City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972

[ID: The cover of the second edition of City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 by Marc Stein. On the left side of the cover, the title is depicted in a purple serif font on a cream background. Below it is a…

Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement.

[ID: The cover for the second edition of Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement by Marc Stein. At the top of the cover is the name of the book series, American Social and Political Movements of the Twentieth Century, written in black all capital…

And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers

[Image description: a book cover of Karen L. Graves’s And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers. The title is presented in a yellow font meant to resemble chalk or crayon writing, while the subtitle is presented in…

San Francisco Clergy Release "A Brief of Injustices," Attacking Police Abuse of Gays and Lesbians.

The Council on Religion and the Homosexual, which was a group of clergy in San Francisco, releases a report, “A Brief of Injustices,” that condemns society’s treatment of homosexuals. The report detailed a range of police abuses toward the gay and…

Dr. Howard Brown comes out as gay

Dr. Howard Brown, a former Commissioner of Health for New York City, comes out in a speech to several hundred doctors at a symposium in New Jersey. Such a revelation by a public figure was still very rare in 1973, and Brown’s coming out later…

The Vatican Releases a Document on Homosexuality

The Vatican releases a document, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” prepared by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. It described the inclination to homosexual activity as “an objective disorder” and…

The Captive, a play, opens in New York City.

The Captive, by the French writer Edouard Bourdet, opens on Broadway in New York. This drama about a lesbian relationship, described by one reviewer as “twisted” and “loathsome,” leads to several months of public controversy and passage by the New…

Daughters of Bilitis founded

A group of eight women, including Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, begin meeting in San Francisco, to form a lesbian social club. They name their organization the Daughters of Bilitis and it quickly evolves into a lesbian rights organization that…

New York's 1973 Pride March

I had just graduated from college in June 1970 and was living in Manhattan. I knew about the Stonewall riots the year before, and I had heard that a march and demonstration were going to be held at the end of June, going from Christopher Street to…

Ma Rainey's Music

The Chicago Defender, one of the major African-American newspapers in the U.S., runs a full-page ad for Ma Rainey’s recording of “Prove It On Me Blues,” a song that openly proclaims the love of women for other women. The ad portrays Ma Rainey…

Legends

Legends Nightclub Complex

Coca-Cola Bottling Company

Coca-Cola bottling company. Image from the Albert Barden Collection, North Carolina State Archives.

Raleigh Skyline

Raleigh skyline. Image from GoodnightRaleigh.com.

Viola and the Countess

Viola and the Countess (from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night) by Frederick Richard Pickersgill

LGBT Identities, Communities, and Resistance in North Carolina, 1945-2012, by David Palmer and His Students

A project produced by thirty-three students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of their requirements for the advanced undergraduate seminar U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Histories. The project was…

Philadelphia Girls' High

Swathmore College Parrish Hall

PALM BEACH ACDC AT THE MARCH

I went to the 1987 March with eight male friends from South Florida. The previous year we had organized a gay/lesbian political organization in Palm Beach County Florida, the Atlantic Coast Democrat Club (ACDC). It was one of the first efforts at…

"The Homosexual in America"

Cover of the book by Donald Webster Cory

My first Dyke March

The first Dyke March I ever attended was in San Francisco in June 1999. I was in college at the University of Connecticut at the time and had just come out as gay sometime in 1998. My best friend Maria (also gay) and I were on a cross-country road…