1970-04-18 Gay Liberation Dance in Chicago

Chicago Gay Liberation holds a dance at the Chicago Coliseum, a huge public space that was once the site of professional hockey and basketball games as well as political conventions. Activists were challenging the police practice of arresting on charges of lewd and immoral conduct same-sex couples who danced together in public. 2,000 people came to the dance and, in a big victory for activists, police did not make any arrests.

1970-05-01 Radical lesbians take control of a feminist conference.

At the second Congress to United Women, a major feminist conference held in New York City, a group of lesbians calling themselves the Lavender Menace seize the stage and read a political manifesto. “What is a lesbian?,” it began. “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”

1970-10-13 London Gay Liberation Front

The first meeting of what becomes the London Gay Liberation Front is held at the London School of Economics. 19 people attend. Over the next several weeks hundreds come to follow-up meetings in response to flyers distributed in gay locales in the city.

1970-10-27 Daily Iowan Covers Gay Lib

The Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa student newspaper, begins a 5-part series on the young gay liberation movement. “Gay Liberation Is Here to Stay” it announces in the first part. A later installment described the first Gay Liberation Front dance held in the campus Memorial Union.

1970-10-27 Protest Against Media Bias

Several dozen activists from the Gay Activists Alliance in New York City conduct a sit-in at the offices of Harper’s, a prominent nationally circulated monthly magazine. The previous month, Harper’s had run a cover story by Joseph Epstein who wrote, “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth.” The protest won a good deal of media attention for the young gay liberation movement.

1970-11-27 Gay Liberation Protest in London

London’s Gay Liberation Front holds its first public demonstration to protest police harassment and arresting of gay men on public indecency charges. Holding hands and chanting gay power slogans, the demonstrators marched to Highbury Fields where they held a “gay in.”