These profiles highlight activists in the early homophile movement who were disabled. This aspect of their identities has largely been left out of LGBTQ+ history, aside from brief mentions or inspiration porn (content that presents disabled people as inspirational for “overcoming” their disabilities by achieving something). While this exhibit honors these activists for their achievements, the goal is not to present their accomplishments as unusually important because they were disabled. Instead, it is to highlight that disabled people have always been part of the LGBTQ+ community and LGBTQ+ movements for social change.

From 1952 to 1973, homosexuality was listed as a mental illness in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). As historian Regina Kunzel and Marc Stein point out, this led early homophile activists and researchers allied with the homophile cause to distance themselves from mental illness. While they succeeded in lobbying for the removal of homosexuality from the DSM, they also created a problematic framework that aggressively emphasized health and wellness, ignoring and alienating disabled LGBTQ+ people—especially those with mental illnesses and those who were neurodivergent.

The activists profiled here were or are physically disabled, and the homophile framework of health likely affected them as well. I could not find examples of homophile activists to profile who were openly neurodivergent, intellectually disabled, or mentally ill, underscoring the disproportionate impact that this framework had on these parts of the disabled LGBTQ+ community.

Note: primary and secondary sources about disability in the homophile movement often use stigmatizing language. When possible, that language has been changed to reflect current understandings of disability (for example, naming the medical condition of scoliosis rather than referring to a person who has scoliosis by an offensive term). In some cases, however, the only existing information about a person’s disability uses stigmatizing language, and in those cases I have quoted sources directly.