José Sarria – first openly gay person to run for public office in the United States (San Francisco city-county supervisor).
A Run for Office
U.S. Air Force
Cpls. Fannie Mae Clackum and Grace Garner, U.S. Air Force reservists in the late 1940s and early 1950s, became the first people to successfully challenge their discharges from the U.S. military for being gay, although the ruling turned on the fact that there wasn’t enough evidence to show the women were lesbians—rather than that there was nothing wrong with it if they were.
Gold Coast Bar
The first gay leather bar, the Gold Coast, opened in Chicago in 1958.
Meet the Harlem Renaissance dancer who made sure lesbian history wasn’t forgotten
Harlem Renaissance dancer, domestic worker, archivist, philanthropist, early lesbian activist; in her lifetime, Mabel Hampton was many, many things.
Born in 1902 in Winston- Salem, North Carolina, Hampton was just two months old when her mother died from poisoning, and she was sent to live with her grandmother. Tragically, her grandmother died in 1909 when Hampton was just seven years old, and she was forced to relocate to New York City, to live with an aunt and uncle in Greenwich village.
New York did not initially turn out to be a haven for Hampton. She ran away from home within a year of arriving, after being poorly treated by her family and raped by her uncle.
“My aunt went out one day, and he raped me,” she would later recall. “I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to leave here.’…So this day, I got tired of that. I went out with nothing on but a dress, a jumper dress, and I walked and walked.”
Hampton walked to a playground where Bessie White found her and took her under her wing. White took Hampton into her New Jersey home and refused to return her to an abusive situation. Hampton lived in White’s house until she was 17-years-old, when White passed away.
On her own at 17, Hampton was falsely accused of prostitution and spent two years in Bedford Hills Reformatory in Westchester County. She was put back in jail after neighbors told police she was attending women’s parties in New York City. After being released a second time, Haptom stayed in a community of women and worked as a dancer in Brooklyn’s seaside resort, Coney Island, for a women’s troupe.
Hampton spent the 1920s dancing in all-black productions and private parties with stars like Jackie “Moms” Mabley and Ethel Waters. She danced in a chorus line at Harlem’s Garden of Joy nightclub, which catered to a primarily gay and lesbian clientele. She eventually became an actress at the Cherry Lane theater.
The artistic, cultural, and political setting of the Harlem Renaissance gave Hampton access to an entire gay and lesbian community. Her recollections of New York’s lesbian parties in the late 1910s and 1920s would provide a window into gay life in New York City, and recount the terms lesbians and queer women used to refer to themselves. In her recorded oral history, Hampton said the women of her time used to identify themselves as “bulldykers and ladylovers, studs and butch.”
When the Great Depression hit, and the Harlem Renaissance ended, Hampton worked as a domestic, cleaning the houses of wealthy white New York City families. When asked why she traded the chorus line for work as a cleaning lady, Hampton replied, “I like to eat.”
In her essay, “Excerpts from the Oral History of Mabel Hampton,” Joan Nestle, with whom Hampton would co-found the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City, wrote that Hampton was asked on many occasions “When did you come out?”
Her usually brusque answer was, “What do you mean? I was never in!”
To the dismay of her friends, Hampton dressed in masculine clothes most of her life. Her appearance adversely impacted her efforts to find better employment, but she was knowledgable and persistent, and never stopped trying to find middle-class positions. She registered with the United States Department of Labor only to be told, “We will get in touch with you as soon as there is a suitable opening.”
In 1932, Hampton met Lillian Foster, whom she later described as “dressed like a duchess.” Decades later, Foster recalled, “Forty-four years ago I met Mabel. We was a wonderful pair. I’ll never forget it… We haven’t been separated since in our whole life. Death will separate us. Other than that I don’t want it to end.”
The two referred to themselves as “Mabel and Lillian Hampton.” They let the rest of the world assume they were sisters, which allowed for displays of affection and afforded some recognition of their intimate relationship.
Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Foster came from a southern background, like Hampton, but also belonged to a large family. She worked her whole life as a presser in white-owned dry cleaning shops. Years spent laboring in poorly ventilated rooms filled with chemical fumes took its toll on Foster’s health, but together she and Hampton created a household that was a warm and loving environment for their diverse community of friends.
Hampton and Foster got through their early years together with home businesses, rent parties, and the help of friends. Hampton did daywork for a local family and spent her free time surrounded by lesbian contemporaries and working in the community.
She volunteered for the New York Defense Recreation Committee collecting cigarettes and refreshments for Black soldiers at the Harlem USO and served as an air raid warden. Despite her meager earnings, she contributed to the Martin Luther King Memorial Fund and gave to LGBT organizations.
When a fire destroyed their apartment in 1976, Hampton and Foster came to live with Nestle and her partner Deborah Edel in Brooklyn until they could get a place of their own. The residence would also become the home of the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
After 46 years together, Foster died in 1978. Suddenly alone, but surrounded by the support of her friends in the community, Hampton remained active and involved in issues important to her. She marched in the first national gay and lesbian civil rights march in Washington, DC, appeared in the films “Silent Pioneers” and “Before Stonewall,” and spent her final years helping to catalog the lives of Black lesbians in the 20th century with the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
Hampton died peacefully on October 26, 1989.
The Daughters of Bilitis
The Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) was founded in San Francisco in 1955 by four lesbian couples (including Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon) and was the first national lesbian political and social organization in the United States
One Magazine
One Magazine publishes as the first gay men’s magazine in the United States in 1952. Founded in Los Angeles, it would later transform into an education institution and then into The One Archives, one of the worlds largest and oldest surviving LGBT archives. (see ONE, Inc. )
Love & Resistance
New exhibit celebrating Stonewall anniversary is rich with LGBTQ history
The New York Public Library’s “Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50″ exhibit shows how the LGBTQ liberation movement was dreamed up, organized and deployed.
By Tim Fitzsimons
NEW YORK — Taken individually, the artifacts, photos and publications on display at the New York Public Library’s new exhibit, “Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50,” do not immediately appear linked.
The show, which commemorates the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising — the spark that ignited the modern-day gay rights movement — includes a 1955 issue of Physique Pictorial, a King Tut-themed invitation to a party at the famed Paradise Garage nightclub and personal photos of legendary lesbian activist Barbara Gittings.
But taken together, the exhibit shows how the power of the LGBTQ liberation movement was dreamed up, organized and deployed. It was a movement born in the streets of New York City, and “Love & Resistance” shows how a unique set of circumstances allowed for the formation of a true rainbow coalition to demand social justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.
Jason Baumann, the exhibition’s curator, said, “The 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots is a unique opportunity to reflect on LGBTQ politics and culture.”
“The thing that I hope people take away from it is that they can be politically active themselves and make the world a better place and that they can change the world themselves,” Baumann said in an interview with NBC News. “These people weren’t professional activists. They were just concerned people who knew that our society was unjust. And so they made a difference.”
Organized into four sections — “Love,” “Resistance,” “In Print” and “Bars” — the exhibit takes us through the ways LGBTQ activists, particularly those in New York City, began to recognize themselves as a community and moved to expand their political power.
At first, gay bars were some of the only safe spaces where this fledgling community could meet to organize, even as these establishments were also regular sites of police raids and often operated by crime syndicates, as was the case at the Stonewall Inn 50 years ago.
Bars like Stonewall attracted gay men, drag queens, lesbians and others in the extended queer communities, and the exhibit shows how authorities tried to flush these sexual and gender minorities out of public life. LGBTQ people were prevented from living openly by laws banning cross dressing, serving alcohol to “known homosexuals” and sodomy — some of which remained on the books in the state until 1980.
And lest a visitor think Stonewall was the point at which life changed for LGBTQ people in New York, raids continued for years: The exhibit shows this with artifacts from the Snake Pit, where a 1970 New York Police Department raid ended with a gay man impaled on a fence.
The exhibit’s “In Print” section examines how these communities found one another in the pre-internet era, noting that “after Stonewall, there was an explosion of LGBTQ publications that reflected the new spirit of liberation.”
Original copies of magazines like The Ladder, RFD, Transvestia and Come Out! show how activists spread the word: “They were passed from hand to hand and distributed through small book shops and the mail,” according to the text boldly written on the exhibit’s wall. The distribution of LGBTQ magazines was a legal battle in and of itself, and one of the first wins in the struggle.
The show’s “Resistance” section examines how activism slowly morphed from “tightly orchestrated affairs with conservative dress codes” to a liberation movement modeled after those sweeping the world in the 1960s.
“LGBTQ political movements developed a range of demonstration tactics that were subsequently employed by AIDS activists in the 1980s and 1990s and continue to inform activist strategies today,” the exhibit text states.
“Probably the greatest impact of LGBTQ activism has been the transformation in relationships for people of all orientations,” reads the introduction to the “Love” section. “By challenging sodomy laws and barriers to marriage, LGBTQ activists expanded the legal and personal options for love in the culture at large.”
The exhibit even lifts the veil on aspects of the LGBTQ liberation movement that are still taboo in today’s society: “LGBTQ people questioned the full range of possibilities regarding love, sexuality, and friendship,” reads an inscription in the “Love” section. “They experimented with open relationships, polyamory, communal living, erotic friendships, and cruising, and they even fought for the right to legal marriage. They embraced the radical idea that sexual desire and love could be grounds for totally transforming society.”
Baumann, the exhibit curator, said the exhibit draws upon a tiny fraction of the 100+ LGBTQ collections held by the New York Public Library, which include the papers of Truman Capote, ACT UP New York’s records, Diana Davies’ photographs and 79 linear feet of documents donated by Gittings and another lesbian activist, Kay Tobin Lahusen. He also pointed to the NYC Trans Oral History Project as an area where visitors can dive deeper into digital-only archives.
Alongside the exhibition, the library is publishing two books containing curated writings from LGBTQ activists as well as reprints of the exhibition items: “The Stonewall Reader” and “Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet Into the Stonewall Era.”
“Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50” runs from Feb. 14 to July 14 at the New York Public Library in Manhattan. In addition to the exhibit at the main library in Midtown Manhattan, the New York Public Library plans Stonewall 50-themed programming at its 88 branches across Manhattan, Bronx and Staten Island.
Spring Fire
“Spring Fire,” the first lesbian paperback novel, and the beginning of the lesbian pulp fiction genre, was published in 1952 and sold 1.5 million copies. It was written by lesbian Marijane Meaker under the false name Vin Packer and ended unhappily.
Temple University Is The First College To Hoist Progress Pride Flag, Which Includes Representation For QPOC
We hope other colleges will follow suit.
Temple University has become the first university to display the Progress Pride flag on its campus openly, Temple Now reported, publicly taking a stand in solidarity with its LGBTQ students across all communities.
According to the Kickstarter launched by the flag’s creator, Daniel Quasar, the Progress Pride flag takes a spin on the original pride flag by illustrating the depth of the LGBTQ community. Philadelphia was the first to add black and brown stripes to the symbol of LGBTQ pride during Pride Month in 2018. The Progress Pride flag includes 5 stripes in the shape of an arrow, ranging in colors from white, light pink and light blue, all of which represent trans individuals; black and brown, which represents communities of color; and black also serves as an homage to those who passed or who are living with AIDS.
The fundraiser exceeded its goal of $14,000 and raised $25,082.
Now, Temple takes pride in its stride toward inclusivity and acknowledgment.
“It’s always good to be the institution that creates best practices as it pertains to this area,” Nu’Rodney Prada, director of student engagement for the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, Advocacy and Leadership, told Temple Now. “Its important as leaders within a city and an urban environment that we promote and check in with communities that are marginalized to show and demonstrate that there is support here. It’s important for us to be a role model in having difficult conversations and dialogues to support others.”
The flag stands in the university’s student center, surrounded by international flags.
Mattachine Society
The Mattachine Society founded in Los Angeles in 1950 by Harry Hay becomes the first gay (men’s) rights organization in the Americas.