies

Ever since the Stonewall riots of 1969 marked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement, the LGBTQ community has been dynamic and rapidly evolving. And while the intervening decades have seen major legal advancements in protections of LGBTQ people and same-sex couples, the historic transformation of this community's place in society has been led not by government or politicians, but instead by corporations that have embraced and supported their own LGBTQ employees, reached out to earn business and loyalty from LGBTQ consumers and through advertising, helped normalize LGBTQ people and LGBTQ families for mass audiences.

When we launched our company, Community Marketing & Insights, in 1992, the Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of Georgia's sodomy law just six years before; 14 states had laws like these on the books in 2003, when the court reversed itself. Being gay often meant being harassed, arrested and losing jobs and family. Love between people of the same gender was often clandestine. At best, LGBTQ people might creatively omit references to their sexual orientations and gender identities. At worst, this secrecy might contribute to compromised job performance, discrimination, emotional stress and tragically, sometimes suicide. The rise of HIV and AIDS only contributed to this isolation.

While many of these challenges remain, of course, a transformation has taken place on a macro scale that had never been witnessed before in American history.

And corporations have often led the way.

The Village Voice might have been an outlier when it began offering domestic partner benefits to its employees in 1981, but by 1994, the New York Times reported that the number of such corporate programs had exploded. It would take another decade for Massachusetts to become the first state to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Today, corporate leaders are now explicitly recruiting LGBTQ employees with equal human resources protections (including sexual orientation and gender identity), targeted benefits and employee resource groups that empower their LGBTQ staff. By contrast, the current administration tries to ban transgender people from serving in the military and has argued that civil rights law does not ban discrimination against LGBTQ people.

By now, the impact of television shows such as "Ellen," "Will and Grace" and later, "Glee," all produced and distributed by major entertainment companies, is well known. But it's also true that brands such as Absolut Vodka and Subaru made subtle nods to the LGBT market in the 1980s and 1990s. In subsequent years, same-sex couples were featured in bold marriage equality support messaging. And they are now seen, often as families with children, in national commercials from Target, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Honey Maid, Campbell's, Apple and many more. The political and societal whiplash is hard to fathom.

All the while, companies and ads such as these have better acknowledged the diversity within the LGBTQ community, beyond the stock-photo young, shirtless white men of the 1990s. Over the past two decades, CMI research has monitored changing terminology: Gay morphed into "gay and lesbian" in the late 1990s; then to GLBT, in a move to include bisexual and transgender community members that still prioritized gay men; to LGBT; and to LGBTQ and beyond.

The terminology that marketers use to address the community reflects the evolution of that acknowledgment. Especially over the past few years, CMI clients have told us that they want to expand beyond "gay" or "gay and lesbian" to fully mapping out the motivations, trends and opportunities among bisexual, transgender and gender-fluid Americans, as well as to learn more about LGBTQ African Americans, Hispanic and other sub-segments of the LGBTQ population.

This intense corporate interest in LGBTQ consumers makes sense. Our most recent LGBTQ Community Survey found that 76 percent of respondents said that companies that support LGBTQ equality will get more of their business this year. And LGBTQ consumers are exceptionally brand-loyal and influential with friends and family well beyond their inner circle.

It's true that companies couldn't make same-sex marriage legal, and they can't provide protections in workplaces other than their own. The government and politicians matter. But whether out of self-interest or goodwill, corporations have often been there for LGBTQ communities first.

Thomas Roth is the founder of Community Marketing & Insights, and David Paisley is the firm's senior research director.

Woven in

As the mountains of rainbow shirts, shorts and shimmery trimmings have piled up, the message to LGBTQ communities this and every June of late is clear: We want to help you celebrate your identities - and we want you to return the favor by buying our products.

But a critical contradiction attends brands' marketing of Pride apparel. The global garment industry is defined by exploitative labor conditions that render workers - particularly queer workers - vulnerable to abuse. For all the alleged solidarity that brands telegraph to their queer consumers, it is rarely extended to queer workers in the factories where apparel is sewn.

A recent report by the Worker Rights Consortium on its investigation of a Salvadoran factory owned by the U.S. apparel brand League Collegiate Wear details intense hostility toward queer workers, manifested in acts of public humiliation and retaliatory dismissal. Factory managers called queer workers "deviants." Two workers perceived as LGBTQ were fired after a manager claimed to have received a "vision" that the two were disrupting production because they were "the devil." Another worker, who is openly gay and was also discriminatorily fired, reported taunts, catcalls and at least one physical confrontation.

These stories exist throughout global apparel supply chains, where plenty of brands that carry Pride apparel benefit from worker vulnerability. Most workers endure low wages and long hours, often without protest, because the fear of retaliation limits workers' capacity to speak up and demand better treatment. But wherever workers in general are mistreated, homophobia and transphobia further isolate queer workers and heighten their disposability, making it particularly dangerous for them to challenge exploitative conditions.

It's a nightmarish intersection. It's also proof that queer solidarity is labor solidarity and that there can be no real Pride without respect for the right to organize unions that protect queer workers.

With robust and independent unions, workers can collectively push back against management bigotry to protect queer workers - exceptionally vulnerable as individuals - against retaliation. Through bargaining, unions can also win benefits for queer workers, including health plans that cover gender confirmation services and access to HIV treatment.

And though not guaranteed to eliminate entrenched prejudice, the experience of organizing a union and fighting for a contract can also build solidarity among workers and develop trust across differences. The benefits of independent, LGBTQ-friendly unions extend to factories without any openly queer workers, too; unions play an important role in reducing workplace precarity, which can create the security necessary for workers to come out.

Nevertheless, brands' demands for cheap garments and ever-quicker delivery times - such as just-in-time production of apparel for Pride month - give factory owners overwhelming incentive to quash workers' efforts to organize. And they get away with it. U.S. brands rarely enforce their own human rights standards in their global supply chains, despite protections for union rights in their labor codes.

So before tossing the glittery rainbow tank top in your cart to wear to the next parade, try to look past the sequins. Underneath, the repression of the people it's supposed to celebrate might be woven right in.

Vincent DeLaurentis is a program associate specializing in labor rights at the Worker Rights Consortium and a queer member of the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union.

Rainbow police

"Trans people are dying to live," Indya Moore told a weary crowd gathered at the memorial service for Layleen Polanco on June 10. Polanco, a bright-eyed transgender woman and member of the House of Xtravaganza, a creative collective and surrogate family, was found dead in her Rikers Island cell on June 7. She was 27 years old and had been jailed for two months because she was unable to pay a $500 bail after her arrest on misdemeanor charges. (Her family has called for an investigation into her death.)

Contrast Polanco's death with the garish rainbow decals that adorn police vehicles each June and the " pride patches " that were added to San Francisco police officers' uniforms this year. Given the legion of companies wading into the celebration year after year, the ultimate consequence of corporatizing LGBTQ affirmation seemed inevitable: Pride itself has become a brand. It's a powerful one - one all sorts of organizations are eager to associate themselves with. And it's particularly disturbing to see police departments try to capitalize on that brand to boost their reputations, especially given what they do to transgender people the rest of the year.

A 2015 survey of 27,715 transgender people found that 58 percent reportedly suffered mistreatment at the hands of police - ranging from being repeatedly referred to by the wrong gender to being physically or sexually assaulted. Fifty-seven percent said that they were not comfortable approaching the police for help.

There are good reasons for this mistrust. Because transgender people are regularly pushed out of school and job opportunities by discrimination, many of them enter the criminal-justice system for poverty-related crimes such as sex work and burglary. A 2011 survey from the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force suggested that 16 percent of transgender people have been incarcerated at some point, a figure that includes 47 percent of black transgender people.

Police departments harass and "profile" transgender people under laws banning loitering and prostitution, including a New York anti-loitering bill dubbed by activists as the "Walking While Trans" ban. Activists report that police in New York state have arrested transgender women for as little as waving, "wearing a skirt" or "standing somewhere other than a bus stop or taxi stand." A transgender activist from New York narrowly avoided arrest for "Walking While Trans" after returning from the State Capitol for a Lobby Day.

Stories such as these were the very catalyst for the Stonewall riots 50 years ago, when people including Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy - transgender activists who also engaged in sex work to survive - banded together to fight the criminalization and policing of the LGBTQ community. They stood up to police officers who harassed LGBTQ people for sport, using their hands, fists and bricks.

It's jarring enough that commemorations of this uprising have so often been turned into slick, corporate events or opportunities for brands to sell everything from vodka to T-shirts emblazoned with rainbow polo ponies. Putting LGBTQ officers forward as the face of police departments by having them march in Pride parades in uniform doesn't actually change what their departments do to transgender people. Painting squad cars and corrections vehicles in rainbow colors, or even apologizing for the conduct of the people who raided the Stonewall Inn, while participating in the criminalization and harassment of LGBTQ communities makes a macabre spectacle out of Pride and the legacy of the Stonewall pioneers.

What LGBTQ people need on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall are safe schools, jobs, housing and the freedom to live and walk while trans. When police officers help secure these things for the transgender community, perhaps they will earn their rainbow branding.

Chinyere Ezie is a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

About this project

Editing by Drew Goins and Alyssa Rosenberg. Video by Joshua Carroll, Danielle Kunitz, Kate Woodsome and Joy Sharon Yi. Photo editing by Nick Kirkpatrick. Copy editing by Lydia Rebac. Design and development by Chris Rukan.

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Opinion | As more companies wade in, it's time to ask: Is Pride for sale?

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As more corporations celebrate LGBTQ people each June, pride and profit are mixed - and so are the consequences Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience.

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The year was 1969. It was illegal for LGBT people to get together and have a drink or dance with same-sex partners. Most bars wouldn't allow queers into their establishment, fearing police raids and fines. But there was one place where everyone could gather - all the fairies, drag queens, queers, trans people, and gender-nonconformers - The Stonewall Inn. Then, as now, Stonewall was a bar in New York City's Greenwich Village. Back then, it was run by the Mafia, and was one of the only places that would allow these so-called degenerates inside the doors. When it comes to crime syndicates, queer money is as good as straight money, it turns out.

The police knew that gays went to Stonewall. They would raid the bar, arrest the queers, and fine the establishment. Many times, the raiding officers got rough, making police brutality a common occurrence at Stonewall and other LGBT-focused watering holes around the country. Until June 28, 1969, when those fairies, drag queens, queers, trans people, and gender-nonconforming folks said "Enough is enough." The three-day standoff that ensued, infamously known as the Stonewall Riots, launched the modern-day LGBT rights movement.

A month after the riots ended, New York City saw one of the country's first public marches where LGBT people proudly, publicly claimed their identities: The Christopher Street Liberation Day March. The parade influenced other cities around the world, laying the ground work for Pride parades internationally. And while Stonewall has become an iconic moment in our collective LGBT history, many are unaware that the first Pride parade, the Liberation Day March, was organized by a bisexual woman. A year later, the same woman coordinated the one-year anniversary of the Christopher Street Liberation Day march, sparking what would become a lifelong passion for the late Brenda Howard.

"You needed some kind of help organizing some type of protest or something in social justice?" recalls Howard's partner, Larry Nelson. "All you had to do was call her and she'll just say when and where."

Born in the Bronx, Howard had a heart for activism, and was involved with antiwar and feminist movements in earlier years, Nelson tells The Advocate. She was friends with many of the individuals who were inside the bar that night the Stonewall Riots began. Her advocacy for the community started then, but it continued for more than three decades. Her lifelong advocacy ended when she died in 2005 - during New York City's Pride Week.

She was militant and was a voice for all minorities. "She was an in-your-face activist," Nelson said. "She fought for anyone who had their rights trampled on."

Howard was arrested in Chicago in 1988, while demonstrating for national health care and the fair treatment of women, people of color, and those living with HIV and AIDS. She was arrested in Georgia in 1991 for protesting the firing of a lesbian from the state attorney general's office due to Georgia's anti-sodomy law. She was arrested multiple times for social justice causes, but she always kept fighting.

While she was undoubtedly an accomplished activist, some of the work closest to her heart was in the bisexual community. Howard cofounded the New York Area Bisexual Network in 1988, an organization that, to this day, serves as a central communication hub for bisexual and bi-friendly groups in New York City and the tri-state area. She successfully lobbied for the inclusion of bisexuality in the 1993 March on Washington, at a time when the movement was focused primarily on gay men and lesbians.

Howard was a hands-on, grassroots activist who fought for the rights of the minorities. And even if her name isn't as well-known as some other LGBT pioneers, her accomplishments can't be forgotten. That's because every year around the world, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals march proudly, celebrating their individuality, their families, and their freedom. We march today because a bisexual woman marched then.

All images via Facebook.

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Bisexual Pioneer Brenda Howard Is the Mother of Pride

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The year was 1969. It was illegal for LGBT people to get together and have a drink or dance with same-sex partners. Most bars wouldn't allow queers into their establishment, fearing police raids and fines. But there was one place where everyone could gather - all the fairies, drag queens, queers, trans people, and gender-nonconformers - The Stonewall Inn.

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Next year will be the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. In the early morning hours, gay men and lesbians fought back against the police raid of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. After that event, which began in the early morning of June 28,1969, Gay Liberation had joined the lexicon of Women's Liberation, Black Liberation, and Chicano Liberation.

There are phenomenal lives and stories connected to that night that should not be forgotten or erased. One is that of Stormé DeLarverie-who had been fighting back all her life and fought back that night.

Stormé had a tough Southern upbringing. She was born in Louisiana in 1920; since she had no birth certificate, she chose Dec. 24 as her birthday. Her mother was a Black servant in the house of her father, who was white. They made sure she got an education, but growing up biracial in the South was a continual fight.

She told Kirk Klocke in an interview that she still had scars on her leg from when bullies hung her by the leg from a fence post. Her brother had to take her down, and she wore a brace for years. She started singing as a teenager in New Orleans jazz clubs until she came out as a lesbian at 18 and moved to Chicago, which is where her singing career really began.

She met a dancer named Diana, the love of her life, and went on the road with Doc Bender and Danny Brown. Finally, she could be herself and was respected as a singer. Together they created the Jewel Box Revue, an extravaganza with 25 high-kicking drag queens and songs sung by Stormé, the baritone who always dressed in a white tuxedo. It was the first racially integrated drag revue in the country. She was the emcee and music director for 14 years.

They toured the country, and starting in 1957, their popular shows could be seen twice a week at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Stormé was also a bouncer for lesbian bars in Greenwich Village.
Stonewall Inn
The Stonewall Inn was Mafia owned and operated. Before you could enter, you had to be checked through a peephole; if you were not gay or lesbian you could not come in. Organized crime kept the gay bars racially segregated and most of the bars for people of color were on 42nd Street and in Harlem. There were, of course, exceptions to the color bar.

There are varying descriptions of the patrons of The Stonewall Inn, but also some general agreement. The owners of Stonewall were one of the few that allowed same-sex couples to dance together. They had a system of blinking lights to warn everyone of an impending raid.

The bar drew patrons from different parts of the city. They were mostly closeted gay men (probably married to women), college boys, and homeless gay youth. It was not primarily a drag bar. There were lesbian bars in Greenwich Village too, and some lesbians also went to the Stonewall.

Stormé was involved in forming the Stonewall Veterans Association and was later elected vice president. They often had panels of speakers, and over the decades she was always quick to remind later generations what it was like before Stonewall: Lesbians and gay men could receive a $70 fine for "looking at someone with desire."

You could be arrested for not wearing a certain number of "gender appropriate articles of clothing." This meant that lesbians who might be wearing a three-piece suit had to be able to show they were also wearing a bra and stockings. If not, they could be thrown in jail.
Stormé's recollection
Stormé recalled her part in the uprising at a public, videotaped event sponsored by the Stonewall Veterans Association. She started at the beginning: "The cops were parading patrons out of the front door of the Stonewall at about 2 a.m. in the morning. I saw this one boy being taken out by three cops, only one in uniform. Three to one. I told my pals, 'I know him! That is Williamson, my friend Sonia Jane's friend.

"Williamson briefly broke loose but they grabbed the back of his jacket and pulled him right down on the cement street. One of them did a drop kick on him. Another cop senselessly hit him from the back. Right after that a cop said to me, 'move faggot,' thinking I was a gay guy. I said, 'I will not and don't you dare touch me.' With that the cop shoved me, and I instinctively punched him in the face."

Four officers then attacked her and handcuffed her in response. When she pointed out that she was cuffed too tightly, one officer hit her head with a billy club. As she was bleeding from the head, she turned to the crowd and shouted, "Why don't you guys do something?" After a long struggle, she was dragged towards a police van, and that was when everything exploded. Many who were there recall her call to arms.

Stormé was always clear: "It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was civil disobedience. It was no damn riot."

Of course she was correct. Stonewall was not a one-night riot. Thousands of gays and lesbians rose up for six nights. There was organizing during the day and returning to the Stonewall Inn every night for six nights. Out of the uprising grew two activist organizations, the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance, and three gay and lesbian newspapers.
Erasing Black lesbians
Claire Heuchan wrote an article for AfterEllen.com entitled, "We Need to Talk about Misogyny and the LGBT Community's Erasure of Black Lesbian History." (See: http://www.afterellen.com/general-news/561237-we-need-to-talk-about-misogyny-and-the-lgbt-communitys-erasure-of-black-lesbian-history )

Heuchan focused in the article on the erasing of Stormé from some of the "official" histories of Stonewall. She was cut from the 1995 and the 2015 "Stonewall" films as well as from many histories of that period-and most recently in a press release by the National Center For Lesbian Rights.

Heuchan pointed out, "Lesbian history is hard to find, Black representation, female representation, and lesbian representation are not always straightforward to find, especially when you are looking for all three at once. Stormé, in all her Black butch magnificence, put herself at extraordinary risk to fight injustice and she deserves to be remembered for it. It was Stormé who led the resistance of homophobic police brutality at the Stonewall Inn."
After Stonewall
For years, Stormé worked as a bouncer at lesbian bars, such as the Cubby Hole in the West Village. Stormé became a self appointed guardian of lesbians in Greenwich Village, patrolling the streets for the next 30 years. For many she was known as the Sheriff of Greenwich Village. She was legally armed and would not put up with any form of intolerance, bullying, or abuse of lesbians in the Village. She was a fearless protector of lesbian spaces.

Her longtime friend Lisa Cannistraci bought a lesbian bar and named it Henrietta Hudson; she hired Stormé as the bouncer. When Stormé could no longer work, the women she protected came back to protect her until she died on May 29, 2014, at 93. Cannistraci summed up Stormé's life: "She was a superhero, a vigilante defender of the defenseless."

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Stormé DeLarverie: The lesbian spark in the Stonewall Uprising - Socialist Action

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By ANN MONTAGUE Next year will be the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. In the early morning hours, gay men and lesbians fought back against the police raid of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. After that event, which began in the early morning of June 28,1969, Gay Liberation had joined the lexicon of Women's...

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Richard Blanco on the Poetry of LGBTQ Historical Docs | National Conversation on #RightsAndJustice

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Corporate logos turned rainbow during this year's Pride Month, even as some of those same companies made hefty donations to anti-LQBTQ politicians. Instagram and LinkedIn now offer a profile section displaying users' pronouns - will other platforms soon follow? Those stories and more on today's LGBTQ Roundtable.

Guests:
Grace Sterling Stowell - executive director of the Boston Alliance of Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Youth
Janson Wu - executive director of GLAD - GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders
Sue O'Connell - political commentator at New England Cable News; co-publisher of Bay Windows and The South End News

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LGBTQ News: Corporate America Turns Rainbow for Pride Month, Social Media Platforms Now Letting Users Display Pronouns

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Corporate logos turned rainbow during this year's Pride Month, even as some of those same companies made hefty donations to anti-LQBTQ politicians. Instagram and LinkedIn now offer a profile section displaying users' pronouns - will other platforms soon follow? Those stories and more on today's LGBTQ Roundtable.

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June 1969: Protests broke out in New York City to put an end to harassment police inflicted on Black transgender people.

June 2020: Black transgender people led protests around the country after a string of violence and deaths of Black people at the hands of police.

Pride Month looked the most similar to its origin - the 1969 Stonewall Inn riots in Greenwich Village - last year than it has in any June in recent memory.

Mainstream Pride Month celebrations have evolved into joyful parades, drag brunches and rainbow-themed branding on popular products. But Pride Month marks an anniversary of protests. Many LGBTQ activists have not strayed from the month's roots.

"Pride, in general, is a political movement and a protest, in a sense," said Matt Hanson, president of New Hope Celebrates in Pennsylvania.

The month celebrates rebellion, said NYC Dyke March organizer Myra Shapiro. Lesbians and queer people who identify as dykes have protested in Dyke Marches annually since 1993. The term "dyke" has been reclaimed by lesbians, but it's a slur when it's used by people outside the community.

Protest groups like the Dyke March strive to re-center voices that ignited the initial Pride Month movements. Their theme, Black Dyke Power, for the first time centers Black Lives, said Jade Watts, another NYC Dyke March organizer.

"Black transgender people have always been here and are largely the reason queer people have the rights that we do," Watts said.

Re-centering Black trans people in Pride, protests

Transgender people, especially transgender people of color, have long said that "pushes of change and progress among mainstream queer organizations have left them behind," said Elizabeth Schedl, the executive director of Hudson Pride Center in Jersey City.

This "whitewashing" of the movement occurred when white LGBTQ organizations wanted to "normalize" the community, said Mustafa Sullivan, the executive director of FIERCE, a New York City community organizing group for LGBTQ youth of color.

"That limited Black queer folks and Black trans folks. It silenced many folks who lifted up organizations ... that had already existed but hadn't been able to fund their marriage movements," Sullivan said.

Sullivan and Watts believe the LGBTQ rights movement stalled after the U.S. legalized same-sex marriage in 2015. But the work is nowhere near done, the organizers said. Key efforts involve protecting the most vulnerable identities within the LGBTQ community.

Black queer and transgender people are hired less often than white LGBTQ people, Sullivan said. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey found that 38% of Black respondents lived in poverty, about three times higher than the general U.S. population at the time. Violence also continues to plague the community - a record 44 transgender and gender nonconforming people were slain in the U.S. last year, many of them people of color, according to Human Rights Campaign data.

As members of the transgender community find their rights and legal protections in peril at a state level in areas across the country, that can potentially shape the attitude of this year's Pride gatherings.

"You're going to see where Prides reflect anger at how members of the community are being discriminated against or violence is being perpetrated against them, and that Prides structure themselves or offer the opportunity to present a response to that," said Jersey Pride President Laura Pople.

For activists, the eruption of Black Lives Matter actions last summer urged them to "reclaim the Black movement legacy of Pride," Sullivan said. The first Pride demonstrations grew from LGBTQ community members protesting mistreatment by police, so going back to the month's origins includes diminishing or banning police from events.

At least two Pride events - the prominent NYC Pride and Denver PrideFest - announced last month they would not allow uniformed police officers to participate in their parades. Police will still patrol the events, however. Government officials and LGBTQ police officers lambasted the decision, but grassroots LGBTQ organizers like Sullivan believe police never belonged at Pride in the first place.

"We stand with the idea that police are not a part of Pride," Sullivan said. "Although there are queer and trans police officers, this is not about them. This is about our community standing strong."
Cops at Pride: NYC Pride banned police from marching in it. That worked for a different Pride in the city
Police officers usually show up uninvited to patrol NYC Dyke March and the Queer Liberation March, a protest put on by Reclaim Pride Coalition. Neither are permitted events nor do the groups have relationships with police in the same way NYC Pride does, organizers said. Both groups train marshals in de-escalation tactics and traffic safety to ensure marchers are protected from harassment.

Although major Pride events limited police presence, grassroots organizers were concerned about the number of corporations present and benefitting in these spaces.

"What happens to movements, unfortunately, is that many people use the image of the movement and make money, and limit the actual fight that we need to have for Black queer and transgender people," Sullivan said.

Pride is, was and always will be a protest, Watts said, because there's still work to be done. People need to understand the month's history, in particular the role Black people played, to move efforts forward, said Adam McMath, the head of marketing and communications for Pride Center of Maryland.

Few people know that history or understand how much further the LGBTQ community has to go, said Schedl, who directs the Hudson Pride Center.

"These are the times where our allies are coming out to celebrate with us, but our allies need to understand how much more work needs to happen for us to get to a point where we are normalized, where equality exists," they said.

Allyship is a year-round commitment

The LGBTQ community needs "all the help we can get" from allies to gain rights and equal footing, Schedl said.

Being an active ally during Pride Month requires action that goes beyond waving a rainbow flag at a parade. That could mean donating or volunteering for a cause linked to the community, or learning about issues and policies impacting LGBTQ people. Schedl encouragespeople to learn key concepts, like the meaning behind each letter of the LGBTQ acronym and sharing pronouns.
Show your support: How to be an active ally every day in workplaces, schools
June is a philanthropic opportunity for LGBTQ organizations. Sullivan urges people to prioritize smaller groups led by Black transgender women and grassroots efforts rather than big-name organizations.

LGBTQ-identifying people need to be allies to people different from them within the broader community, Watts said. White people can step up to center Black transgender voices to honor Pride Month's start.

"It's important to recognize that not all queer people are on the same basis," they said. "We're all very different people so recognize that your gay friend might not know the experience of your transgender friend, and vice versa."

Pride Month provides "an opportunity" for LGBTQ people and allies "to reset and realize we are still experiencing disparity," McMath said. That involves refocusing on including everyone in the community, and recognizing the civil rights movement's influence on the LGBTQ rights movement.
Alex Biese of the Asbury Park Press contributed reporting for this story. Sammy Gibbons is a culture reporter for the USA TODAY Network's Atlantic Region How We Live team. Email: sgibbons@gannett.com | Twitter: @sammykgibbons. For unlimited access to the most important news, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Most importantly, allies should work to support LGBTQ people and efforts beyond June, advocates said.

"Pride for us is 365 days a year," Schedl said.

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The first Pride was a protest. For LGBTQ activists, action is still the priority

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June 1969: Protests broke out in New York City to put an end to harassment police inflicted on Black transgender people. June 2020: Black transgender people led protests around the country after a string of violence and deaths of Black people at the hands of police.

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Tomorrow marks the 50 year anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising of June 28, 1969, an inciting factor in the queer liberation movement that's since paved the way for countless achievements in LGBTQ+ civil rights. The uprising occurred at a time before Pride meant corporate sponsorship, and being out and proud was substantially more likely to cause you to lose your job, your home, your family, your life, or all of the above.

SAGE is the oldest and largest organization dedicated to improving the lives of LGBTQ+ elders. Founded in 1978, they offer social and support services and advocate for the rights of older queer adults. They're also driven to uplift their clients' stories, honoring the ways they've blazed trails for young people today - and those stories, a selection of which are featured below, can help us better understand what life was like for queer people before Stonewall, and the true breadth of how queer culture and the LGBTQ+ rights movement has evolved in America.

Their stories reflect the bravery and tenacity of their lives. Charles "Valentino" Harris, 67, sang a queer anthem called "I Was Born This Way" long before Lady Gaga was even a twinkle in her parents' eyes. Jeremiah Newton, 70, made friends with Warhol and Hollywood superstars. Before transitioning, Graeme Davis, 63, found freedom in the lesbian bars of the West Village. Joe Caldiero, 66, learned about gay life from a West Village drag queen and witnessed the Stonewall riots from inside the bar itself. We asked Harris, Newton, Davis, and Caldiero to tell us about life before, during, and after Stonewall, and how queer culture has evolved throughout their lives.

On being queer before Stonewall:
Jeremiah Newton: Growing up in the 1950s was difficult. My father must have seen something he didn't appreciate in me as a little boy; he was always critiquing me. A man stands this way, not that way. Why do you have your mother's dress on? I was four or five, I didn't know what I was doing. In the early 1960s, I had a wonderful correspondence with Joan Crawford. She let me know when she'd be in Manhattan for personal appearances and I'd show up. I went to a gallery opening and Andy Warhol was there. He kissed a guy like in Europe, on both cheeks. I was kinda stunned; I'd never seen that before. Joan Crawford saw me looking and twisted my head around. She said, "Men don't do that in this country, only in Europe. And you're not in Europe."

It was hard being gay. You felt you had to keep it a secret because people could have you committed. If the boys found out, they'd want a blowjob and that would ruin your reputation forever. In junior high school I started going into the Village - Greenwich Avenue was my gay mecca. I sat on a stoop feeling too obvious and pretended to write a letter. Before long, these three women walked by. One would turn out to be Candy Darling, the other was Holly Woodlawn. Candy and I became friends, which lasted to her death in 1974.

Charles "Valentino" Harris: The Dance Department head [at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York, where I was a student] called us into her office. I thought we must have done something really good. She slammed her cane onto the table and she said, "Let me tell you about the five flaming faggots of Performing Arts." She read us the riot act about what Hollywood and Broadway were buying. They were not buying this. She was gay, which made it really hard. But what she said is what it was like. If you wanted to work, you had to go by these rules. I knew then that was not for me. I left Performing Arts my junior year. I never let that bother me. I thanked her for it because I realized what she was doing, but it was a little harsh. There was such a stigma about male ballet dancers. That's probably why she was so hard on us. I wound up going to Harkness Ballet School. There was nothing you couldn't express there. We all felt free enough to be ourselves. I'm a Taurus, so I'm gonna be me. I knew I was gay at a young age. Maybe that's why I chose dancing, because it allowed me and my spirit to be free, which no one had before Stonewall.

"I feel like Stonewall was one of the first times everyone said enough is enough, we're not gonna take it anymore. We're human beings born to be free. They stood up that night not knowing they stood up for all of us. They stood up because they were tired. They didn't know they were rebelling for all generations." - Charles "Valentino" Harris

Joe Caldiero: I was luckier than most because my family accepted me. I didn't get bothered in a lot of places. As time went on, it wasn't safe to be gay anywhere. I dropped out of high school because it was hard to go to the bathroom. You went in and hopefully you'd get back out. If they knew you were gay they'd follow you in. It was hard to move down hallways, the schoolyard. I was always afraid of getting hit. I went to beauty school instead. My mom [said], "You're gay, be a hairdresser" [laughs]. That was a safe place for me. My "gay name" was Max. If you knew I was gay, you'd call me Max so I'd know you knew. If you called me Joe, I'd have to act straight for you [laughs]. If you got busted at raids or police bothered you, you wouldn't give your right name so they couldn't find you. I was about 15 when I came to Greenwich Village. I met this drag queen named Electra Maxine. She said, "Honey, you don't go down this or that street." She told me about signals like keys on the right (a bottom) or the left (a top). The colored handkerchiefs, all the hanky codes. Underneath all this chiffon, Electra would wear polka dotted men's boxer shorts. You had to have an article of men's clothing on or you'd get arrested. I remember being safe on Christopher Street, but a few times I ran into the Stonewall Inn because of gay bashers. Strangely, the only straight person in my life was the Stonewall bouncer, Chuck. He called us his little fairies and pulled us inside, shut the door, and yelled at the guys. It was really kind of nice.

Graeme Davis: In 1969, I was 12 - I was young but very much aware of queer people in my neighborhood, of what went on in the Village. I recognized myself early on, but a term I didn't use at that time was queer or gay because I was trying to navigate my life through school. It was not something so accepted back then. Knowing who I was, I feared speaking the word because of non-acceptance, being ridiculed in the neighborhood and in the community. We'd hear of people being bullied. There was a queer person in my neighborhood. She told us about some situations that occurred while she was out in the community. It was understood that you tried to stay under the radar.
On the Stonewall riots:
CH: I was 17 when Stonewall happened. My friend and I were at The Sanctuary discotheque on 43rd Street. Someone called from a telephone booth and said the queens were rioting in the Village. We jumped on the train to Christopher Street. It was really humid and there was that New York smell, like a fish market, booze, and smoke. You could feel it as soon as you left the subway station. It was really muggy. There were cops, lights, folks throwing beer bottles.

To be honest, to me and my friend, it was just a night. I didn't know it continued days after or what would happen from that. I feel like Stonewall was one of the first times everyone said enough is enough, we're not gonna take it anymore. We're human beings born to be free. They stood up that night not knowing they stood up for all of us. They stood up because they were tired. They didn't know they were rebelling for all generations.

JC: I was hanging out in the back room at Stonewall with friends. I had no ID on me, which was stupid, because they'd never find the body. Suddenly, the lights went on and cops were everywhere. They lined us up. I was always taught to respect the police, but it really hurts my feelings when I think of how my friends were treated that night. There were two lines, people with ID and people without. The police were shoving people. People with IDs moved quickly. I got to the policeman at the door. He asked my name and I said Paul McGuire because that's what it said on the fake draft card I bought to prove I was 18 when I wasn't. Outside the bar, this drag queen Twiggy said, "Oh my god, there's Max! Get out!" The cop shoved me out the door. I don't know what happened to the people behind me. It was scary and loud. Twiggy grabbed me and brought me to Sheridan Square, across the street. Then I noticed people throwing things. The queens said, "Don't go home, don't let them follow you." I ended up in Queens. A bunch of us hung out at somebody's house trying to comfort each other. I was a teenager but still a little boy. I wasn't used to police treating me that way. It was so violent.

"After Stonewall, I went back and got my high school diploma, then I went to college. I didn't necessarily feel safe, but I no longer felt alone. I think Stonewall did that. I felt a little more courage." - Joe Caldiero
On being queer after Stonewall:
CH: Dancing and being in the theatre, it was easy for me to sing my song "I Was Born This Way " in 1975. It's genderless, an anthem for the gay community. It was number one in New York. Lyrically, it can't get any more proud than that:
I've learned to hold my head up high Not in scorn nor disgrace [...] Yes I'm gay Tain't a fault, tis a fact Yes, I was born this way
I didn't have a problem saying that. Everyone was like, "Oh my god, if you sing that, what's gonna happen after?" I'm not gonna have a problem with it, that's who I am. I was that way before Stonewall. I got worse after in the best ways [laughs]. I wore scarves on my head, I wore heels. Some woman said to me one night, "Ooh, you look so svelte and sinewy!" I said, "That's lovely, thank you!"

GD: I was able to find lesbian places to go pretty easily. I felt free to tell the world who I was. When I first went to this bar Bonnie and Clyde's, you went downstairs, turned a corner, and woo! There were lesbians at the bar, standing around, music playing. It was wonderful. On a Sunday night. I saw some of my high school friends. We all hung together in high school, but we were never able to say, "Hey, I'm gay, you're gay." But once I walked into that bar, saw them and met them, it was a wonderful connection. I thought about transitioning when I was 15 years old. Back then you had to travel out of the country. I'm a kid growin' up in Harlem, who had the finances to do that? I didn't. I tried to compartmentalize my life to keep moving forward. I'm a trans person now. Those services weren't really available before. Even now they are available, there are organizations and groups addressing it, but there are also a lot of trans people not getting services they need, not able to connect, not able to have medical insurance, not able to have finances to do what they need to do if they are transitioning. Those are some issues we still need to address. We are still struggling.

JC: After Stonewall, I went back and got my high school diploma, then I went to college. I didn't necessarily feel safe, but I no longer felt alone. I think Stonewall did that. I felt a little more courage. I never felt fully accepted, but it didn't matter. You don't have to approve of the way I am, because I do. What you think of me is none of my business, and vice versa. The attitude I had before - that what others thought of me was more important than my own life - Stonewall turned it around. I didn't feel like the only queen in Brooklyn anymore. It was a beautiful thing.

Interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.
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Queer Elders Tell Us About the Stonewall Riots, and How Their Lives Changed After

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Tomorrow marks the 50 year anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising of June 28, 1969, an inciting factor in the queer liberation movement that's since paved the way for countless achievements in LGBTQ+ civil rights.

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Hungary's parliament passed a bill on Tuesday forbidding depictions of queer and transgender people in media aimed at minors. The legislation has been likened to Russia's widely criticized 2013 law banning the spread of LGBTQ+ "propaganda."

Proposed by the ruling Fidesz Party, the bill was advertised as cracking down on pedophilia following a series of scandals that have rocked the Hungarian government. Its former ambassador to Peru was arrested for possessing child pornography last July, and two Fidesz leaders have been busted at orgies since 2019. The most recent of these, in which a parliamentary lawmaker attempted to evade arrest after a gay sex party was raided in December, made international headlines.

But advocates say the stricter penalties for sex crimes involving youth under the legal age of consent mask the bill's true intent: targeting the LGBTQ+ community. Under the legislation, any television show that depicts the "diversion from one's biological sex, change of gender, propagates or portrays homosexuality" will only be permitted to air between the hours of 10pm and 5am, according to the New York Times.

The restrictions apply across all forms of media, including movies, advertisements, and literature. LGBTQ+ subjects may only be taught in sex education classes if the lesson affirms Hungary's "constitutional identity" and dos not "propagate consensual same-sex conduct or the affirming of one's gender," per Amnesty International.

Thousands of activists rallied outside the walls of Hungary's National Assembly as parliamentarians discussed the proposal on Monday, chanting "We are here!" In comments to the Agence France Presse, critics lambasted the draft law as "anti-child, anti-family, and anti-human" and a "cynical, distasteful, and deliberate attempt by the Orban government to trample the rights of LGBT people."

Opposition lawmakers staged a walkout in protest of the legislation, boycotting the final vote. But with Fidesz controlling a parliamentary majority, ultimately the resistance was futile: The bill passed on a 157-1 vote on Tuesday.

LGBTQ+ groups have blasted the law, which follows moves by conservative leaders over the past year to ban same-sex adoptions and block trans people from legally correcting their gender. Prior to the vote, the Háttér Society said the measure "endangers the mental health of LGBTQI youth by making it harder for them to receive preventive education and affirmative support in due time."

"They have a right to an education which helps them develop into healthy, fully rounded people, which means they should receive relevant and comprehensive information about sexuality and family life," a spokesperson for the Hungarian advocacy organization said in a statement.

Over 83,000 people have signed into a petition opposing the law, according to .

While the legislation's passage signals the Hungarian government's increasingly hard-right turn in recent years, it also prefaces what may be a surprisingly tough reelection bid for Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Despite having won his three previous races, Orban's government was criticized for bungling its pandemic response, with 84,000 Hungarians dying from the novel coronavirus. Hungary has the second-highest COVID death rate of any country in the world, behind only Peru.

Orban's 2022 campaign is being challenged by 6 opposition groups, which have joined forces to stop the conservative leader from serving another term. The opposition has "caught up with Fidesz in opinion polls," according to .

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Thousands Protest as Hungary Passes Russia-Style Ban on LGBTQ+ "Propaganda"

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Hungary's parliament passed a bill on Tuesday forbidding depictions of queer and transgender people in media aimed at minors. The legislation has been likened to Russia's widely criticized 2013 law banning the spread of LGBTQ+ "propaganda." Proposed by the ruling Fidesz Party, the bill was advertised as cracking down on pedophilia following a series of scandals that have rocked the Hungarian government.