1972-01-10 French Gay Activist Comes Out

An article titled “The Revolution of Homosexuals” appears in Le Nouvel Observateur, a widely read French weekly news magazine. The author, Guy Hocquenghem, was a student radical of the 1960s, and in the article he came out and described his life as a gay man, something that had not previously happened in the French press.

1972-05-13 Lesbian Activism in Paris

At the “Days of Denunciation of Crimes Committed Against Women,” a conference in Paris organized by the French women’s liberation movement, a group of lesbians seized the stage and chanted, “We are dykes, lesbians, depraved and foul. We love other women. We will break our chains. Let us love each other in broad daylight.” Their action brought an unprecedented visibility to lesbians and their issues in the feminist movement in France.

1972-06-16 First performance of the play Coming Out!

Coming Out!, a play by Jonathan Ned Katz, had its first performance at The Firehouse, the headquarters of the Gay Activists Alliance in Manhattan. With dialogue drawn entirely from historical documents, Coming Out! brought LGBT history alive in a way that it never had been before. The play went on to have performances in a number of cities and on college campuses and led Katz to write the book Gay American History.

1972-07-12 1972 Democratic Party convention

Jim Foster of California and Madeline Davis of New York become the first openly gay and lesbian delegates to address a national convention of the Democratic Party, which was meeting in Miami. “We come to you affirming our pride,” Foster declared in his speech to the convention.